Guy Pratt – Sees The Funny Side Of Touring

Bass player Guy Pratt is in Melbourne on tour. There’s nothing unusual about that – as a band member for the likes of Pink Floyd, Gary Moore, Roxy Music, Michael Jackson, Echo & the Bunnymen, Coverdale Page, Kirsty MacColl, The Smiths, Tears for Fears, Lemon Jelly, The Orb, All Saints, Icehouse, Madonna, Stephen Duffy, Robbie Robertson, Robert Palmer and  Billy Pilgrim, it’s no surprise to find him just about anywhere.

But he’s actually in Melbourne for the Comedy Festival where he is performing his show Wake Up Call, where he tells some hilarious tales from the road. It seems his time with Pink Floyd provided him with plenty of material. It also provided him with a wife – Pratt is married to Gala, the daughter of Pink Floyd keyboardist, Richard Wright.

He also translated the stories into a memoir called, My Bass And Other Animals, one of the funnier musicians memoirs of recent times.

Wake Up Call is a great show and well worth seeking out in the mass of shows fighting for your comedy festival dollar.

HHMM: So whatever happened to the old adage, “what happens on tour, stays on tour”?

GP: Obviously I don’t say anything that’s likely to break up a home! That’s Rule 1. The only person that comes out of my stories looking a ‘twat’ is me! But I know what you mean, I am telling tales out of school. I used to tell more Pink Floyd stories that actually mentioned members of the band and with David Gilmour being a close family friend, I started to feel weird and awkward about it. So when I wrote the new show I told him that I’d left him out of it this time. He came to my opening night in London and he was visibly upset! It just goes to show…

HHMM: To what extent is your audience made up of music industry people who have experience in what you are talking about and who know the horrors of being on tour and to what extent is it comedy fans?

GP: I don’t know. You can always tell when there are musos in because they laugh at the whole intro tape thing that I have, which is of a tour manager trying to get people up. I listen to see if that goes down well because that gives you a clue of how many musos are there. It’s meant to be as broad as possible and its not meant to be for musicians only. It’s for anyone who has a vague interest in music and really anyone who has ever stayed in a hotel should get a lot of it. This show is about the madness of touring really, its not so much about music. It’s just travelling, any kind of travelling and how it drives you mad.

HHMM: Some musos keep touring forever, some buy studios, some move into film and tv music, some stay home and get angry about what could have been and what has become of their life. You went into stand-up comedy. How did that happen?

GP: I’ve done all of those things – but I wasn’t very good at staying home and getting angry. I thought that part of my life was over and it was all about making sense of it. I thought I could either be that bloke down the pub, who everyone looks at and says, “don’t get him started”, or do something else. So I had all these stories and I loved telling them so I realized that people loved hearing tour stories. The funny thing is that when I started doing stand-up I became busier than I had ever been as a musician, so it paid off both ways.

HHMM: Humour is a very important part of being on the road. It’s a form of survival. Do you think there have been any tours that you got as a musician because they wanted a funny bloke on tour?

GP: Definitely. Not so much tours but I definitely got session work because of that. Most bass playing on pop records definitely doesn’t require anything special and in  London there is a phone book full of bass players. I’m sure it would be like, “we can get him, we can get him, oh lets get Guy, he’s a laugh”.  That definitely has happened. On tour, it’s your ability to get on with other people that is as important as your ability as a musician definitely.

HHMM: Often the funniest guys on tour are not the musicians, but the crew. Is there an idea to expand the show to include some of the adventures of crew members?

GP: On tour with Pink Floyd the best fun we ever had was on the nights when we were in the same hotel as the crew. Those guys actually work – unlike us poncey hairdressers – they actually work hard and play hard. They really know how to take a hotel apart – and put it back together, more importantly! We were in Moscow once and we were in the bar and someone said, ‘what a shame there isn’t a piano in this bar’. So the crew went, ‘right’, and they went out and found a piano and bought it back to the bar! They can do things like that.

HHMM: You’ve played to audiences of 50 to 100 thousand sometimes. With comedy it’s more normal to play to audiences of 50 to 100 people. Has that been an interesting transition?

GP: In comedy so long as there is more than 7 people you are alright! That seems to be the minimum number to get a laugh. It’s much scarier because you are much more aware of your audience, you can see them – all of them! Having said that, I’ve just come from a South American tour playing bass for Dominic Miller, who is Sting’s guitarist. That was jazz tour, playing small places and it was really nice playing music in an intimate setting like that.

