TOYAH TALKS
SHEEP FARMING 2020

From the DVD of the Sheep Farming In Barnet reissue 2020 

TOYAH: I was spotted on the streets of Birmingham because I had green and yellow hair in 1975, and I hadn't heard of the Sex Pistols, but by 1975 I was already making my own clothes and I was a hair model and I was highly, highly unusual.

And I was going to drama school in Birmingham and to try and make this short two directors, the Bicat brothers were looking for a young girl for a BBC2 play, who could play a girl who breaks into the Top Of The Pop studios to sing a song and she gets caught and arrested and they could not find this girl because everyone they were auditioning had been to drama school and they were just too polished.

And someone at BBC Pebble Mill said, you've really got to go and see this girl with green and yellow hair. She dresses at the local theaters. She goes to the local theater school and she does extra work on dramas at Pebble Mill. So they came to see me and basically I ended up doing their play. I wrote the songs with Bilbo Baggins, those two songs in it. Phil Daniels was playing my boyfriend and Noel Edmunds was playing himself.

When that showed on TV, three months later the world superstar Maximilian Schell, who's a big German actor, absolute superstar, was watching this with Kate Nelligan and they were casting for a National Theatre play. And they both said, "wow, that's Emma in "Tales From the Vienna Woods" ". And the next day I was at the National Theatre and never went home.

I always intended to sing. I always intended to do both. Why? Because I can do both. And I wasn't brought up with any form of snobbery that said you couldn't do anything. Now, when I got to London at that time, and I'm talking about 1976, an actor couldn't do voiceovers and do stage. An actor couldn't do TV and do stage. An actor couldn't do film and do stage. Stage was just sacred.

So I found myself in this really lucky place being directed by Maximilian Schell, starring alongside Warren Clarke, Kate Nelligan, Elizabeth Spriggs, Brenda Blethyn. I was just with Oscar winners of the future and they all took me under their wing and they introduced me to musicians because the beauty about the National Theatre is all culture is under that roof.

And I met a very charismatic boy from Golders Green called Glen Marks, and we had a band together. It was very brief, very quick, totally inspired by Velvet Underground and Lou Reed. And we were so heavily into cross dressing and gender fluidity and all of that.

And our first gig was Ford factory in Dagenham and it was just hysterical. It was in the cafe and we were really bad but Glen Marks introduced me to Joel Bogen because he realized that I needed to just take this further. And I was a lyricist and I had this phenomenal background, behind me with the National Theatre. So Glenn introduced me to his friend from Golders Green, and I think they went to school together.

And Joel instantly trusted that I was going to be a band member and could produce the lyrics and produce songs along with him. And we just started this incredibly elongated rehearsal process, just getting gigs wherever we could. The beginning of making “Sheep Farming In Barnet” it was really quite eclectic. I had already been working at the National Theatre. I came to London when I was 18 years old and I met Joel Bogen when I was 18. And we very quickly realized that we are quite a creative bond together, but the journey from let's say 1977 through to when this album came out in 1978 was very, very disjointed.

So Joel and I agreed that we needed to play as much as possible. And we played parties in Golders Green. We even played a synagogue. We played his school, his high school in Golden Green. And I was very much the odd girl out. It was really quite strange because I was a full on punk rocker who'd made the film "Jubilee" by this point. And Joel I think was a very overqualified musician for the kind of music that we were doing.

So at these parties we were covering Lou Reed, we were doing "Louie Louie", we were doing "Free Bird", we were doing Buddy Holly. We were literally doing anything we could play to keep us playing at these really riotous parties that went through the night. So there were many lineups before we actually hit on making the album. So the first line (below) up was Jonathan Miller on bass and Dave Robbins on drums, Pete Bush on keyboards, Joel on guitar and myself.

We were all great friends and we'd meet up every Sunday at Pete Bush’s house in … I think it was Whealdstone and we would just improvise all day. So songs like "Gaoler", "Problem Child", they all were the beginning of Toyah. The band when we were playing at parties was very much Joel's creation and I think we were called Ninth Illusion.

And then because I was taking off as an actress and as a singer, ironically, because I went from the National Theatre into the movie “Jubilee”, which just launched me into the punk scene, along with Adam Ant, it associated me with Siouxsie Sioux, even though she walked away from the movie and it associated me with The Clash, Gene October, Jayne County, it was just the most phenomenal ascension into punk rock royalty. And at that point, Joel and the boys felt that the band should just be called Toyah.

