Tim Booth of Dr. Strangely Strange talks to Jason Barnard about the group’s history, and their new Radio Sessions album that captures their ‘lost’ 1970 BBC In Concert, Top Gear recordings plus other rarities.
What are your reflections on the new Radio Sessions album?
It was a surprise. I didn’t expect it. I didn’t know that some of that stuff had been recorded. Parts of it are great, especially the bit with Terry and Gay Woods, which is nearly good.
The one thing that is unfortunately missing from it, which I didn’t know existed when it was being put together a few years back, we played in Scotland at something called the Highland and Islands Festival. We had a rhythm section with us and one of the gigs we did was for the BBC in Aberdeen, in a place called The Lemon Tree. That was actually recorded and put out by BBC Scotland. And someone sent me a copy of it some while back. And it was surprisingly good. But we didn’t know it existed at the time. So there you go.
So going back to the start, Dr. Strangely Strange coalesced at university.
Yeah. I myself went to Trinity College in Dublin, which is a very old sedate university, but it had several music societies. There was a folk music society, a jazz society, and there were a few rock and roll bands lurking in and around who played in the college and played around the town. Ivan played in one of those and I was playing more folk music, but somehow we got together and started to play music together. And then another guitarist called Humphrey Weightman arrived in Dublin. He’d been in Cambridge and had left under some kind of a cloud and arrived in Dublin. And he was a pretty good kind of Bert Jansch type guitarist. So he played with us on our very first gig as Dr. Strangely Strange, which was in the exam hall in Trinity. And from our point of view, it was a disaster. But the jazz critic from the Irish Times was there and he thought it was great.
I’ve read that The Incredible String Band were one of the influences that started to come in. Is that correct?
That would be correct. Their first album was like a complete breath of fresh air. I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan’s earlier stuff and I used to like American blues music. I also liked Appalachian music and bands that covered it, like revival bands like the New Lost City Ramblers. I was very keen on them. Still am. I still like them a lot. And so when we heard Mike, Robin and Clive doing this stuff, it was kind of gosh. You can write from your own background. You don’t have to be thinking about writing songs about Alabama or whatever. You can actually write about the people that you know and the things that you’ve experienced. The String Band were doing that and it was like a breath of fresh air. It kind of removed a writer’s block, if you like.
The Irish music scene in that period had showbands and the more Irish folk element. But what you were doing seemed to be quite unique for Ireland.
It was. We were really the only people doing it like that. We occasionally covered someone else’s song, but mostly it was our own music. I suppose one of the reasons that we played our own music, was that we had written it and we knew how to play it, so we were confident in playing it. Whereas if we played someone else’s music, we would be less confident and we might be trying to make it sound like the recording that we’d heard, rather than making it sound like our version of it. These days, if we do a cover, it’s definitely us playing someone else’s song.
The music scene around Dublin had a great pool of talent at the time. I’ve read that you were friends or certainly knew Gary Moore and Phil Lynott, is that right?
Oh, yeah. We had a couple of places which were – commune would be the wrong word. There was a house in Mount Street which became known as The Orphanage because the woman who rented the house, a woman called Patricia Mohan, was known as Orphan Annie. I don’t know why. So her house became The Orphanage, but it was quite a large Georgian house and she had two floors and the basement of it, so there was plenty of room there. So people would pass through, some people would crash. Robin crashed there a few nights and Phil Lynott used to drop by all the time. He was only about 15 or 16, but we were kind of accessible musicians as far as he was concerned. I don’t know how we met Phil in the first place. He just sort of gravitated to us and he would have a new song and he’d play it and we’d play it with him. And then later on, when he was a little bit older, he introduced me to a very young Gary Moore, who was also about 15 or 16 at the time, but could play the guitar very, very well even then.
So he came and stayed, but not at that orphanage. There was a second communal house in Sandymount which also was known as the Orphanage. It was The Orphanage Two, and Gary stayed there on and off for a couple of years, which was lovely because we used to practise there and Gary would be in and out with the bands he was playing with. When he wasn’t playing with them, he’d play with us. And it was brilliant and that’s why he played on the second album, Heavy Petting, because he knew all the songs.
Joe Boyd was a key figure. How did he become aware of you?