HHMM: Has there ever been any tours you have done where it has ben absolutely impossible to find anything funny about the tour?

GP: That’s a really good question, hmmm. No, because if everything is going great then everyone is in a good mood, but then there is this gallows humor as well, where everything is awful, the you are having to make jokes to kind of keep yourself going. So there is always some kind of humor. The last tour of Australia I did with Bryan Ferry in 2007 was pretty miserable which was a shame because you always look forward to the Antipodean leg of any tour. On that one, on the last leg, I was so depressed that I smashed a guitar, which is probably why I  wasn’t touring with Roxy Music here earlier this year.

HHMM: In Australia recently there has been a rash of memoirs from musicians of roughly your vintage. Why do you think there is this need to do that when musicians get to a certain age?

GP: I don’t know. I didn’t really want to write mine. I started writing a book and I hated it, and that’s when I decided to do stand-up because I loved telling the stories but I hated writing them. Because of the stand-up I got offered money to write a book, so I thought I’d better write it. But when I wrote mine, I read a lot of musicians memoirs, most of which I found pretty terrible, mostly because they take themselves too seriously and they would never take the blame for anything. Everything was always everyone else fault. But I remember handing it in to my publisher and thinking there was one common thread with all of these books and realizing that pretty much all of them were written after the protagonists mother has died! I thought, “Oh no, my mother is going to read this!” Mine is very much alive and hopefully will be for a long time to come. But for me doing stand-up was about making sense of what I’d been through, because for most musicians their older life is just about re-visiting their younger life. No-one is really that interested in your new album when you are fifty, they just want to hear you playing your hits from when you were twenty-five!

HHMM: People love to hear stories of chemically enhanced mis-behaviour, but there is a dark side to that. Not everyone lives to tell the funny stories. How did you survive your era of chemical experimentation.

GP: I don’t know. I never did rehab or anything like that, although at one point would probably have been a good idea. You either grow up or you don’t, it’s as simple as that. There are quite a few funny stories in my book and in the show but I’m not really glorifying it. Hopefully its just a stupid thing that you do when you were young and then you grow up.

HHMM: I guess when you look at the Pink Floyd experience you can say you had the last laugh – you married the bosses daughter.

GP: Well, yes, although that’s not how I look at it! It’s sixteen years I’ve been married now. Because Gala grew up in that world there is nothing that surprises or upsets her. I say this in the show, but it’s absolutely true. On my tenth wedding anniversary she said to me “when I married you I thought you were going to be away far more than you have been.” I’m not sure how to take that. Now Gala loves me going away. Nobody wants an out of work musician hanging around the house.

Wake Up Call – Swiss Club 89 Flinders Street , 13-24 April, Melbourne Comedy Festival

Roxy Music – Rod Laver Arena

I guess there are two types of Roxy Music fans. There are those who know singles like Same Old Scene, More Than This and Avalon; songs that, although impressive in their construction and performance, are essentially stylish fodder for commercial pop radio and which probably still feature on many ‘gold’ format radio stations. It’s not to say that they aren’t very good songs, because they are, but there’s no doubt that they are far more accessible to the mainstream than much of the bands earlier work.

The second group of fans know that earlier work and in many cases know it in an encyclopedic fashion. These are the fans for whom Roxy Music are a band that merges art with rock and who are an English equivalent of, say, the Velvet Underground, in terms of their artistic credibility and influence. The bands self-titled first album was recorded in 1972, and at the time was seen as a wildly experimental, avant garde statement of intent.

Perhaps there is also a third group of fans – those who think that Bryan Ferry is the only important member of this band and who came along wondering what else he would play other than Lets Stick Together. This group may have been represented by the bloke in the urinal after the show loudly bemoaning the absence of The Price of Love from the setlist.

On this tour, the happiest subset of fans will have been the second group. This is clearly how it should be. After all, this line-up, with one notable exception, was the band that created that debut album and its successors For Your Pleasure, Stranded, Country Life, Siren and Manifesto. Drummer Paul Thompson departed prior to the Flesh & Blood and Avalon albums that were the ones that contained the most prominent of the hit singles.

So…given that this tour was intended to be a real and meaningful retrospective of the music of Roxy Music there was always going to be some songs that left portions of the audience a little bewildered.

The set opened with The Main Thing (from Avalon), allowing the audience to take in the spectacle, which included a full backdrop video screen that would later feature some excellent vision that really enhanced many of the songs, and two interpretive go-go dancers who couldn’t be faulted in terms of either aesthetic or technical prowess.