And I was getting a lot of attension for being a very charismatic actress and a very charismatic vocalist because I went on to the ICA to do a play with Stephen Poliakoff, Mel Smith, Antony Sher, Phil Daniels and I was singing in that. And then I got “Quadrophenia”.

So the band itself was just trying to hold itself together and almost being polarized by everything else that was going on around me, because there were big distractions because after “Jubilee” I ended up in a movie with Katherine Hepburn being directed by George Cukor, the biggest director in Hollywood in the golden age of film. And I can remember I missed the gig because I was stuck in Wales filming. So the band were very, very patient with me.

But going back to my relationship with Joel and Pete Bush, that was the creative relationship. The writing process was really focused on Joel Bogen and myself and Pete Bush because we had endless endless days in rehearsal studios and Sundays we would go to Pete’s house and just jam and piece things together.

So I'd have a microphone. Pete would be in one corner on his keyboards, Joel, with his guitar amp. And we would just go through riffs, rhythms. I would sing on the spot, improvise on the spot and we'd start piecing things together that way. Joel, very fiery person, very overqualified to be in a punk band.

But I think what was quite unique about all three of us was we were heavily influenced by seventies music. And by that I mean, I'm from Birmingham. So by the time I was 11, I'd seen Hawkwind, Black Sabbath, Led Zepplin, Uriah Heep. I mean, I'd seen them all. And I broke into these venues to see these bands. I love Moody Blues.

And when we started touring, which was pretty quick, the circuit to work on in '77, '78, '79 was just a river of gold because you could go into any pub and draw 2000 people and make headlines in the music papers. And that's what we were doing. And we weren't signed for a good year, but we were drawing 2000 people into ridiculously small venues and people were talking about us and didn't quite know how to make us out. They didn't know if we were punk, they didn't know we were new wave. They thought that we were pretentious in the way that we wrote our songs, but we were all learning on our feet.

And I think the innocence of that is what brought the success to us because I don't think I was singer back then, but it was a great show woman. And I had phenomenal charisma and power, but I wasn't a good singer and Joel had great musical knowledge, but he was still to some extent learning to play.

So we were all like kind of holding onto the back of the bus and getting a free ride to some extent. Pete Bush, very accomplished keeper keyboard player. But of course this was the advent of the synthesizer. So nothing was standing still. We were having to learn, learn, learn and we're having to fight this tide of everyone running to sign unsigned bands. Yet we were at the back of the queue.

We then I found a manager called Howard Abrahams, who was a lovely, lovely man. I remember he worked in Cornhill in the City, so he was obviously an accountant, but he started to get us agents and we ended up touring up and down the UK and everything just took off from there probably on the back of “Jubilee”, because that gave me a hell of lot of coverage. And I went round the whole of the country promoting that movie when it opened and getting gigs for the band. 

So I think Joel, Pete Bush and I just managed and fought hard enough to win our audience in every kind of backstreet town there was. I mean we didn't play main cities for a good year. We were going up to little places outside Nottingham, little places outside Glasgow. We were just in the bus the whole time getting any gig that we could. But back then the word of mouth was through fanzines and fanzines sold really well.

And we won such a following and we were very, very dedicated to our following and they ended up travelling with us. I can remember we had to get bigger and bigger buses so the fans could get on the bus with us. And the fans were really intelligent people. I remember they were becoming computer programmers.

So computers came out of my experience with fans and my boyfriend at the time who knew these phenomenally advanced computer programmers who told us all about the fact that one day computers will be able to record everyone's lives. We'll be able to hold messages forever. And there might be something like 24 hour TV on a computer.

So I learned all this from my fans who were hugely educated, who travelled with us or followed us in cars. We were like this incredibly romantic caravan called the Barmy Toyah Army and great, great friends, great friends. And what we used to do is we'd get to a venue, say, Oxbridge University and we knew because these people were following us all the time, they had no money.

We would do the soundcheck, the venue would then close and go dark. And we would eat in the dressing room – well, we would go and open all the exits so all the fans could get in. And I can remember people with clickers back then who'd click everyone in the room so they knew how much they owed the band and they couldn't work out how they’d sold 200 tickets yet there were 1200 people in the venue. We just opened all the doors.

I've had very few bleak moments in my life. And the bleakest was when “Jubilee” ended for a couple of months. This was 1977, where all we were doing was just meeting for rehearsals and there seemed to be nothing going on. And it was just tough because everyone was getting signed. Everyone. The Slits, X-ray Specs, Penetration and Gloria Mundi, I mean brilliant bands, but we felt that we were just being ignored and it was hard. It was really hard.