Well, first of all, there was a visiting American record producer called Bernard Stollman, who had a record company called ESP-Disk and they put out people like The Fugs and Sun Ra in America. He happened to come through Dublin and heard about us and he offered us a record contract in America on ESP-Disk and we were thinking about that. But meanwhile there was a woman in Dublin called Anthea Joseph who worked for I think it was EMI and she knew Joe Boyd and she had told Joe about us and Joe had come over and seen us play a gig in Carlow, but he wasn’t that impressed. It wasn’t exactly a bidding war. We were thinking of going with Bernard and Anthea said, no, you should go with Joe, he’s much more your kind of person. So she talked to Joe again and Joe came back and offered us a lease tape deal, which we took. He became our producer.
The move over to London, did that happen quite quickly then?
Well, once we had the first album out, it got quite a lot of publicity. Anthea got us an agent and we began to get university bookings supporting people. We supported nearly everybody, we supported Rory Gallagher. Elton John supported us, actually, early on in our career. We would be out there touring around the university circuit in England and being paid the princely sum of 30 quid for a gig, which was about ten times more than we were getting for a gig in Ireland.
So when you recorded Kip of the Serenes, you weren’t based in England. You actually came over fully later?
I’m not sure whether we did some gigs in England before the record came out. I think we did, but people knew we were recording, so social secretaries and universities were interested in getting us and getting us cheaply because 30 quid was actually pretty cheap, but for us it was good money. So if we did four or five of those in a week and did three weeks in England, we came back to Ireland with some money in our pockets so we could relax and rehearse and do the other things that we did. Like I was a painter, Tim Goulding’s a painter and Ivan was into various things at the time as well. He was writing.
Was the group’s debut album a good representation of the material that you were playing live?
It was. It was all the stuff that we were playing live. When the album was out, we were writing all the time, so new stuff came along and then we got a manager called Stephen Pierce, who was very good for us. He made sure that we had a van and that we had reasonable equipment, because playing acoustic music, it was very hard to be heard. Guitars, there were very few acoustic pickups for guitars, so you have to play into a microphone, so you have to have a very good microphone and a good PA.
The obvious next question is whether that led on to the sound of your next album, Heavy Petting. The sound was a bit rockier.
Yeah. I don’t know how we decided we’d get rockier. I think it was the influence, probably, of Gary, because it was just so lovely to play with him. He was a beautiful guitar player and he really respected our inabilities if you like. Because he was streets ahead of us as a player. But when Gary played with us, he had us on our toes and we would play much better. And he loved the music that we made, he loved our songs and he loved to play them. So when he started playing electric guitar on them, we said, oh, gosh, let’s make this one electric. And then we talked to Joe and Joe said, well, you’re going to need a drummer. If you’re going to do that, then you haven’t got a drummer, and you’re going to need a bass player. I was playing bass a bit. So when we came to record Dave Mattacks played drums with us. Fairport’s drummer. He’s a superb drummer, you just couldn’t go wrong with him.
The sleeve of Heavy Petting had a unique design. Ironically the flaps led to it becoming easily damaged.
It was designed by Roger Dean who did a lot of work for Yes. I don’t think he really considered what would happen to the sleeve if it was being pushed in and out of a collection of albums. As John Peel said once in one interview it was an amazing self-destructive sleeve.
It seems that John Peel didn’t seem to actively support the group until around this period. He was quite late to champion you.
I don’t think he liked us at all initially. He didn’t get us. But we did a gig in Dublin, in the stadium with maybe the band that Gary played in Skid Row. Plus I think the Liverpool Poets and there was some other English band, but I can’t remember who they were. John Peel was the compare. We were middle of the bill and we went on and we went down very well with the Dublin audience and actually we played well. And afterwards he came up and he said, “I never got to you guys before, but now that I’ve seen you play live, I see what it is that you do, so you’ll be hearing from me.” And we did. And he put us on his radio shows a few times and treated us very well. He was very nice to deal with.
And this new set features one of your sessions for Top Gear. When I speak to artists, some love the opportunity to replay material or play new material in BBC sessions. But other artists almost see it as a waste of time and inferior. What’s your view on that?
For us, it was a chance to get the music out there a little bit more than it was. And we were, if you like, the country cousins from Ireland. So to us, to be able to do a John Peel session, it was really nice. We were grateful for it. We really liked doing it. And also, I think we got a few bob for it as well.
The heart of this new CD is the concert for Radio One that was recorded in late October and then got released early November 1970. Do you have any memories of that?
