Allan Clarke continues his return to music with upcoming album I’ll Never Forget. The lead track ‘Buddy’s Back’ is a nostalgic tribute to the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, and it showcases his distinctive voice and Graham Nash’s songwriting talents. The song features them singing harmonies together for the first time in decades, marking a significant moment for fans of The Hollies. The album promises to be a celebration of old friendships, longstanding love, and new beginnings, reflecting on the many experiences and memories that have shaped Clarke’s life. Jason Barnard speaks with Allan about his influences, lifelong friendship with Graham Nash and reflections on his musical career.
This is the written version of a podcast interview.
We spoke about nine years ago to support the release of Sideshow, your solo collection. It’s fantastic to hear and see what’s happened since, including the resurgence of your solo career, which has culminated in your new album I’ll Never Forget.
That’s great. I don’t know how that has happened at all. [laughs] One day, I was just sat in my chair thinking about what a great life I’ve got. And then all of a sudden, I had this song going through my head, and I thought I better put that down, which I did. And it started from there. So I’m just in a whirlwind of resurging from the past to the present. It’s all been crazy. It really has.
Your new single ‘Buddy’s Back’ is particularly poignant. It connects back into your early years, not only with the inspiration of Buddy Holly, but your lifelong friendship with Graham Nash.
Yeah, very much so. When I’d done the first album, I met Graham and he wanted to hear it. He sat there with the cans on all the way through. And he said, “Wow. That’s really good. That’s great. Maybe we can do something in the future”. Well, that was about four years ago. And intermediate to that we’ve been seeing each other off and on with mutual friends that he knows and I know. And each time we’ve said, “When are we going to do this?”. So what happened was, I did a FaceTime to Graham, I said, look, “Let’s do it. Instead of talking about it, let’s do it”. And he said, “Okay, you send me some songs and I’ll write something for the album”. So I said “Wonderful”, so immediately that I had been writing songs. And there’s one particular song, which is called ‘I’ll Never Forget”. I wrote that, about the uncertainty of doing it with Graham. It might happen, or it might not happen. So it’s a collective of words, hoping that it will happen. But if it doesn’t, I’ll never forget what happened anyway. So it was one of those types of songs, I sent it to him and he said, “Okay, let’s do it”. And that broke the camel’s back. And we said, “Okay, let’s go ahead”. And we’ve done it, we finished the album, and I’m very, very pleased with it. Graham’s very, very pleased with it. I wrote all the songs on the album. Because when we were halfway through, Graham said, “Well, I looked to see if this is the way that it’s going. This should be your solo album”. I was quite relieved in a way that the songs that I was writing were for me and him in the way that we used to write songs in the past, which showed our harmonies together beautifully. And he said, but I will write a song about something about us in the past. He said “I’ve got this one called ‘Buddy’s Back’. I’ll send it to you and see what you think”. So it ended up being on my solo album, in which he sings all the harmonies on which is brilliant, and ‘Buddy’s Back’ because Graham and I are in a thing called the Buddy Holly Education Foundation. We were presented with a guitar each of a famous Buddy Holly guitar that he used to write his songs on, and he also chiseled a leather jacket on. It was a Gibson really.
I met Graham at the Albert Hall, because that’s where I was going to pick it up. Halfway through I went to see him in the dressing room. He says “Right, we’re starting the show and we’re going to start with ‘Bus Stop’. So he said “You better be ready to do it”. I hadn’t even rehearsed anything, it was crazy. So there I was stood on the famous stage again at the Albert Hall in the middle of Graham, David Crosby and Stephen Stills, which was absolutely fabulous for that to happen to them or to me. When I actually walked on stage at the Albert Hall it was just fantastic. I never thought that I’d be there with people standing on their feet, actually applauding and cheering and things like that. And so I went into it, and I did my imitation of what I was producing in Bus Stop at that particular time. But then when I got my guitar and Graham got his. It’s called ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’, I did want Peggy Sue but someone else had got it. So there’s my guitar, and it’s on my wall over there and I write all my songs on it. And that’s how we started Resurgence. Every morning I’d come here. This used to be a bedroom. But at that particular time, I’d just put my guitars on the wall there. And I always pulled the Buddy Holly guitar down from the wall. And the first thing I do is play ‘Peggy Sue’. [laughs] I haven’t worked on that further with the chords really. I started with doing three chords and now I think I’ve got to five. To me five is enough. So that’s me and my guitar and what Graham and I do Buddy Holly Foundation.