But then suddenly something just kicked in and I think it was possibly “Quadrophenia” happening. It was possibly that I out of 2000 girls ended up starring in a movie opposite Katharine Hepburn, something just turned the corner. But there were bleak times where we just … we never thought what was the point because we all liked each other. And we liked what we were doing.

There was an incredible power in it and the audiences were there, but we weren't being noticed by the record companies and people like Rough Trade just didn't like us. So we did have our haters. And I think for a couple of months, the haters were winning, but then you can't ignore the amount of people that were coming to see us.

And the turning point might've been that we actually got gigs at the Nashville Room (in Kensington, London, above). Everyone went to the Nashville, Bowie we saw The Human League at the Nashville. Just everyone played the Nashville. And I think that was a turning point. And we ended up on the bill at the Lyceum without Adam Ant and Psychedelic Furs. And at that point I think I was winning over a very critical audience and we just started to be accepted.

I just remember, even when I was hugely successful, when "Sheep Farming" came out, "Blue Meaning" came out, "Toyah! Toyah! Toyah!" and I had an hour long documentary at 9:00 PM on ITV. This is long before the hit singles. People took great joy in saying they hated Toyah but we were filling 5,000 people venues. So at that point, you think, well, go fuck yourselves! We’re doing something we're doing something right!

So the distractors or detractors, you just think, no, you've lost your power. You've lost your power, mate. And I still think that now, time is the great proof. And we're still filling quite amazing venues. So it was tough. But I think once I realized to not center to my reality and see myself through other people's kind of critical bitching, that I should just carry on being me and we should carry on writing in the style that we wrote in, which was natural to us. It wasn't contrived.

And I remember what really didn't help with John Peel just loathed us. John Peel said that we were a contrived manufactured band. What we weren't, we were struggling musicians. And I think when John Peel said that it really was an uphill struggle, especially getting America to take notice.

And what turned the corner for "Sheep Farming In Barnet" was actually it was licensed in Germany as an EP before the UK and Germany contacted, I think a distributor and said, "we are exporting this to the UK. Why is this woman not signed in the UK?" And that was a turning point - the demand. So there were definitely tough times.

When we go our record deal, by this time I was already filming “Quadrophenia” and “Quadrophenia” was the movie to be in. I was on the poster immediately with Sting, with Phil Daniels, with Leslie Ash. And my role in “Quadrophenia” isn't huge, but the kudos was much, much bigger. And I had to be reminded of this because I'd forgotten, but we had done a gig at the ICA (above) and the review was so blinding.

The review said that if this band isn't signed, the music business has failed. If Toyah Willcox doesn't become a worldwide superstar the music business has failed. If this music doesn't take over everybody's life, the music business has failed. I mean, it was a most blinding review and unbeknownst to us, an independent label called Safari, run by Anthony Edwards and John Craig, read this review and called our then manager Howard Abrahams for a showcase.

Well, I was in Brighton shooting “Quadrophenia” so I came up one lunchtime and we had a kind of music room near Waterloo that we met everyone in. We performed three songs and they signed us on the spot. That's really where the real Toyah band started because it presented certain problems. And the main problems were none of us had really been in a recording studio proper.

We'd done one session to do demos somewhere in Cambridge. We did three songs and I think “Problem Child”, “Computer” and “Last Goodbye”. And I found those phenomenally difficult to do. I cannot sing with headphones on, I sing in an open space and I was too young and too naive to realize that that was what was causing my tuning problem. So we were all dealing with these things, how do you go from a life space that is so electric, so ionised and alive into the sterilized space of a studio.

So once we were signed, we were put into Chappel Warner Studios to start recording potentially what was going to be an EP produced by Steve James, just the most fantastic producer. By this time I started an association with a band called Blood Donor and Keith Hale, who wrote “It's A Mystery”, even though I wrote the second verse.

So when we started recording “Sheep Farming In Barnet” which started as an EP and moved into an album, we found ourselves using some of the Blood Donor musicians but eventually we had some auditions and we arrived at Steve Bray and Mark Henry, but on the actual album it was a really eclectic journey for Joe Bogen, Pete Bush and myself, but we held it together and we were really so impassioned and so grateful for being signed that nothing was going to break us and we just had to learn on our feet.