It was the one where we supported James Taylor. My main memory is we wanted to hear how our recording sounded. So after James Taylor had done this gig, we went up to the sound booth and the engineer was heading out. He had finished his shift, so I don’t think we actually heard the recording. But then we had left our equipment on the stage, including the harmonium, which is a big, heavy item. Tim Goulding played the harmonium as well as playing an electric organ. And on the harmonium was the chord sheets and the words of a song that he had written, a new song of his called, Love Is A Horse, which I think we did at the gig. And sitting and playing the harmonium was a beautiful blonde woman and she was playing it and singing the song, but singing it with a completely different tune than Tim had written, and it was Joni Mitchell who was going out with James Taylor at the time. She said something like that’s a really far out idea for a song Love Is A Horse. And we were about to engage in conversation with her when James arrives and says “Joni. We’re out of here.” And off they went, so I never forgave him.
In late 1970, Tim Goulding announced that he was leaving. How did the rest of you respond?
Well, we were very good friends then and still are. I love Tim Goulding, he’s a great guy. And so we just thought, well, that’s kind of a shame, because we were beginning to gell very well as a band. We had Hoppy playing drums and sometimes we were really good, other times we weren’t quite as good, but when we were good, we were really on it. So we were disappointed that he was leaving, but we respected his decision, obviously, because we were friends and that’s what he wanted to do and we couldn’t say, no, you can’t do that. So that was fine. And he gave us plenty of notice and somehow we had a feeling that it wasn’t at the end of the road for our playing with Tim. So we looked around in Ireland for people that we would be able to replace them or how we might proceed. And Terry and Gay Woods, we’d always admired the way they sang and played music, so we thought that might be good and they went along with it for a while. But it didn’t really work out, there were too many difficulties. Terry and Gay were, I think, going through the beginnings of difficult divorce proceedings, well, a breakup of a marriage, and we didn’t know that was happening when we brought them in. So that was happening a lot while we were all in the van together and so on.
And that wasn’t great. So that was an experiment and occasionally we did some good gigs with them, but it was kind of a little bit of a blind alley or an oxbow lake might be the best way to put it. So when the band then split up fully after a few months with them, but after about a year, we got back together and did a tour in the north of Ireland with Tim Goulding and a few other people, and that was great. And since then we just get together whenever we feel like it or whenever anybody wants us and we play. And we have recorded a few other albums since Heavy Petting as well, including the Radio Sessions. Well, that was recorded way back, but albums come out in dribs and drabs.
I guess not having the restriction of having to constantly play and record every year gives you the flexibility and freedom to balance playing with the group with doing your own thing.
Absolutely it does. During COVID we didn’t play. Ivan and myself did a gig together about a month and a half ago for a friend of ours called Paddy Goodwin up in Drogheda. We just sang a few songs and he’s got a great band called The Holy Ghosts and we did a kind of an interval set for him, and then he joined us with his band for one or two numbers. But Tim couldn’t come to that because Tim Goulding had a liver transplant about four or five years ago. So COVID is a very big no no for him. So it’s difficult for him to go into crowded places because of that, because of his immune system and immunosuppressants he has to take to retain someone else’s liver in his body.
There’s a book on the Dr. Strangely Strange story so people can find out the full details of the group there.
Yeah, that’s a great book. It was put together by Adrian Whittaker, who had precedingly worked on the String Band and doing the String Band convention in Leeds. He’d written several other bits and pieces and books. But he did a mighty job on this, drove us crazy with his research, asking us difficult questions. But it’s a very, very good book. I think it had about 2000 issues and then it was scrapped. So it’s a collector’s item now, if you come across it. It has lots of photographs and stories, and if you want to know the Strangely story, that’s where it is.
Fantastic. Well, it’s great to see this material is being unearthed from the group and that you’re still very active in keeping the sound alive.
Ivan is also doing solo gigs occasionally, both on guitar and on keyboard. Ivan is a really nice piano player, a little known fact, but he’s really good on the piano, and I actually think he’s better on the piano than he is on the guitar. So he’s doing a couple of gigs. If anyone wants Ivan, they can get them. He will travel. Have guitar, will travel!
It’s been a pleasure to talk to you, Tim.
A pleasure to talk to you as well. Thanks for your time.
Further information
Dr Strangely Strange Radio sessions is due for release on CD and vinyl on October 21, 2022 and is available for pre-order now.
Dr Strangely Strange Radio Sessions at Think Like A Key Music
