Davey Johnstone talks to Jason Barnard about the formative influences that forged his solo album Deeper Than My Roots and his time playing and songwriting with Elton John.
First of all, I just have to congratulate you on a fabulous solo album. You must be so pleased how it turned out.
Thank you so much. But, yeah, I really am. It’s unusual, actually, for me to enjoy and embrace something that I’ve just done. Usually I’m picking holes in it and kind of saying, no, that could have been different, and that should have been better. But the way this record seemed to happen was just so natural that it just all flowed the way in. Any accidents that were on there during recording, I just left them on because they felt good. They were happy mistakes, if you like. And so it’s a very organic sounding record.
Many people have already heard one of the advance tracks, Melting Snow. That’s your youngest son on vocals, isn’t it? He’s got a great voice.
Yeah, Elliot has got a great voice. I kind of stole him while we were in isolation, in lockdown. Because it started in probably the summer of 2020 after I’ve been home for a couple of months from Australia when the Elton Farewell Tour got ceremoniously dumped right in the middle of it. So that’s fine. I realised, okay, maybe I’ve got time for myself. Elliot was 15 at the time I asked him to maybe sing a couple of songs. Nothing was planned about making an album at that point. It was just really, let’s have some fun. And we’re not doing anything right now, so let’s record a couple of things. So we recorded Here, There And Everywhere, because I’m a huge Beatle fan, and he loves the Beatles too. And all my kids, in fact, have been brought up with the Beatles, so they were kind of press ganged into it. But yeah, Elliot, immediately we started doing his vocal to things that I was writing. It became pretty obvious that this is the kind of path I wanted to take for the record. I would play all the instruments and arrange everything, do all the backgrounds and all the rest of it, and he would sing lead on most of it. So it’s worked out really well.
Absolutely. And there’s quite a lot of tracks to pick out. One Look In Your Eyes, it’s got that classic rock feel.
Yeah, I kept thinking it sounded a bit like The Kinks when I was doing it, and I don’t mind that at all. It’s like, this is great. I’m drawing from my past and all those bands in the 60s that I was listening to when I was like 10 and 11 years old and just started to play guitar. Those are the guys that I listened to and worshipped and still do in many ways. George Harrison, as far as a guitar player who plays exactly the right thing at the right time. I don’t think there’s anybody better than George. And so I kind of modelled myself on the way that he structured his parts for songs so that the song spoke the loudest and the guitar parts were great, but they didn’t detract. So I always try to do that with Elton as well.
So is that one of the reasons behind the title of your album, Deeper Than My Roots? You’re reconnecting with some of those influences.
Absolutely. All the way across the board. There’s some Incredible String Band influences, again from my youth. From The Dubliners and The Chieftains, because I never really lost sight of my Celtic roots being from Edinburgh. But the thing is, I left Edinburgh when I was 17. I was just a babe when I left. So I really hadn’t seen as much of Scotland as I would have loved to have seen. And it’s on my bucket list. When we’re done with all this touring with Elton, I’ll spend a couple of years going in and above the Highlands and the Orkney Islands and Shetlands and stuff like that. But yeah, this album is really about my roots, definitely. And actually the album cover as well. The artwork that my daughter has done so brilliantly, I explained to her what it was I wanted. I wanted a cross between Sgt Pepper and the Incredible String Band with some whimsy in there and some interesting stuff. And stuff that people would have to look at and really take it all in. Because I think album artwork has gotten very boring because we don’t have albums anymore. Basically everything’s online and it’s the occasional CD. But we’re going to do a vinyl release of this record sometime in the late spring. I think it’s going to be April, where you’ll really see the full extent of the album artwork, which is great.
You referred to Scotland and your roots there. I’ve read growing up that you were exposed to standards and folk music through your family. Is that correct?
Kind of. I was a sponge for everything that was going on. I mean, ever since I was five years old and my sisters were playing their records. My sisters are ten and twelve years older than me. So they were listening to Elvis, Buddy Holly and Little Richard. I would hear those big giant breakable 78s when I was five. So I was totally attracted to it at an early age and all the way through growing up. There was a great singer called Ted Warwick, a brilliant singer of Scottish ballads. And they would come over to the house and we had an upright piano, and Ted’s wife would accompany him. And he would sing all those amazing folk standards and Robert Burns stuff. Ae Fond Kiss, Bonie Wee Thing and My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose and all these amazing Robert Burn songs that I again, grew up with. And then picking up all the brilliant Scottish folk singers that are out there. Everybody from Bert Jansch and John Renbourn to Sandy Denny and the Fairport Convention. Archie Fisher and people like that who were part of the folk revival, which was huge in the mid 60s to early 70s.