When we were working with Keith Hale and Steve James, initially we were only working with Steve James, if my memory serves me well. And Steve felt that you had to bring Keith Hale in. Keith Hale had a band called Blood Donor and really that band, even though it didn't hit big heights influenced the whole of the synthesizer movement that came from that into the 80's. I mean, everything Keith Hale did got copied. Just a phenomenal musician, phenomenal sound person. He could create these sound landscapes and these sound stories.

So he was brought in and it wasn't comfortable. It really wasn't comfortable. And he was deeply deeply sensitive about this because Pete Bush was our keyboard player and and co-writer and here was Keith Hale kind of having almost authority over Pete Bush. It was very, very difficult.

We had to do a lot to rebuild Pete Bush's confidence. Why has this other person had been brought in but in hindsight Keith Hale's presence took away from, and I mean this positively, he took away from Joel, mine and Pete’s influences that weren't doing our individuality any favour and what I mean by that was we were heavily influenced by what could be called as prog rock bands. And Keith Hale came in and just kind of rubbed all that out. And he just added these sequences and arrangements that kind of put intense originality into this album.

They all tried to contain and keep what Bush, Bogen, Willcox created. To some extent we went beyond that if we needed to do extra tracks, we needed to do improvisations. We’d then create those in the recording studios at Chappel Warner with Keith kind of guiding us through.

But Keith was on tender hooks because we were all ferociously guarded our own individual creativity. I very much remained the lyricist because I just wasn't interested in anyone else's lyrics. And my lyrics are very visual. Joel was very guarded about his creativity because his creativity is based in jazz and a lot of that is in the notation and the chords and the keys he was choosing. He had his particular favorite keys and they're very repetitive in these early albums.

And Keith, Joel, Pete and I, we went on to tour together, we worked together on other albums. He never really left our lives. He was a really, really good man and he was a kind man, but it was hard creatively. It's as if the studios became a pressure cooker. But once all of that was ironed out, we just got on with it. And we had a lot to learn about the technique of making something sound vital and in the moment within a recording studio, but we definitely had teething problems.

I would definitely say it at an end of a recording day there was no job satisfaction because I was going out to the studio thinking, how am I going to learn to sing in this environment? I found it phenomenally hard because as I always, I mean, even today, I sing with one ear available to the room and I get my harmonics from the room.

And I was forced into this environment where everything was pressing into my head. The guitar was too loud. The drums was too loud and I didn't know how to communicate. So at the end of each recording day on “Sheep Farming In Barnet” I was coming out thinking this journey is going to be very, very long. I've got so much to learn.

And I think we all felt like that but we'd go back in the studio the next day and we'd listened through and I'd go "no, I've got to do that vocal again. It's sharp, it's sharp. It's flat. I've got to do it again!" But we had the time to do that. I had the time to go away and for my ears to recover, because everything back then was about volume. There was no subtlety. We played with the same volume in the studio than we did at Lyceum. I mean, it was like hell. So we were learning, we were sensitive to each other but I did not walk away from that album going, wow, yeah, we've cracked it.

Do you know, the first time I realized that this album was utterly unique and utterly special was in 1994 when I visited again, listened to it and I thought fuck me! We were completely ahead of the game! Everything we did was ahead of the eighties and nineties. I just think it's one of the most relevant the albums of all time. I really do.

Safari were very creative with their promotion. So they were doing flexi discs in magazines. Free tracks is a pretty glorious thing to be able to do back then. They would have me do special meets and greets with the fans. They wanted material, material, material and they put us into a rehearsal room in Vauxhall virtually every day of the week, which put great pressure on us to write as much as we could, but they made it all possible. They really did invest in us and they were very much like family.

Tony Edwards was just a glorious person to us. He didn't understand us, but he gave us everything he could. John Craig, I think was slightly bemused because he was very passionate about West End songs, West End musicals. So there was huge polarization going on there, but Safari were very, very good to us. And they got in the pluggers, they got in the PR teams, they got in the distributors, they did everything right and it just started working very well very quickly.

It's really interesting that “Victims Of The Riddle” (above) became the very first single off it, when you look at classics like “Neon Womb”, “Waiting”, “Computer”, “Last Goodbye”, “Indecision”. I mean they're just absolutely fabulous potential singles. I think I was fighting for pure originality. That was really, really important to me that how we presented Toyah the band was it wasn't going to sound like any other band or any other band fronted by a female.

“Victims Of The Riddle” and this is how it is in my memory. I think Joel might remember it differently so I'm going to tell you both stories. I can't remember if we were in Warner Chappel or we were in the Marquee Studios, but it was about one in the morning. Keith Hale created a sequence, di di di di di di di di di and I said I want to do an improvisation over that and I had a poem which was “Victims Of The Riddle” and it was about vivisection.

And I went in and I just did this incredibly off the wall, using every inch of my vocal chords, this improvisation. We went away, Keith edited it into something that he could form a song around and then Joel put the guitar on. Now, I think Joel's memory is that Keith and he created it and then I improvised it. I'm really can't tell you which is the truth or what the actuality was, but it came from an improvised vocal. It was completely off the wall and I was really, really proud of it.

And then you get to try and perform it live and you think, what the hell have you done to yourself, girl?! I mean, this is a voice wrecker! So it was very, very hard to perform live and we still get requests for it now and I have to work out how are we going to do it? Because it's like (makes high noises) It really is ...just goes beyond the pale of vocality.

So I chose the image because of punk rock. The story is about the mummies of Guanajuato and this is a town in Mexico where the gangs would put a kind of borderline around the towns. And if you came into the town, you and your family would be murdered. You be mummified and you'd be hung up on posts.

So that's where the imagery came from. It was real life, cultural gang war in Mexico. Long, long time ago, all these bodies are now in a museum. And I had a book about this. I was very into books about different world culture from Kabuki, right through to the Masai, to the tribes of Papua New Guinea. The visuals were just the best and the most beautiful and the most inspiring.

So I knew about these mummies and I'm wildly against vivisection. I'm wildly against any form of animal testing. I loathed the makeup business for having a six billion money pot for testing on animals when really humans were willing to be the guinea pigs. So all of that was about my feeling about how animals were treated.

So on the back of the artwork for “Sheep Farming In Barnet” there is a picture of someone killing a rat by breaking its neck and there's just the word “why?” and I just felt why and who funds this kind of behaviour, funds this industry when there are so many human beings out there who are willing to be guinea pigs for the future of science. So again, Safari and the band actually agreed to this because I just think it’s a brutal world and sometimes you have to have the most brutal images to make the most vital points.

And also you've got to remember the whole humanity thing back then. Joe Bogen, a Jewish boy from Golders Green. Well, we'd be playing up and down the country with the National Front recruiting in the audience. At some concerts we were just downing our instruments and going in there with fists flying. So we were trying to kind of conserve respect for everyone.

We'd been through the mill critically. We'd been misrepresented to a certain extent in music papers. And yet we were really passionate about what we believed in. So I think we just hit the ground running with that one. I think Safari backed to us all the way that it was going to be the most original band ever and completely off the wall and that seemed to be very suitable for the punk ethos at that time.

Do you know I don't think I expected “Sheep Farming In Barnet” to chart. It would have just been too good to be true. And I think part of that is I knew “Victims Of The Riddle” was so obscure that it wasn't everybody's cup of tea, but when the first indie chart started “Victims Of The Riddle” was number one in the first indie chart for 12 months, it never left the number one spot. That for me made me incredibly proud, incredibly proud.

And I think it said to the band, we're on the right track, this is okay but I never expected to enter the mainstream charts. I was just not physically beautiful enough and I didn't play the game with men that a lot of women in the industry had to play back then. I was very much, third gender and what I mean by that no gender. And you know, that didn't play well in music back then. And I probably held the band back with that. So I think “Blue Meaning” was the first album went to number two in the album charts. And I think it like what the fuck?! It’s gone in the charts! Are you kidding me!? So I don't think I was surprised at all

Our album designer, Bill Smith, at the time, wonderful, wonderful album designer, would come to us and say, "well, what do you want? What do you want to do?" And I'd seen a picture of the early warning system, which is up in Yorkshire and it's three balls and if you take the picture at the right angle, there's this beautiful perspective.

And I said, "well, I want a picture of that, but my head is the fourth ball." And in those days you couldn't Photoshop anything or you didn't kind of cut a picture out and stick it on. So we drove up to Yorkshire, Bill Smith, myself, my then boyfriend, Jem Howard and we broke in because it was an RAF site and it was the nuclear early warning systems. So the public weren't allowed on.

And I sat in the car, I did my makeup in the car, which actually was blue. I had a blue face but Bill also managed to bring a blue light and as we took the picture, we could see all these trucks, the security trucks coming towards us, and Bill said "keep going, keep going. We've got the picture, we've got the picture". And I said "right, give me the film". The film went down my pants, we got arrested and escorted off the site, but we got the picture.