The songlist then took a loose stroll through the catalogue with no particular theme in mind. Ferry was in fine voice, particularly on the more atmospheric songs like the still-chilling In Every Dream Home A Heartache, while guitarist Phil Manzanera frequently contributed parts that remind you that he’s a seriously great player who probably doesn’t get the recognition he deserves.

Paul Thompson received support from a percussionist although that hardly seemed necessary while saxophonist Andy Mackay also had a sidekick sharing his duties, although his featured parts were perfectly blended and tasteful.

This was an outstanding musical concert that reflected the bands history very well. They seemed comfortable with the more brazen tracks like Street Life, the glam sounding Prairie Rose (supported by a great Texan video montage), Editions Of You and the show-stopper Do The Strand. A surprising inclusion was a cover of Like A Hurricane that had appeared on the 1990 Heart Still Beating compilation.

The other surprise was the Ferry solo hit Let’s Stick Together – perhaps performed as a concession to the less deeply connected fans. Along with Love Is The Drug this was the song that got the biggest crowd reaction, a situation that perhaps reflects reality, but not necessarily the most heartening situation for the band.

While this concert was immensely satisfying for serious fans of the band, one can only speculate how good it would have been in a more suitable venue. Rod Laver Arena works well for many shows but this show required something more intimate and, well, ornate. I’m sure the economics don’t work but I can only imagine how good this would be in the classic surrounds of the Palais or even (in a fantasy world) at a room like The Forum.

As it was Roxy Music walked away from this show with their reputation enhanced. Ferry’s effortless cool and Manzanera’s startling guitar playing were the obvious touchstones, but really the whole presentation was first rate.

Setlist

The Main Thing

Street Life

Pyjamarama

Prairie Rose

If There Is Something

More Than This

Jealous Guy

Like a Hurricane

2HB

In Every Dream Home A Heartache

Tara

Bitter-Sweet

Same Old Scene

My Only Love

Virginia Plain

Love Is The Drug

Editions Of You

Do The Strand

Avalon

Let’s Stick Together

For Your Pleasure

Roxy Music Tour!

It is with a great deal of arty excitement that we have learned that Roxy Music will be touring Australia in Feb/Mar 2011 with the original line-up of vocalist Bryan Ferry, guitarist Phil Manzanera, saxophonist Andy Mackay and the great Paul Thompson on drums.

Tickets go on sale from Wednesday 25th August.

Roxy Music will be supported by Australian rock’n’roll legends Mondo Rock.

Roxy Music will be performing material from their entire catalogue including such hits as Dance Away, Avalon, Let’s Stick Together, Take A Chance With Me, Do the Strand, Angel Eyes, Oh Yeah, In the Midnight Hour, Jealous Guy, Love Is The Drug, More Than This and many more.

In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Roxy Music on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.  Roxy Music are regarded as one of the most influential art-rock bands in music history. The group, formed by vocalist/keyboardist Bryan Ferry, enjoyed a successful run through the ’70s and early ’80s, crafting a sound that was completely their own.

Roxy Music first exploded on to the scene with their 1972 self-titled debut album. The progressive debut was the sound of a group challenging the constraints of pop music. The LP was lauded by critics and popular among fans, peaking at number 4 on the U.K album charts. From there, they recorded 1973′s For Your Pleasure at London’s legendary AIR Studios.

Some of their finest records of their career include Country Life (1974) and Siren (1975). After two years away, the group reformed in 1978 to release three more albums, Manifesto (1979), Flesh and Blood (1980) and Avalon (1982). It wasn’t long before the compilation album Street Life raced to No.1 in 1986 and stayed there for five weeks. Roxy Music disbanded while still at the top of their game.

Thirty years later, Ferry, Manzanera, Mackay and Thompson re-formed the group and continue to play concerts all over the world reconfirming that the legacy had only appreciated with time. In 2005 Roxy Music played a stunning set at the Isle of Wight Festival, followed by festival dates throughout Europe.  In 2010 they will play their first gigs in five years before heading to Australia in 2011.

Wednesday February 23    Adelaide Entertainment Centre
Ticketek 132 849
Friday February 25    Sydney Entertainment Centre
Ticketmaster 136 100
Saturday February 26    Hope Estate, Hunter Valley
Ticketmaster 136 100
Tuesday March 01    Brisbane Riverstage
Ticketmaster 136 100
Thursday March 03    Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne