interview: terry

Free Radical Sound's Louise Woodford found Terry Edwards in his manor - Whitechapel. She discovers what life is like in the real Eastenders.

Louise: How did you come to collaborate with Urban Dub on the new single "Gonna Rise"?
Terry: It was done by osmosis. Don't you know Oz? No, it's good. I really like the riff. We did it before, but the tempo wasn't right, so I re-recorded it in Tottenham with Oz, osmosis. So we did it. Rhythmically it was slightly different. It's good.

Louise: How many instruments do you play?
Terry: Saxophone, trumpet, guitar and keyboards. Obviously keyboards covers a whole wealth of things, but mainly Hammond Organ and piano. I'm not really a whiz kid on all the new-fangled synth business. Like most guitarists I have a go on the bass from time to time, but I tend to leave that to the professionals.

Louise: What year was your first release?
Terry: 1981. It was a compilation album called "Norwich - A Fine City" that had two tracks by the Higsons on it. The Higsons were a band from Norwich. That was the first band that I actually made records with and we were together for about six years. We were all at the University of East Anglia. I go back once or twice a year to visit my friends there. I like it there, but I wouldn't live there. The Higsons had two singles on Two Tone Records. The first one was produced by Jerry Dammers from The Specials. I only bring that up because of Urban Dub being Urban Dub. There's a connection musically, maybe. Skanking is involved so the Two Tone connection is worth a mention.

Louise: Was the skankingness something that attracted you to working with Urban Dub?
Terry: No, I think it was the trousers of all the band members. Urban Dub need a good tailor.

Louise: You don't need a good tailor, because your trade mark is the suits that you wear. Where do you get them made?
Terry: I tend to buy second-hand. I scour every second hand shop in every town that I go to. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.

Louise: So are you a mod?
Terry: No.

Louise: Are you a rocker?
Terry: No. It's the Ringo Star answer. The Beatles were asked if they were mods or rockers. He said "We're mockers" in his beautiful scouse accent.

Louise: There was the album Snuff Vs Urban Dub Blue Gravy Dub Versions. Did you produce the original album - Snuff Blue Gravy Phase Nine?
Terry: Yeah, it was a coproduction job with Paul Corkett. He's a technical bod, so he got some really good sounds up. I had quite a bit of input with the arrangements with the band before we went in the studio, and I did all the horn arrangements, played all the horns except trombone, and I played the Hammond Organ, except on the track "Blue Gravy". Duncan Redmonds played the Hammond on that. He finds it difficult to play the drums and Hammond at the same time, though. So I play the Hammond on "Blue Gravy" for the live shows! There was a lot of preproduction during the making of the album, making all the bits fit. Paul and Dan at Mole Studios got a really good sound. I'd say it was a pretty strong record. The bands manager was very keen, after he'd heard some of the Urban Dub stuff, to do a dub version of the whole album. So then we had to start work on the album all over again with Urban Dub.

Louise: Would you ever work with them again?
Terry: Yeah, I'm working with them now on their new album which will be out this year.

Louise: So you've told us about what you were doing in 1981, and now you've told us about what you're doing in 2001. What happened to the twenty years in-between?
Terry: Well, after doing the first records that I made, I started working with different bands. I had a solo outfit called New York, New York. It was a rather ill-conceived r'n'b band, in the old style of r'n'b. It was saxophone-lead swing and jump music, that I quite liked. I quite liked the idea of having a blues band without the guitar in it. It was me on sax, a drummer, a keyboard-player and a bass-player. You'd just expect a guitar in there and there just wasn't one, which is something that I like. Taking the intrinsic things out of something and seeing what's left. That's how my proper solo career started off. We did an EP of four Jesus and Mary Chain songs. The Mary Chain stuff is all about guitars and lyrics, so two of the tracks on the four track EP have no guitars and no vocals, just the melody. I did put a guitar in two of them because it just didn't sound right without having something pinning the chords there, but I didn't do any of the squealing guitars that you associate with the Mary Chain. I did the squealing on saxophone instead and built it up another way. So that's always interested me, like taking something out of the music and seeing what's left, which I suppose in a round about way is what dub is about. You strip the song back. You do the song and then you do the dub version, which is kind of experimenting with the bones of what's there. You don't take the piss or anything, you just sort of skew it round a bit, or look at it as a negative instead of a positive photograph or something, you know. You mash the colours. I've always had a thing in my head to do that. Then after the Jesus and The Mary Chain ep, I did a couple of others. There was a ska version of Fall songs - four covers of songs by The Fall done with a ska band, because that quite intrigued me. Then there was an ep of Miles Davis songs with tenuous numerical links to them. "Seven Steps To Heaven", "81", "4", and I squeezed in a tune called "Half Nelson". I thought half was close enough to a number. They were thrash metal versions of Miles Davis tunes. I got known for doing cover versions and I got asked to do things for tribute records. I never saw my cover eps as tributes, they weren't. I was doing somebody-else's songs, not as a tribute to them, I was just covering them. I got a band together to do some of these things live and that was the birth of Terry Edwards and the Scapegoats. In the meantime, John Peel had been giving us sessions, so I've done four John Peel sessions under my own name, but I'd dearly love to do a fifth because I did five with the Higsons. I like to have all the numbers in alignment. I've also been doing a lot of sessions with different artists. I'm recording with Snuff for their new album. I'm recording with Urban Dub for their new album. I've just been on tour with Lydia Lunch and I'm doing some more stuff with her in May. I'm working with Glen Matlock the Pistols bass-player. I've been working with him for two years. He's in the studio, as we speak, putting down tracks and I'll be putting Hammond down, and then we'll be touring. Numerically it's a lot of bands. I'm doing solo stuff with prerecorded backing - soundscapes and improvising. You can take that anywhere, really. I'm going to tiny places like the cellar bar at Moles in Bath, and Public Life which is a converted convenience in the heart of London's East End. I've also played the solo stuff at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where there was about eight hundred people. It's the type of project you can take anywhere.

