Marty Wilde: The Beatles, Elvis, His Family, And “Let’s Rock This Place”
Introduction
Last week, Rock ‘n’ Roll legend Marty Wilde turned 87 years old just before his brand new studio album “Let’s Rock This Place!” and performance at Banquet Records on Friday 17th April. Marty first rose to prominence back in 1958, with “Endless Sleep” and since has been involved in music for a staggering eight consecutive decades of official chart success. It is entirely possible that we’ll never see a feat like this again.
The album has been a roaring success for Marty and a true return to form, and features classic hits, a classic sound; but also makes way for new interpretations. It follows on the momentum from his previous album, “Running Together” written together with his daughters Kim and Roxanne Wilde.
For the first time, the title track from the new album features Marty’s granddaughter Rose Fowler, (daughter of kim), a reworking of “Rage For Love” a 1985 hit for Kim. For Marty in 2020, she co-directed the music videos for “Christmas Fantasia”, and “Christmas All over the World”.
Marty is of course no stranger to collaboration, penning hits for Status Quo with “Ice In The Sun”. The Casuals with “Jesamine”, Lulu’s “I’m A Tiger” and Hot Chocolate’s “You’ll Never Be So Wrong”, to name a few. Check out our Spotify playlist which includes the best of Marty’s hits just below,
Martin Shaw sat down with Marty to talk about his early career, his transition from being influenced by Elvis to finding his own voice, and the impact of The Beatles on his career. Along with where Marty is today as an artist, with chats about his brand new album and upcoming tour.
The Interview
MARTIN SHAW: That back wall of yours is full of guitars!
MARTY WILDE: I stopped collecting quite a few years ago, but I got the guitars that I really wanted.
MARTIN SHAW: So going back to the early days, did you ever envisage that you’d have such a magnificent, spaced out career?
MARTY WILDE: No, I didn’t to be honest with you, it’s a strange thing, really. It’s like so many things in my life, I never, ever really gave it a great deal of thought at all. And I think it’s because I’m basically pretty unintelligent in some ways, because I don’t think a lot about things. I just carried on, you know, I just love music so much.
I gave my boss a two weeks notice in London. And I mean, when I look back on it, it’s really very strange what the driving force was, and I never gave any of this a great deal of thought. I didn’t think, ‘Would I last?’, I didn’t think about the future. I just went in and head down and barrelled.
MARTIN SHAW: And here you are, all these years later, bringing out new music, which sounds so fresh. I’ve been bopping to the single this morning and watching the video. You’re having so much fun there.
MARTY WILDE: I did well. I mean, with as far as the single goes… it’s one, to be honest, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. Whether the public sees it that way, I don’t know, but I’m very proud of it. You know, some records just happened. And this one happened, it just had all the right ingredients. It was a joy to sing.
It’s like all things, really, you just record, then you keep your fingers crossed, or you pray, whatever you want to do. But really it’s in the lap of the gods. You know what people think, and you can’t make people like something. I wish you could.
Sometimes you know, I hear music. I might hear a record or something, and I look in the charts and it’s not there. And I think, come on, what? What are you listening to?
MARTIN SHAW: Well this is what TRi THIS Music is trying to do, in some way, evidence… and you’re a typical example, evidence, the quality of the past still active in the future, and pointing people back to the origins of the music that they take for granted these days.
MARTY WILDE: In many ways you’re right, Martin. I mean, I think the thing about Rock ‘n’ Roll is… I had a friend in and he’s in his 50s, and he obviously knew Rock ‘n’ Roll and I played that track. I played my latest single to him a long time ago when we first cut it. I said, what do you think of this? I just put it on, and I just watched his feet, and he was going, bang, bang, bang, bang. He’s just tapping away. And he said, ‘Wow’. He said that brings back so many memories of things around me. He said my parents loved that music and he heard it as a child when he was very young and he said it was fantastic. And that the album is a reminder for people to enjoy what a lot of them have forgotten.
MARTIN SHAW: Do you think that you’re at a place now that you’ve got nothing to prove so, and that’s why you’re enjoying this music?
MARTY WILDE: I’m sure that is what it is Martin, I never thought of it that way, but I’m sure you’re right. I just do what I want to do, basically. And the funniest thing all my life, you know, I wanted to sing like Elvis, particularly when I was a young man. I think Billy Fury, Cliff Richard, me, all the others, we all wanted to sing like Elvis. And you can hear it in our styles, little bits and pieces that we copied from him.
But the thing I realised was when I made this album, it’s not Elvis at all, it’s me. So much of my work, I realised I was always in the… not in the shadow of Elvis, but vocally, he always played such a part in my records. And now, it’s changed. I revere Elvis for what he is. He’s very special to me. But that’s just one separate segment. I’m doing my own thing now.