‘Buddy’s Back’, it tells a story. This is the type of way that Graham writes his stuff. He says it eloquently in so few words. About us getting the guitars, hearing Buddy Holly, trying to copy him in whatever we do; and all the other rock and roll people that we found that were coming on the scene at that time. And eventually we got to the Everly Brothers but this is a song about Buddy Holly. We named the group after him. It’s a really nice catchy song, which we wanted to put out as the first single because it relates to me and Graham and how we really sound when we sing together. And when they do hear that they go, oh, yeah, there’s the Hollies sound. So yeah, I’m really pleased with that. And I’m pleased that Graham said, “Yes, let’s do it”. So here we are.
That’s one of the great things about Buddy Holly. Perhaps one of the hardest things in songwriting is simplicity, simplicity of the melody lines, and sometimes the lyrics. That’s a lot harder than people think.
Well, it can be easy writing songs, and you can make it really hard by trying to write a song that’s going nowhere. That’s the beauty of songs. The ones that are hits seem to be the most simplest songs that have been written. Like when I wrote ‘Long Cool Woman’ with Roger Cook. We met in Park Lane, in Park Street where the AIR offices were, and we went down into the basement. We had a bottle of brandy, I had my guitar, and he had his ukulele which is weird, and there was also a piano there. And really, we didn’t know what we were gonna do. But Roger came out and said, I’ve got this idea about this beautiful woman who’s mad about a DA guy, or the DA guys. I said, “Oh, right. When you’ve got this and I’ve got a few lines, let’s start it”. So we did and within half an hour, I think we were about half a bottle of brandy down, and the song was finished. And I thought, “Oh, well, that’s really good. That’s great because I’m recording an album with the Hollies. That’ll be okay, that will be on the album; never ever knowing that someone in America was going to pick that up and run with it. And then the rest was history.
I was quite annoyed. Well, not annoyed at myself but annoyed at The Hollies. At that particular time, I’d said I wanted to do my own album. I didn’t really want to leave the band. They said, that’s it, bye bye. And I think that was probably one of the worst mistakes they ever made; to leave the group when I had a number two riding in the charts with The Hollies, with just me playing guitar, singing it. So I said, “Well, maybe I can come and do it and promote it with you”. They said “No, no, we are going to do it ourselves”. I think that the group then could eventually bound up the American charts, maybe making it number one. I think the group would have got a lot hotter in America, if I was right in front of the guys doing that, but that never happened. But that never worries me because I still own the song, and the song is still being played. So it was a good song to be a part of. Shame it didn’t happen the other way around.
You reconnected with that track from your previous album, Resurgence with ‘Long Cool Woman’s Back in Town’. So you’ve taken that template and remodeled it.
Yeah, not all is well in love and war, it’s not always like lovey dovey. He was a DA, and she was a girl that put herself about for a while. And actually, what I wanted to do is write a song about what happened when they left that club hand in hand, and went off into the horizon. And it didn’t really work out for him, sometimes the right way is the wrong way to go, which is the chorus of it. And that’s what happened to them. They tried to make a life for themselves, but she was just the type of girl who couldn’t stay with one man too long. And the whole story is told in the song.
To go back to Buddy Holly. It’s amazing some of the connections with Buddy Holly that come out. You’ve mentioned a moment where you appeared on the Rolling Stones ‘Not Fade Away’, a Buddy Holly song.
The story is that Graham and I were walking in London where it used to be Tin Pan Alley, it was Wardour Street. And as we were walking down, this guy was working towards us, and it was Phil Spector. Graham remembers it well because Phil Spector had a pair of red cowboy boots on, which I thought was absolutely fabulous, I’ve never seen them before. But anyway, we halfway down Wardour Street and this door opened as we passed it. It was somebody that we didn’t know but he said “Oh, Allan, Graham, Phil. The guys are in here, they want some help”. And we said, “Well, who are the guys?” He says “You know, it’s Mick.” I said “The Stones you mean?” He said “Yeah, come on in.” So we went in and when we went in, we found there was another guy who did ‘24 Hours From Tulsa”.
Gene Pitney.