Louise: Do you run your own label?
Terry: Yeah, it's called Sartorial. We're going to be reissuing the Butterfield 8 album. Find out more on terryedwards.co.uk.

Louise: What are your influences?
Terry: Do you know, I knew you were gonna ask that. Caffeine and alcohol. No, but seriously, the top three saxophonists who are my influences are Davey Payne, who is the guitarist with Ian Dury and The Blockheads, Earl Bostic, who was an r'n'b player who died in the mid 60s. He was always poo-pooed by the jazz fraternity, because he actually had hits and had a reasonable amount of success. He wasn't considered to be a great improviser by those who don't know. The people who did know about him think that he reinvented the instrument, really. He found a way of playing a harmonic range an octave and more above the instrument that had never been used before. Art Blakey's on record as saying that he just knew the saxophone inside-out. John Coletrain's first recording session was as a sidesman with Earl Bostic. A really good player. And the last one is John Zorn - the avant garde american saxophonist and composer.

Louise: How did you end up on tour with Urban Dub?
Terry: Jim Chapman was keen on Urban Dub and Snuff getting together for the tour. It made the van very cramped, having both Snuff and Urban Dub in the same bus. We got on pretty well together. It's always nice to have something that you want to listen to before you go on stage. There are times that you go on tour and there is a local band every night, but it's good to have the solid Urban Dub crew so that you know what the set up is. They occasionally spun some of my discs. They played the Noon Day Underground Remix of "Boost" and echoed it up, and "6-8-1".

Louise: Did rival factions develop amongst the bands?
Terry: There was the occasional arm-wrestling contest.

Louise: Who won?
Terry: Urban Dub, every time. I, of course, was the referee. I don't arm-wrestle myself. I have other people that do that sort of thing for me.

Louise: Do you ever go to Brick Lane Market?
Terry: We used to go every Sunday. Instead of having a Saturday job, like most teenagers, I had a Sunday job working in Brick Lane. My dad got in to photography and we went round taking shots. I used one for a record sleeve. It was a photo of some graffiti that said "Everywhere offices, Nowhere homes.". All the area used to be boarded-up. Everything was smashed. I've lived here for 17 years, but now it's all very different. You used to have all the winos down Brick Lane, and we got some really good shots of them outside a boozer called the Two Brewers. It used to have green glazed bricks on the front, it looked really good.

Louise: Didn't Harry "The Hat" McVitee get shot in the Two Brewers?
Terry: You're mixing up several people there. You've got Jack "The Hat" McVitee, who got carved up by Reggie, and George Cornell got shot in The Blind Beggar, which is on the corner of Cambridge Heath Road and Whitechapel Road. But that's nowhere near Brick Lane. Well, I guess if you live in New York, then it's very near Brick Lane. There's a lot of interesting music to be found in Brick Lane. I think Urban Dub go trawling through the cassette shops for goodies down there. The Arts Café in Commercial Street was the sight of the "6-8-1" gig that Terry Edwards and The Scapegoats did on 6Th August 2001. It cost £6.81 to get in, we did a twenty five minute version of "6-8-1" on the date 6/8/01. It was very numerical.

Louise: The Long Throw Specialist did a mix of the Terry Edwards All Stars performing "Liquidator". It was on the 21st Century Ska 2001 compilation album. How did that come about?
Terry: The Long Throw Specialist is a big fan of the Butterfield 8. I formed the Butterfield 8 with Mark Bedford from Madness. The Long Throw Specialist is a Madness fan. He's an Essex boy. So we took it up from there really. He's done a couple of other things. He had a group called Dynamo, who were an eighties-sounding synth band. They played really good songs. I think that the songs are quite heart-felt, because they are very much made by somebody who lives a suburban existence and feels disenfranchised from the big city where things go on. They just kind of know that it's always gonna be like that. Everybody knows