MARTIN SHAW: He was a superstar, but to the industry, he was a milestone, wasn’t he? He pointed you down a road of direction that you could go down with confidence?
MARTY WILDE: Well, I’ve always said he was the blueprint. He showed you what to wear, the way your hair could be cut, how many in a group to have, what style of songs, it goes on and on and on. And he was the blueprint you just have to follow down that road.
MARTIN SHAW: What is it like for you in the late 50s, early 60s, when you’re being mobbed and you’re being superstared and you’re being put on a pedestal. How does that feel?
MARTY WILDE: It would, to me personally, and I’m sure I speak on behalf of lots of other artists, maybe all artists… some artists, they do have a certain amount of arrogance or conceit or ego, but with me, it was just a job. It was just something I love to do so much, music was so important to me and Rock ‘n’ Roll, I was carried away with Rock ‘n’ Roll.
I never viewed myself as a great singer. I never viewed myself as somebody special. I just viewed myself as a singer doing his best. I mean, I’ve retained that kind of feeling my whole life. There were guys miles better than me, Martin there were, honestly, there was a guy I remember seeing in the Southeast I went to see. I can’t remember who he was now, and he’s always been a mystery. And he was somewhere on this stage. He was fantastic! And I was singing at the time in a little skiffle band, and I thought, my God, you’ve got to get yourself ready mate, because this guy is going to be sensational, but he wasn’t. And I think a lot of it, so much is good fortune, and your attitude, your mental attitude, I’m not a quitter. Once I get going, I can’t quit. I have to keep going.
MARTIN SHAW: Then you had the hits. And then I suppose The Beatles came along, and it’s skewed things slightly. What happened to you in the 60s?
MARTY WILDE: Well, my career was going down anyway. You couldn’t keep the same pace all the time, and I wanted to get married, and that was a different thing. You didn’t get married in those days. That was the last thing you did. But I wanted to, and I wasn’t going to be dictated to by other people. But The Beatles, that was a different thing. My wife comes from Liverpool, so it’s a special thing to me.
When I was working in the Liverpool Empire. In fact, we were laughing the other day… I think it was three times Larry Barnes put me in there in one damn year. There were thousands of screaming girls and all that bit. And there was this guy, and he came backstage. I can’t remember his name now, I should really remember it. And he said, ‘You know this group called The Beatles?’. I said, ‘funny name’. He said, ‘Yeah’. He said, ‘but they are fantastic.’ He said, ‘Here’s a magazine’. And he had this magazine and there was a picture of John Lennon who had a medallion or a leather jacket on, that sort of thing, a very early photograph. He said, ‘they really are fantastic’. That was one show.
Next time I went, he was there again, and he said to me, ‘Have you heard them now?’I said ‘No, we haven’t heard anything’. He said, ‘No, you will, you will, you’re gonna hear’ he said.
So then I was working up in Chester in a ballroom, and the kids came up to me, the youngsters, after I finished my show, and they said, they said they enjoyed the show, and they said, ‘Have you heard The Beatles?’ And I said, ‘You’re about the third or fourth person that has that!’ I said, ‘No, I haven’t’. They said, ‘Well, they are fantastic!’
I knew. So when “Love Me Do” came out, I just said to my wife, who’s Liverpudlian as well, I said, ‘you know’, ‘that’s it’. I said, ‘Let’s say it. That’s going to be a monster’. I said, ‘this is the beginning’. And I knew it. I just knew it. Isn’t that strange? And what a great joy, because the writing… I think the songwriting was so wonderful, so natural, and it was British, damn it. You know, we weren’t under the American thumb like we are now mate, ‘we’re British’, and we are British, and it was something to be damn proud of. They were our boys. They led the way. They encourage people like me to write better songs. Their attitude, I think, by and large, was brilliant. And the way they handle themselves… but the songs, I mean, you get two songwriters like that, it was absolutely a billion to one chance that they all got together like that. But what a joy, what a joy.
MARTIN SHAW: So you’re working your way through the 60s and into the 70s. I’m assuming that you’re gigging across the UK and around the world at this time?
MARTY WILDE: Well, funny you say that, I just had a letter the other day from The Batley Variety, and because they’re doing a kind of a remembrance thing about The Batley Variety, I used to work there. So the 70s really were working clubs. A lot of work in men’s clubs, a lot of hard work sometimes.
The Batley Variety: Was a premier working-class venue, serving 1,700 people nightly and featured world class performers – opened in 1967 in West Yorkshire by James and Betty Corrigan.
But nevertheless, it was a learning ground. When you worked Bernard Manning’s Club was a joy, because he’s a total pro. He was a total pro. Bernard Manning, a very clever guy, and I used to work at his club, and I used to learn from him, and you know, that experience, you can’t buy that. You can’t buy that experience.