That’s right. We stood all around this one microphone with Mick, as he was singing it, and we all had different things to play. And we said, “What are we doing?”, he said “We’re doing ‘Not Fade Away’. It’s Buddy Holly”. So we thought “That’s great”. And we actually got on the b-side as well. That was a great memory, it really was. And I think the feel that he got with that song that’s not so different from the way that Buddy did it. But it turned into a Stones song, as well as a Buddy Holly song. Everything gets done by chance. I do believe that if you’re in the right place at the right time, things happen. And that’s happened to me all the way through my life. Things have happened and it’s been in a good way, but in a bad way at the same time, some of them. You learn by your bad mistakes, as well as the way that you live. So that was one of them, The Stones.
In the mid-90s when you were still with The Hollies you reconnected again with Graham Nash for almost a song with Buddy Holly ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’. It must have been quite a strange or an amazing moment that you kind of got to sing harmonies to Buddy Holly.
I don’t think there were a lot of harmonies on that song. But what happened was I’d known about that through a friend of mine in Los Angeles. And I said, “I wonder what song we’re going to do?” Because I’m a rock and roller, it was one of the other songs of Buddy Holly that I prefer to do. Then all of a sudden, I get a call from Graham out of the blue. And he says, “I’ve got the song that we should do with Buddy Holly. And I thought, “Oh, I thought the Hollies were doing something. I didn’t know you were involved”. So Graham got involved but the reason why I liked that he got involved was that he had a recording of Buddy Holly’s voice with no backing on it. And I still got that. And I thought “I wonder how they’d done that because this was a long time ago. When he brought it in he said “We can put our backing track onto Buddy Holly’s voice. He said “This is going to be really weird, singing along with Buddy Holly. It was. I think they made a good score of it at that time, The Hollies. It went because it was part of the Buddy Holly remembrance of all the songs that he’d done. And there’s a lot of people on that album. And it was only much later, actually, when they put the Buddy Holly Education Foundation came into reality, which was around 2009/2010. Another great thing. You think you’re gonna go down one path and all of a sudden another one comes up, but it’s a good path.
Although The Hollies had some fantastic hits of songs by other artists, even back in the very earliest days you were writing with Graham. I don’t know if it’s the very first session that you did with the Hollies, ‘Hey, What’s Wrong With Me’.
We used to write in the early days. When we were 14 years old we were doing skiffle. [laughs] We tried to write skiffle songs, but they weren’t going anywhere because there were too many skiffle bands around at that particular time. So it was great actually that it did turn into rock and roll and of course, The Everly Brothers came along and we just fell in love with their music. We were trying to write songs thinking about them and how the harmonies would go. ‘Hey, What’s Wrong With Me’ was one of the songs that we sat down, we could have been in a park and wrote it. It just came very easily. When we got into recording with Ron Richards, he said, “Have you got songs?”, which we played to him. He said “They’re great for the b-sides” which is not a good thing to hear. What do you mean, b-sides? Well, it’s good for a b-side, we’ll just take the songs that I choose in a moment, I know what’s good for you. And he was right. He was right for a while. And then wrote ‘We’re Through’, which was like the opening to have a single, which was great. And it was a hit. So that’s really when we started writing together in a way that we were a little bit more serious than just getting our jangling written into a form. When I look back actually on those old songs, I think they should have been singles. But we were outvoted by one man, Ron. [laughs] But anyway, we didn’t miss it. They’re there and I think they are still good songs.
Actually, we took part in a film with Frankie Vaughan, called It’s All Over Town. We thought “Great, we’re gonna be in a movie”. They said “Which song would you like to do?” And I thought, “Well, what kind of song do you want?” And he said, “If you got anything like the twist?” because that was big at that particular moment, and we’d just written a song. [sings] You all know that baby. Now I got a copy of that. Graham and I recorded that song that we wrote at a place called Johnny Roadhouse in Manchester. And we actually recorded that along with an Everly’s song. I don’t know what the other two were but I’ve still got the disc with things on it. I think there were only about four discs made, Derek Quinn is on that session. I think we had a guy called Pete Bocking, he was a brilliant guitarist, he really was, and a drummer Joe Abrams. We were just making a demo to send it to somebody to see if we could get somewhere. That one didn’t make it. But yeah, we used to write songs before we became famous. They weren’t going anywhere, because we never thought we were going to get anywhere. That was the last thing on our minds when we were playing. We were going out to enjoy ourselves. And we did [laughs] in a lot of ways.
And the strength of the songs really started to shine in the next few years. I don’t know if this was a single over here, I think it was elsewhere. ‘Put Yourself In My Place’. Your songwriting really developed.
It did and because we’d got into a threesome at that particular time. So it’s three guys having ideas with the same song. And really I think that was a good thing because there are parts in songs that The Hollies did, when you got to a middle eight, the middle eight had to be just as good to what went before the middle eight. That’s where I usually came in on the songwriting as well as lyrically and things like that. I always got into doing, like ‘Carrie Anne’ there’s a great middle eight in that “You’re so. You’re so like a woman to me.” That was my bit of that song in there and I’m looking to get that on. Because I remember we were on a TV show, and I’d just been to the canteen. I was walking back and I heard these voices coming from the dressing room. They’re singing this song, something about a Tambourine Man, I was watching and was like, “What’s all this then?” And they said “We’re singing this song, tell me what you think”. When they got to the second verse I went into, “Oh, you’re so, so like a woman to me.” And that’s all I did in ‘Carrie Anne’. But when you get to other songs, you’ve virtually finished a song before you take it to the guys. And they put their embellishment on it and things like that. But you could have written that song virtually, it could have been out on its own. But no, we wrote as a threesome. Like most partnerships do, it doesn’t matter what you’ve written on the record, you share it because whatever you put in has made that.
1966 seemed to be a bit of a turning point. Obviously, the 60s moved on and things got more sophisticated. For Certain Because, that was the first album where you wrote all of the material yourselves.
Yes, that was 1966 I think. That album cover was done in New York. It may have been the first time we went there. So we had some shots taken there, I thought it was great. I thought what we’d done on the album was great. I think that was the first album that we were taken seriously. People started to say, oh, they can write songs. Not getting on the verge of The Beatles on one side, and others on the other. It was never like that with The Beatles, or with The Stones to come to that. We were all very proud of what we did, each group did what. We thought that For Certain Because was a new opener, all of a sudden we could write decent songs. And it sold quite a few copies.
There’s songs off there that I don’t know how many people are aware of that are just beautiful, like the song ‘Crusader’. It predates Love’s Forever Changes, which is a masterpiece. The arrangements of that song as well as in some of the material from the album are much more sophisticated. And the lyrics as well. ‘Crusader’ has got a historical theme.
Yeah. I love seeing films about knights on horses killing each other. [laughs] And the King Arthur thing, a lot of that came in. I think that Graham had most of the lyrics of that rather than the feel of it. But you know, there were many songs. I think I’ve got the album up there because I wanted to remind myself what was on it. Was ‘Would You Believe’ on there?
That was that period, wasn’t it?
The whole song was me. I used to like singing in that way. And it was a love song about two people that had parted. Again, that is a different way of writing the song as was like, ‘Crusader’. What do you do? You get this idea in your head and you’ve finished it. I wrote on a 12 string, it was the first time I’d ever played a 12 string. And I liked that song. I really liked that song. I redid it on one of my albums, because I thought I might be able to do a better version. A bit looser, a bit more orchestrates. There’s a great solo in my other ‘Would You Believe’. That was a guy called Ray Glynn who was with me.
The Mirage.
Yeah, you’re right. I came across him when I said I wanted to make a solo album. And suddenly I found this guy that played brilliant guitar and I really liked him, I thought this guy’s good. And we did do a lot together with my solo albums. I enjoyed making those solo albums. Somebody said “We can hear that when we listen to it”. [laughs] I can’t tell you the real stories about that album but there you go. [laughs]
Going to ‘My Name Is ‘arold’ released in 72. Ray’s all over that. Although one of my favorite songs for that is a song which I think was just credited to you, ‘Baby It’s Alright With Me’. It feels Dylanesque.
That was one of my songs. Those are my lyrics. Ray did a great guitar, an American style folk come rhythm, I would like to think like Stephen Stills would play. I’m a big fan of Stephen Stills. To me, I think it’s more American than English. I mean, that intro [sings it], I can never get that. I can’t play that on the guitar. So yeah, he did all the arrangements on that particular song and I’m glad you did. And I went home early one evening, because I had to do something. I left Ray there. When I came back, he said, “Listen to this”. He put a solo on it which I thought makes the song, that guitar [sings the same intro phrase and goes into a rising solo – laughs] Brilliant. I thought, “Oh, well done, man. Yeah, I love that”. It was a good sound.
Going back to, around 67, that latter period of when Graham was in the group. The songwriting there for the singles, and you mentioned, ‘Carrie Anne’ earlier showed that your own material was as strong if not stronger than the material that were hits earlier.
Yeah.
You’d seem to have mastered what made a great pop song.