So that was really where I based all my musicianship on. And I would learn to play intricate finger picking styles and stuff that not many rock and roll guys were doing. Ironically, there were two people who I really noticed picking it up and using it in that way. One was John Lennon, who later on I got to work with, which was wonderful. And I was amazed that he was actually using the same fingerprinting style that I’ve been using for years. He was using it on the White Album and Abbey Road and all these great albums. And I was always wondering where he learned it from. He actually learned it from Donovan. Donovan was the Scottish folk singer who was attached to that whole hippie scene back in the mid 60s. He taught a lot of people that rolling style of picking guitar. There was also Jimmy Page. Jimmy was playing that same style of acoustic guitar picking quite early in his career. So I realised that, okay, I’m in a very special small club here because as I said, not too many people play that style of folk based picking.
It’s almost 50 years since your debut album. Listening back to that material, like A Lark In The Morning, you can hear some of that folk coming through.
Absolutely. Yeah. I still love that kind of music. In fact, about five years ago, a friend of mine, Hans Zimmer, who’s a music composer for movies, wanted me to play on the Sherlock Holmes movie he was doing with Guy Ritchie. And so they brought me in. And I didn’t know this, but Guy Ritchie is a huge fan of traditional Irish and Scottish pub music, which usually features tenor banjo, pipes and fiddles and stuff like that. So I was the guy for the gig. So Hans knew that I played all that stuff. So I really enjoyed doing that. And I was quite featured in that movie, actually. And the music was nominated for an Oscar. So, yeah, those kinds of things are really fun for me. And I actually wouldn’t get to do those things if I hadn’t had such a wealth of experience growing up and doing folk music and blues and then eventually rock stuff. So I’ve never really lost sight of my roots in that way.
I can hear what sounds like a sitar at the end of Black Scotland on Deeper Than My Roots. And if I’m right, you were playing that with Magna Carta as well on Give Me No Goodbye.
Yeah. There’s a famous Scottish folk singer called Archie Fisher. He’s like a legend among Scottish and UK people. Archie is brilliant and I actually called him up last year. I went to his apartment when I was a young 15 year old wannabe folk guy. I was getting some attention because of my banjo style and stuff. So somebody took me over to Archie’s house and he was sitting on an oriental rug surrounded by joss sticks and incense and all that playing the sitar. I was instantly hooked. It was like I saw this and I was like ‘I want to do that’. Because I’ve always been like a real fiend for stringed instruments and anything different I wanted to play. So right there and then I decided I would get my own sitar so about a year later I saw an ad in some Indian magazine when I was living in London with my friend Noel Murphy, another great folk singer. And I ordered a sitar from Bombay. It was £100 and I scraped together the money because I didn’t have any money in those days at all. I was living on porridge and Guinness in those days. That was my diet to stay alive.
About six months later, this giant crate arrived. It was like a coffin, it was that size. And there was my sitar. I have that same sitar to this day. And it’s the one that was on all Magna Carta stuff. Very many Elton songs over the years, like Lucy In The Sky, Holiday Inn, Blues For Baby And Me and stuff like that. I’ve used it a lot for effect. And also, like you mentioned on Black Scotland, it’s really effective there.
In Magna Carta you worked with Gus Dudgeon. He was the link that eventually brought you to Elton, and Madman.