And you learned to die a death if they didn’t like you… I didn’t die a death. If it didn’t go as you wanted to, you said, ‘I’ve got to do better than this. I’ve got to try harder’. Bernard Manning, bless him, one day he said to me, Marty, he said, ‘You’re worth more than this.’ I said ‘What do you mean?’. He said ‘your fee should go up. Up your fee.’ Yeah, well, what a manager to say.
MARTIN SHAW: So we’ve moved up. We’re heading towards the 80s. Family around you, your son, and your daughter, they’ve obviously been influenced by you. But how did this perfect mix come together for you, Ricky and Kim to sort of create not only a brand new career for your daughter, but also sort of bring you into music in a completely different way?
MARTY WILDE: Well, I mean when they were youngsters, obviously being in the industry, the only thing I never gave them was I didn’t ever concentrate on their education, which I really I should have done as a dad, but I was a little bit immature, to say the least, as a father, in many ways. But the good side of me was I played music all the time, and I didn’t have little speakers, like, you know, like six inch speakers. I had, like, 15 inch speakers, big Wharfedale speakers, and I used to pummel all this stuff out.
And my choice of music is so eclectic. It goes from one thing to the other. It might be classical music one morning, going through something I adore. Then the next minute, it would be something else. It’d be Rock ‘n’ Roll. One day, my son said ‘There’s a band, Dad’ he said, called the Kraftwerk, he said, and ‘they’re working with synths’. So I said, ‘Okay, you know, I’ll get a copy.’ And of course, listening to the Kraftwerk, which was the early synthesiser work. I was smitten.
Kraftwerk: A German electronic band formed in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. They are considered innovators and pioneers of electronic music, Kraftwerk was among the first successful acts to popularise the genre.
Ricky was writing and I was writing, and that’s how we got together, really. And Kim, Kim has always been, as I say, in the influence, she’d sung backing vocals for me on stage. But she wasn’t a show biz girl at all. She would sing for me, but mostly her time was spent at college learning horticulture and other things like that.
But when it came together again it was… we came up with “Kids In America”, in this house, I’m living in today, it was just one of those things. He had this melody, which I liked very much. I had this idea about “Kids In America”, which was really a criticism, because they frightened the life out of me. I’d seen films of these youngsters, and I thought, my God, your attitude is so tough, so raunchy. What are you going to be like when you get older?
“Kids In America”, when I wrote the Lyric, the idea really was not of a girl who was subservient at all. The girl was in charge. This was going to be a woman’s time, not men’s time. It was one of those early, early things, I suppose, in a way, but that’s what I tried to get across. And we were just a hot team. I mean, Ricky would keep on coming up with these incredible synthetic ideas and melodies. And all I had to do, really, was to work out which way to angle them, and to decide what title I was going to call them, and how it was going to go.
I did have, obviously an influence in the backings, because I’ve always had an influence in the backings, but we were a team, and Ricky was so Ultra talented. It was, it was just like riding on a wave, really. And for Kim, it was a joy to be with, a lovely artist to work with. So that was just one of those things. It was a lovely time.
MARTIN SHAW: I remember the first time I heard it and saw it on Top of the Pops. And like you say, she came across as very shy, she wasn’t 100% but you saw her personality grow over the next couple of singles that came out, the confidence with the music. And that was really interesting to see. And like you say, in many ways, she was early girl power, wasn’t she? Before it was girl power.
MARTY WILDE: Yeah, she was, someone asked me about four or five years before Kim started, they asked me in the 70s, ‘So what do you see in the future? What kind of stars do you see?’ I said, ‘Well, I can see someone coming along that could adapt Rock ‘n’ Roll as what we’ve had in the past, adapt it to his own style, and become a star on it’. I said, ‘I can see that young guy, a good looking guy can do it.’
To see the other side from a girls point of view, I see a blonde girl, Bardo, a Bardo type girl being a big star. He said, ‘Do you think so?’ I said, ‘Someone will come along like that’. Yeah, sure enough. It was very prophetic, because there was Shaky, Shaky came along and so did Kim. You know it was, it was a weird prophecy.
MARTIN SHAW: You’re never far from Rock ‘n’ Roll, though, are you? It’s the backbone of everything that we do in the pop world, in a way, isn’t it? Let’s quickly get up to the present day. It says that you are an artist who’s had chart success over… how many decades is it? It’s really incredible. You’re in the heritage charts. You’re making music as a producer, you’re out on the road. How do you stay fit and healthy?
MARTY WILDE: It’s just the thing that carries me through all the time, whether I’ve got my arthritis playing up, or whether I’ve got a back ache or whatever, whatever goes down, it’s just probably the same for you, Martin as well. It’s just this great love of music. It’s like being on a tidal wave.