As you know, ‘Carrie Anne’ when we started, I didn’t know whose idea it was, but I got in on that idea. But there are other things like ‘Jennifer Eccles’.
I think this is where Graham started getting a bit annoyed about what he was doing with boys, and really wanted to move on. But I think it was with ‘King Midas In Reverse’. It was his baby. We let him have his head on the Butterfly album. I think he sings about four of the songs which were more than less the way he wanted to go. When it didn’t make it, I think Graham over orchestrated it too much. I think that, him palling out with or listening to The Beatles too much I think after Sgt Pepper’s came out, he saw a new way forward, really. And you couldn’t do that with The Hollies. Anyway, it had been done by them. But when it failed, coming in number 15 and staying there, to us was a failure.
So there was one night we were together. I was with my wife, Jenny. And he was with his first wife, Rose, and was let’s write a silly song. ‘Jennifer Eccles’ just came out, it was easy to write those kinds of songs that we were well known for. Graham didn’t want to be a part of that anymore. When we took it to Ron, and Ron says, “Let’s record it.” it went into number two. It just showed what the people wanted from The Hollies. They wanted us to sound like The Hollies, they wanted to feel happy about The Hollies. There were songs in between all the other songs that we wrote, which had a serious message most of the way, but we were known for doing that. So it’s not as if we could put a whole album out of our songs saying stop pulling the trees down. The political side of it wasn’t our thing to do as The Hollies. But we went on to write other things. He recorded with us quite a lot after ‘Jennifer Eccles’ and we had hits. So the reason for him to leave was because he didn’t want to be a part of what he called pop bubblegum songs. Hey, now when we make a living out of that. What can you do when you’ve got The Beatles on one side, you’ve got The Stones on the other, and you’re known as being The Hollies, you don’t want to stand outside that little part of the dartboard that’s yours. You’ll get lost. Well, Graham decided that it was time for him to go. He didn’t make that apparent. If you look at the videos that we made with him just before he left, ‘Listen To Me’ and those others. Again, he didn’t want to stay with a hit group.
He went over to America and he fell in love with David Crosby and Stephen Stills. David wasn’t a friend of mine, but I knew Stephen very well, because I’d met him in the Buffalo Springfield years before, along with Neil and Richie, all those people. I remember when we went over to Los Angeles. I remember them coming back to the hotel after a show we’d done at the Whisky a Go Go, everybody was there who wanted to see us. We brought the house down, everybody was raving. I went to bed because I was tired but I did hear guitars strumming in the other room. I knew that it was Crosby who was singing and I knew that it was Stephen. I thought “They’re having a jam”. So it was planned in such a way that it wouldn’t be noticed. Anyway, I was told by a friend of mine in Hampstead. He came up to me and said “Do you know, Graham’s forming a group?” I had no idea that was happening. Then it all came out and Graham suggested he wanted to leave. It wasn’t a good time for The Hollies. It wasn’t a good time for me or the rest of the guys.
We did have a big meeting with everybody involved, the heads of EMI and things like that. And Graham said “I’ve made my mind up, it doesn’t matter what you do, I’m going.” and he left the meeting. So I was actually devastated even though I hid it very well. I had a family.. None of the guys in the group had kids, I was the only one that had two children. That was something that I would never ever do like just nip off, to leave the group and go to another group; knowing that this other group is going to has got a brilliant guitarist, a songwriter, and the other guy who is a brilliant singer is a songwriter. And the three of them together make a great sound. I don’t know. I would have had to have thought twice about that because I’m a family man. When Graham left, he left everything, and that was that. He started Crosby, Stills and Nash. And it was an instant hit, it couldn’t miss, could it. When you think about it, it couldn’t go wrong. So I sat myself down, I thought, well ‘Come on, Al. You’re the lead singer for crying out loud. You’ve got a sound which everybody loves. You got to try and find somebody to replace Graham. And Terry Sylvester came along, I liked him immediately. Good looking guy, he had a great voice, and he could play rhythm guitar, which was what Graham did. He had all three in spades. And we recorded ‘Sorry Susanne’ and it went straight to number two. So that’s when my worrying about Graham stopped, but I did worry for quite a while about whether we would make it without him. But we did. And he famously says on a DVD that we did back in 2010, ‘The British Invasion’, he said “How did they have the audacity to actually record two number ones without me.” He said he said it, not me. But there you go. So we both followed a different path and we were both successful.