He sure was. Yeah, I’m so grateful that you’ve done your homework. I really appreciate that, Jason. You know a bit about what I’ve done. But Gus was entirely important. The main link, in fact, in my career, because when I went down to London, Gus was one of the few producers who was willing to listen to young, crazy people like me with all the ideas I had. And I would talk to him about the bands. There were suddenly folk bands that were turning electric, like Fairport or Fotheringay or Magna Carta. And as it happened, because he worked with Magna Carta, he said, well, you’re working with Magnus. Why don’t you play on their next album? And I’ll be producing it. And it was like, great. So after we’d known each other for about a year, he mentioned this young guy who was working with called Reg, and he kept talking about this guy. Reg is writing some great stuff, and he’s getting some attention in America. And then one day he said, Look, I’ve got this album we’re doing with Reg, and it’s called Madman Across The Water, and we can’t find the right guitar part. Would you like to try it? And I was like, sure, but I had no idea who he was. Didn’t know him from Adam. So I showed up at the studio and met this very nervous little guy behind a piano called Reg. And we immediately hit it off. I played guitar on Madman Across the Water, and then I played mandolin and sitar on Holiday Inn, and we became instant friends musically. And the next week, I got a call asking if I’d like to join him. And it was like, sure, I’ll do that.
Was it Honky Château where you were fully incorporated in the band?
Yes, it was. And that’s exactly 50 years ago this month, in fact. In January 1972, we all got on a plane at London Heathrow Airport and we went to France to the Château d’Hérouville. We made Honky Château in about two and a half weeks. It was very quick. We just sat in a semicircle and rehearsed the songs as Elton and Bernie were writing them. Because it was all done on the spot. I mean, nothing was done before we went to the Château. So in the first few days, he was writing things like Rocketman and Honky Cat, and we would go straight to the studio and record them. And as I said, it was only myself, Elton, Dee Murray and Nigel Olsson. That was it. We were the only guys who made up the band. So it was a real departure for Elton because up until then, Paul Buckmaster had been arranging all the stuff, and they were doing things with orchestra and top session guys from London, which was brilliant. It worked out great. But Elton always wanted to do it with a band, a really small band, and that’s what he got. So him and I, Nigel and Dee made all these great albums from 72 to 75. They were just really the classic core of Elton’s work, I feel.
That’s what, to my mind, lifted Elton or helped lift him. If you take Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting and your guitar. You mentioned The Kinks earlier. It’s one of those riffs that is now a standard.
I know. It’s so nice when that happens. I get kids coming up to me with a guitar saying listen to me, I can do it. And that’s so great to hear the fact that you’ve maybe touched people in your career. And I’m very grateful for the chance to have that experience of having so many people hear what I’ve been able to bring to Elton’s music, into my own music and to other people. I’ve played with so many people. Again, I’ve been really fortunate, really blessed to have people ask me, invite me to play on their records. And that’s been fantastic. It’s really interesting because again, to me, the song is always the thing that comes first in a piece. Well, if it is a song. So I always try to embellish the song with really cool guitar lines and guitar parts so that you’re attracted to it immediately. I’m a great believer in hooks. I’ve been very fortunate to come up with quite a few hooks and like on Rocket Man doing the slide part that goes up to the stratosphere when he sings Rocket Man on the record and things like that. So, yeah, I’ve been very fortunate to have such a long career where I’ve been able to dip into my bag of cultural instruments and different things like Irish, Scottish, English, whatever it might be, American blues and jazz. And now with my own record, I dipped into South American music with Meh Amour, which is based on Brazilian bossa nova guitar, which is not an easy thing to develop. But I’m so glad I sat down and worked out how to do that style.
Your songwriting is underappreciated. Songs like Cage The Songbird. Do you remember writing that? Because that is one of the gems in Elton’s catalogue and you co-wrote it.
I appreciate that. Thanks, Jason. How that happened was really quite remarkable because we were sitting up in Caribou Ranch in Colorado. It was the middle of winter, and we were sitting around because we all had these separate log cabins. And Elton and his manager and Gus were sharing the biggest one of those, which was kind of our meeting room. So we were hanging out there one night. I was playing this guitar piece that I just composed, and I was just playing around with it. And Elton said, what is that? And I said, It’s just something I wrote. And he was like, that’s beautiful. And he said, play it again. So I was playing it again. I was playing the piece. He was going through all these lyrics, a pile of lyrics that Bernie had given him, and he obviously knew what he was looking for. And he pulled this one out, and he said, okay, I’ve found it. He said, play it again from the beginning. And I played it. And he started singing, and it fit, like, perfectly. Well, Elton is really good at phrasing. He’s amazing at phrasing things, and the whole thing just fit perfectly.
And the idea of the song being about Édith Piaf, the famous singer who had such a tragic end. It just fit perfectly. And so we kept the piece, and we decided to keep it for the double album Blue Moves, which we did about a year after writing it. But we also, in that same period, wrote Grow Some Funk Of Your Own, which is a real balls out rocker, which was on Rock of the Westies. And that was fun. I’ve always enjoyed writing with Elton. We’ve written quite a few things together, and we’ve had a lot of success doing it. The biggest one being I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues. It has obviously been a massive song, and it’s a big favourite with a lot of the fans, too.
I was reading something that Jim Steinman said about you working with him on Bad For Good. He spoke about your dedication to getting the guitar sound and layering the guitars on Stark Raving Love which was the highest praise indeed. What was it like working with him? Another legendary figure.
It was really great because, again, I’m so fortunate because when I get hired to play on somebody else’s music, they hire me not to play the notes that they want me to play, but they hire me because of what I might bring to the song or to the piece that they’re doing. So I kind of get free hand. So Jim would play me a song that he’d just written on piano, and he would say play. And he was very operatic in his approach to writing. It was very rock opera, very grandiose and all that cool stuff. And so he would say, Just go for it. I was very into acoustic guitar in rock because I think there’s nothing that drives a track better than a really aggressive acoustic guitar part. And that’s something that Pete Townshend and I share. And we’ve done that together on a couple of tracks. Pete’s brilliant. And Jim loved the fact that I would do that kind of thing. And we were working that time with Jimmy Iovine, who is another one who loves to experiment with different guitar things. So they kind of let me go with it. They said, just do what you want to do.
So I had a lot of fun working on those records. It’s been amazing getting to do that and working with such rated people like Stevie Nicks. That was a great album. And that came directly from the Jim Steinman project, because Jimmy Iovine was producing all that stuff. And when he went to do Stevie’s Bella Donna album, he asked me to do the guitars with Waddy Wachtel, and that made a great combination. Me and Waddie and Russ Kunkel on drums, Bob Glaub on bass. And it was a classic California kind of thing. And me being the odd man out, obviously, being Scottish. But I’ve become a born again American. I’ve lived here since the mid 80s.
I don’t think any chat with you would be complete without mentioning the 3000 shows that you’ve done with Elton. And maybe that’s one of the ways that your arrangements and guitar come alive. Songs like Funeral For A Friend, Love Lies Bleeding are a tour de force live.
Yeah, always. Every time we play, every single time. There have been a couple of times where we had funny accidents, for example, on the Farewell Tour. We do it at a very pivotal point in the show, right in the middle, and everything goes completely dark. And we have a thunder and lightning storm going on with lightning flashes and stuff. And then we slowly go into a Funeral For A Friend, and it still gives me chills. I still get goosebumps when I’m just waiting to come in, because it just reminds me of what it was like when we recorded it. Because when we actually recorded it for Yellow Brick Road, we recorded both those pieces in one go. We didn’t do two and then stitch it all together. We did the whole thing from the start and went all the way through Funeral into Love Lies Bleeding and all the way to the end. So it was quite something the way we recorded it. So I always get those chills when we’re doing it live now.
There was a very funny accident that happened sometime, I think, in the 80s when we did it in Madison Square Garden. Our sound man was a great geezer called Clive Franks. At that time, Clive Franks was the sound guy, and he retired about 13 years ago. But we’re getting ready to do Funeral For A Friend. And in those days, the place went black, as usual. But we had to use a CD to start, because in those days we didn’t have Guy Babylon to play, or later Kim Bullard. We had to use a tape to start the synthesiser part at the beginning. So Clive would start it with the synth part. But what happened was he put the wrong CD in. And so it’s dead quiet, really, really quiet. And then out of nowhere, full volume, you hear “You say, yes” it was a Beatles tape in there. And instantly the people, me and Elton and Dee were dying on stage. We’re trying so hard not to laugh. And we were just falling all over the place. So it was one of those great Spinal Tap moments. But they haven’t happened too many times in our career. There’s been a few things like that, but I’m saving them for the book. I’ve been writing a book for a couple of years time.
It’s been fabulous to talk to you, Davey.
Thank you. I really appreciate it. Great talking to you, Jason, and give my love to everybody over there.
Further information
Order Davey Johnstone’s “Deeper Than My Roots” CD from Cherry Red Records.
A podcast version of this interview, including the music discussed is available here.