MARTIN SHAW: It literally is like taking medicine. Music is… it must be something to do with sound waves. There’ll be scientists in the future that’ll analyse all this and say, instead of giving you pills, we’re giving you music therapy and all that stuff.
MARTY WILDE: Well to back up what you’re saying Martin, a good old buddy of mine Joe Brown; I said to him one day, ‘I feel really rough today, Joe’. I said, ‘my back is absolutely killing me’. I said, ‘I can’t even bend over, and I was wearing a corset’. He said, ‘Don’t worry about that. Dr Footlights will take over’. I said, ‘What’s Dr Footlights?’. He said, ‘When you get out there mate, you won’t feel anything’. I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’. He said, ‘You know, you watch’. And sure enough, when it came to the end, I didn’t really think about what he said, but at the very end of my act, I found I was bending over saying, Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. And I thought, oh, Joe, you’re so right. Exactly what you’re saying Martin, scientifically work out what Dr Footlights is.
MARTIN SHAW: Perhaps we can get together and bottle it up and make a fortune. Let’s talk about now. Let’s talk about the new single. Congratulations on that. It’s so true to the past, but it’s so crisp and true to today. I love it when music has a heritage but stands out as current, all at the same time. You’re out on the road now, aren’t you?
MARTY WILDE: Yeah, I’ve got shows to do… it makes me laugh because they come through with contracts for next year. And suppose I’m not here. You know, I love their optimism, because I’m sure I’ll be getting them for the next… if I was alive for the next eight years, there’d be contracts every other year! You know, one year ahead, all the time, I can’t die, I’m not allowed to! (laughs).
MARTIN SHAW: No, you’re not! So what’s in, what’s in the lineup of songs? You’re covering the old stuff as well?
MARTY WILDE: I wanted to get the feel of the past. So I’ve been listening to lots of music from the 30s and the 40s, just during this period of time where we were making this album. I wanted part of it deliberately old fashioned. I didn’t want to go, you know, metronome type music. I’ve got a rockabilly band that’s fantastic – Darrel Higham, one of the best rockabilly guitarists in the whole country, well not one of the best. I think he’s probably THE best and also wonderful double bass and a drummer who plays absolutely brilliantly, plays like he plays like D. J. Fontana, who was Elvis’s drummer. He hits hard.
And when we all got together, that’s what was coming across, because we cut this first track, “Let’s Rock This Place”, it was one of our early tracks. And we all sat back and looked at ourselves, and we were going to do about three or four tracks, and then quit. And we all sat back and looked at ourselves, and we were going to do about three or four tracks, and then quit. And we all noticed that, and said we’re going to carry on with this. And of course, we sent three tracks to the record company, Cherry Red, and Cherry Red snapped it up straight away, just with three tracks. So we knew that we were on to something interesting. And so we then we worked. We beavered away. So it took me a year, but it was well worth the effort.
MARTIN SHAW: Have we got any remixes on there? Have you tried to mess around with the old stuff?
MARTY WILDE: Not yet. Not yet. No. I mean maybe, maybe there will be remixes. But by and large, I don’t want to. We’re just going to let it come out as it is. First of all, get people used to that sound? I mean, most of the remixes that I hear I don’t like. I mean, most of the remixes that I hear I don’t like. And the other day, I heard a remix of an artist, and it was a remix of “Hello Mary Lou…”, by Ricky Nelson. And I listened to the original, and then I listened to the new version. The original walks it. And I thought, I’m glad I didn’t. Maybe later on, we will maybe, yeah, maybe it depends on what happens with the album. If people are really interested, I would do it. If that’s what they would like, I would do it.
But I wanted it to be as genuine as I could. And I wanted to show the rock and rollers that you can still play rockabilly. You can have a rockabilly drummer, a rockabilly bass player and a rockabilly guitarist. You can go on to contemporary artists, like, Dave Edmunds did with “Girls Talk”; that was an Elvis Costello track that he took it in, made it rock and roll almost, you know? And I thought, yeah, that’s what I’ve tried to do on this album, yeah, I’ve tried to get that across.
MARTIN SHAW: Is there a moment in your life, whether it be in a studio or on a stage, where you can think, in this moment now, when you’re just sitting there quietly contemplating… where suddenly you can say something changed in my life, or I’ll remember this forever?
MARTY WILDE: I think “Kids In America” in the studio, when we first played it, the first time I heard it on ginormous, big speakers in Rak Records with Mickie Most, the genius Mickie Most was, and he put this on, here comes the synths and it took my head off. I couldn’t believe it. And he said, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘What do you think chart wise?’. So charts, ‘Well, I reckon it could make the top 50. I think it will. It could definitely make the top 50.’ He said, ‘I think it could make the top three around the world.’ And that was Mickie Most, you know. That was his job. He was a clever man.