Over the years, obviously, I’ve seen him in airports and hotels and things like that and we have done other things together by making an album, we had a hit called ‘Holliedaze’, one of those handclap things. I think Tony and Bobby had put together, got into charts. Top of the Pops wanted us to do it and said, “What we need from you is the original people to play it on these records. Graham said “Yeah, I’ll do it. Send me some tickets I’ll come over.”, which he did. And after the show he came to the studio where we were recording, and said, “Oh, I like this, I love what you’re doing”. I was thinking, “Hang on a minute. You’ve left the group. What’s happening here?” It turned out that, okay, he got into the group. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, he’d left the group and that was it. But Tony and Bobby thought it was a good idea. So we went ahead with it. And we toured America, and we made an album in America called ‘What Goes Around’. We were with Graham for about three weeks finishing the album in LA, and then going on to tour then when the tour ended, I don’t think I saw Graham ever for a couple of years after that. So that wasn’t a part of the plan that I had, but as I said, right at the beginning, things are offered to you in the right place, sometimes you think it’s the wrong thing to do. But I learned a lot from that. I think that I gained more confidence, as well. At the beginning at all this time, I didn’t really have all that much confidence or ambition. Ambition was never one of my things I wanted to do. I wanted to enjoy what I was doing, well be The Hollies.
So my life changes every day. I live a day at a time.So I don’t worry about what’s gonna happen tomorrow, I just let that happen. You have to make some plans, obviously. But it’s been good. Until somebody says I’ll give you a contract. BMG, and yes, I love your album. We’ll put it out. What?! [laughs] For 16 years, I’d not done anything. Out of the blue. Again, amazing. I’ve even learned to do 40 tracks on GarageBand. And actually play some of the instruments as well, because you can do that. Before when I was songwriting, I had to have someone who could play the guitar with more than four chords. So they would strum the guitar and I would sing my part of the song and ask to go to another because I think they know presumably, where can you find that chord where that is, I think it’d be good. That’s the way I used to write songs for the boys. I never had a guitar to do it. Now I can.
Was ‘Journey Of Regret’ a song reflecting on your break from music and coming back?
It’s about life, really. As I was saying, there’s things that happen in your life, where you’re very happy, there are some where you’re very sad, there’s some where you’re very angry. All the things that you have emotionally within one’s life can make you do things that you thought you would never do. Things that you missed that you thought you should have done. And what they are, they’re one liners, you can be riding a rainbow one day, and the next minute you’re on top of a wall and the wall collapses. So that’s what that song is about, is a journey of regrets. Now, when you regret something, you either regret that you didn’t do it, or regret that you did do it. So regrets are not just one thing, having a regret can go two ways. That’s what happens to me quite a lot when you go one way and you suddenly think I shouldn’t have done that. So that’s one ‘Journey Of Regrets’ is. They’re all my regrets all in one song. If that makes any meaning to you. I know it does to me. It’s a bunch of words that you can get out of it what you want to get out of it, you know?
The sound of The Hollies continued to evolve. Some of those albums from the 1970s deserve a greater hearing. ‘A Crazy Steal’ is a case in point, a shift in sound possibly, a bit of an American sound. Songs like ‘The Writing on the Wall’. There’s almost a bit of a Springsteen element.
I love Springsteen. He’s a friend. It’s not as if I’d pick up the phone and talk to him every day. It’s not. But I do remember, way back when I was in a publisher’s office and he said “I’ve got this tape to listen to.” He played it and I think I was there for two hours listening to this tape. I thought “Who is this? This is absolutely fantastic”. He said that it’s this guy called Bruce Springsteen. I’m sure that I shouldn’t have done this but ‘Born to Run’ was one of the songs. I said “I love that song. I want to do it.” He said, “Well, I don’t know. It’s coming out in America sometime. We’re not sure.” I said, “I’m gonna do it”. And I did it. When I listen to it now, I can understand why it made him. Life was against me there. It didn’t want me to be famous for ‘Born To Run’ it wanted Bruce to be famous for ‘Born To Run’. So I had to swallow that one. But I did actually use a couple of his songs, ‘Sandy, 4th of July’. And another one called ‘A Priest’, which I thought “These lyrics, what do they mean?”. But I liked the song and I wanted to sing it. And I did and I tried to pull whatever emotion I felt about each particular line. And it’s only like many years after that I knew that Bruce had put it out. It was never on an album. It was only like last year I think, that he actually spoke to me about me doing it. So he brought his out. I don’t know why he did it. But when you do listen to the lyrics they are quite heavy. You can take it one way or another about what he’s talking about. But I know now what he was talking about, what he was saying. I can’t understand why he didn’t release it. But at that particular time, I loved it so much I didn’t care what happened. I thought it was a great song, and a great way of looking at the Trinity. That’s the way I see it.
Did that influence you as a songwriter in that period?
He came to see me at The Bottom Line in New York. The guy who was on the door said ‘Bruce Springsteen’s out here. He said he wants to see you.” So I bought him and we sat down and we had a chat and he said “Thank you very much for recording ‘Sandy’ and the other things that you’ve done for me. It’s been one of the greatest things, knowing you like my albums and you like this and like that.” I was dumbfounded because he was this immense star in front of me, thanking me which I thought was rather nice. We went out for a drink and after about an hour, he said, “I’m tired now. I think I’ll go home”. I forgot how much younger he was than I was at that particular time. But I have seen him since. I’ve been to a couple of his shows, where he always invites me to come on back, we’ll have a chat. But he’s still going strong. It’s all those hits he’d had all those many years ago from 1974/75. So he’s made it, one of the main stars in the world of popular music. A fantastic, great guy.
You did a new version of ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’ for NHS charities during the COVID period. It added huge gravitas to what is an outstanding song.
I love that song. It was one of those songs that came along via Tony. A forgotten song that had been around for a while and recorded by different people. It had a message and we thought, “Should The Hollies do this? Do we take a gamble and do it and see what happens?” So we said we’d do that. We had a full orchestra in the big studio at Abbey Road. I didn’t play the intro on the harmonica. A lot of people think I did. On stage I did but I didn’t play it as it was part of the orchestra that was there. I wish I could give you the guy’s name. I think he’s died recently. He was a brilliant harmonica player, like Larry Adler and all those chromatic things. I could never play one of those with a button on the side. Mine was blues harmonica. I was in a singing booth on my own singing ‘He Ain’t Heavy’ and it didn’t really take me long to get into that track. When you hear the harmonies on ‘He Ain’t Heavy’, which is Terry and Tony.
It’s just one of those songs that took a while. But then when it got over that it was a huge hit all around the world. I think that was probably because of the message that it has in that song that when you see somebody who’s in trouble, you should give him a little help. That was a long time ago so there’s a lot of people who haven’t taken any notice of that song and the message a lot since then but it was released again in 1988. That made number one. Wonderful, three weeks. Fantastic. I do remember that when I sing that song on stage, I mean it. It’s got a story as well. It’s a true story about Boys Town, it was where they take orphans in. But I did look at the history of it again, only the other day, and there are different meanings of ‘He Ain’t Heavy’. One of the things is that somebody asked, he saw a picture of a guy carrying his brother on his shoulders. And then there was a saying of somebody meeting someone saying “Why are you doing that? Carrying that boy on his shoulders?”. And his reply was he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. The meaning says it all in that song. It should be released again in about 15 years.
Given what was going on a few years back, you thought it was quite resonant for that time?
I didn’t think that I should do it. Because the way that I sang it, I thought I could never ever sing it like that again. So what would be the point? And it was only Francis, who’s my producer, Francis used to be with The Hollies in the 80s. He said, you should just do it with piano and I thought, well, that’s pretty bare, isn’t it? You’ve got to have something that hides all the little down notes and the up notes. He says “No. Do it on a dry mic. Practice it”. So I did. I practiced it in the bathroom, because when you’re in the bathroom it echoes. You get that sound, that sound I always used to like, that little bit of edge, reverb on it, that kind of thing.
So it was all remote.
I couldn’t go anywhere. He sent me the piano piece. He said he’d shortened it, but it means what it means. I sat here because I’ve got my microphone, and I’ve got my computer and I’ve got all this. And I sat there and I tried it and I tried it. I found that the more they sang it, it released my throat because I hadn’t sung anything for quite a long time. There are points in it that I would have liked to have been able to sing it stronger. But when you’ve not been singing for that long on stage, because when you’ve been on stage for two and a half hours, three weeks at a time. I can only do like four shows and then I need two days rest. But the boys were a bit angry about that “Can we get another night out of it?”. No, if you want me to sing, it was my it was my ending in a way. But I don’t know, being that much older and being able to sing in a lower voice which I did with that. I felt as if I actually did put more emotion into it because I knew what was happening around me. It may have not been my best interpretation of ‘He Ain’t Heavy’ but at least it was real. I’m glad I did it. I’m glad we’re out of it now. Well, not free but they are treating you like a cold now. I’ve still got to be very careful when I go out with my aging body. [laughs]
A very exciting period. You’ve got your forthcoming album coming out I’ll Never Forget. Is the plan to maybe release another single and then keep songwriting?
Sure. There’s vinyl out, CD. It’s all going out on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all those things. I’m doing interviews, some TV. It’s possible, you’re never state it as fact because when you do that things don’t turn out that right. What I’m trying now is to maybe Graham and I could do a video. Like what we’ve done on the album and piece it together. So it looks like we’re together. I don’t think that he’ll be coming over here for quite a while. And I don’t think I’ll be going over there for quite a while. So that might not be possible. But you never know. People say, “Come on, just the two of you. Why don’t you come on this special show? We’ll make it all comfortable and easy for you. Then you think ‘Ah, yeah”. This is what happened with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I said “I don’t think I can do that Graham”. He said “Come on. It will be the two of us, we’ll have a great time”. And all the time I was worried even when I got off the plane was stood outside The Waldorf. I thought “What am I doing? You’re crazy.” Then I walked into the ballroom, and there was this band on stage. Graham was saying “Hey man, come along”, and when I walked in everyone applauded.
I thought “This is pretty good.” He said “You’ve got your own microphone there. We’re just gonna do a rehearsal of ‘Bus Stop’ and ‘Long Cool Woman’. I thought, “Oh, well that’s great”. And he said “Shall we do ‘Long Cool Woman’ first?” I said “I haven’t played that for years”. He said “I know that Al, but the two guitarists that are in the crew don’t know how to do your riff. [laughs] I said, “What do you mean, you don’t know how to do it?” They said “There’s a note missing. We don’t know how you do that note.” So I said “Well, okay.” So I got the guitar and I played it. And what a lot of people don’t know what they do know, because these tabs now on videos of people playing it and they say, “There’s that note, that’s missing”. What I do on the second string, as I’m going up there, I click it twice instead of doing it once, twice like that and it has that one note. It’s like the invisible note which is there. When I showed them it, they went, “Oh, it’s that easy is it”. And I said “There you go. You wouldn’t have been able to play that if I hadn’t shown you”. Then I felt at home, and it turned out that when I went on he was the lead singer of Train, and the lead singer of Maroon Five, who I’d never heard of. They said “We’re here to make it more comfortable for you now. So just go out and enjoy yourself and sing the songs”. Which when you think about it, you are actually singing live to about a billion people around the world. But apparently it went really well. Some sort of miracle happened I think. So I’m glad that I did it. Because if I hadn’t done it, I’d have been kicking myself. Tony and Bobby couldn’t make it because they were working.
Carry on playing live whatever.
Yeah, so whatever, even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Nevermind, I enjoyed it.
Maybe one of the final threads is that we were mentioning Buddy Holly at the start, but your lifelong friendship with Graham and the partnership there and how you bounce off each other is that continuous thread.
Yeah, there’s times when I meet Graham and it depends on what environment we’re in. If there’s a lot of Americans about, Graham is an American. When I sat down at a table with people from his homeland, a very, very good friend of mine died recently. And he was a big part in my life, a big part in Graham’s life. And we sat down with our wives and we were discussing this particular person. His name was Ron Stratton, a great influence in our lives. We got to telling stories about the past and bringing him back memories of when we weren’t famous and things like that. And the more that I spoke to him, and he spoke back to me, because we were talking about the past, his voice changed. And he started talking the way that I’m talking now. And I said, “There you are. I can see you. You’re still there”. That was a good thing to see under the circumstances. So get him in the right mood and the right time. It goes right back to the Graham that I know.
Thank you so much for your time. Allan, it’s great to connect with you a decade on where the idea of new solo material was starting to come in. It’s fantastic that you’ve now got two albums behind you and going from strength to strength.
I’ve got a 10 year contract. [laughs] That’ll make me 90!
I’ll see you in another 10 years, Allan!
Okay, thanks. Bye.
Further information
Allan Clarke’s new album I’ll Never Forget is released on April 7 2023.
Pre-order album: https://allanclarke.lnk.to/IllNeverForgetID
Listen to Buddy’s Back here: https://allanclarke.lnk.to/BuddysBackID
This is a written version of a podcast interview.
See also Strange Brew 2014 Allan Clarke interview