Joel lived in Golders Green, I lived in Wealdstone, which was just before Barnet. So every day I drove out of Golders Green, towards Barnet past a sheep farm on the A406. I mean bang in the middle of London, in one of the busiest places of London, there was a field full of sheep. So that's where the title came from.

My image choices and my choices of artwork were very much to provoke because there was no way I was going to do sexy artwork. There was no way I was going to be reclining looking demure on a sofa. It just wasn't going to happen. So I wanted to put things on the album covers that I was interested in that also reflected in my lyrics. I've always put kind of strange little clues and symbolisms in the lyrics. I've always put hidden meaning in and I wanted the artwork to kind of reflect that as well. I've always been really interested in the fact that I just do not believe this life is the only thing. So I've always kind of studied anyone or anything to do with the paranormal.

And when I moved to London, I was able to go to Foyle's bookshop and spend every penny I ever earned on the third floor, which was the paranormal floor. I mean, I have paranormal libraries. And I discovered Nostradamus and it was just like oh my God! Oh my God! Because you always get within the evolution of the human race people that see into the future. Leonardo DaVinci saw into the future. Nostradamus saw into the future. In fact, many, many more have and they've all documented it in books. And it's believed that the Vatican were collecting all these books and hiding them because the whole point of religion is you control people through the fear of death. Which I don't believe in.

So anyway, reading Nostradamus and I come across something that related to the book of revelations in the Bible and it's the Twin Towers falling. And I thought that just has to go on the back cover because it's just like a wake up call. So we put it on the cover. No one was interested. I mean, this is what was really interesting. Absolutely no one was interested until the Twin Towers fell and the boy, the amount of letters I started getting. Why did you put that on the back cover in 1978? And I said "read Nostradamus."

I never meant to court controversy, unless there was any way of changing something that I thought caused so much pain to people - like vivisection. I never wanted to court controversy for the sake of controversy. I wasn't that kind of person. I like a peaceful life. I went to an all girls school. I didn't like one second of it. I was governed by fear the whole of my life. I was always told I was not good enough that nothing would come true for me. And I just don't believe that. If you have a positive mindset, you can make the world yours. So I just wanted to kind of preach that.

I was asked to play Toolah in “Shoestring” (below) with Trevor Eve and it was just the luckiest break in the world and I think that came about because of “Quadrophenia” the movie, but also I think Safari was so in tune with promotion that they offered the music. So they used “vivisection” (NB She means “Victims Of The Riddle”) as the kind of background music in the drama of "Shoestring". And then we performed “Danced”, I think “Neon Womb” and there was another song that we performed.

It was an absolute blessing. This shot us fame wise into everyone's homes. It made Toyah a household name cause “Shoestring” was one of the biggest dramas on BBC at that time. So for the music to be used, I think it's a very obvious choice and it's a wise choice. If you're going to take a relatively well-known singer and have a play a part in your play, but to actually use the singer's music. It was the best thing that could happen. And we won so many fans from that. And a lot of fans who have been following us up that point it kind of gave the tip of the hat towards them, that the artist they believed in was now being recognized enmasse as well

I see the end of the seventies as a very, very special time. And even though absolutely everything that happened to me was absolute gift from heaven I assumed it was because everyone was experiencing this very special time. So we got the Old Grey Whistle Test, which we recorded I believe in Edinburgh. We were on with Jerry Lee Lewis, which was incredibly exciting. I knew who Jerry Lee Lewis was. And I remember that my management were absolutely adamant I would not be alone in the dressing room with him. Well, he was fine. He was fabulous! He wanted to meet me. I sat down in his dressing room, we talked for an hour. He was just brilliant.

And I don't think I was just assuming this happened to every artist. I just felt that I was on the crest of a cultural wave because the end of the seventies was changing like no other time in my life. Punk had changed the goalposts. You had your big superstars, like the Jackson Five were still going, Elton John was still going. You had Rod Stewart, you had the big bands, you had The Rolling Stones but something was allowing the smaller people in. And it was a very, very exciting time to be young.

I feel very passionately that the Safari catalogue has not been exploited in the last 30 years in the right way. I feel very passionately about that because I've had to fight against the tide as an artist to keep it alive and keep it going because I believe in it. Obviously I believe in it but I believe in it because it's so utterly groundbreaking. “Sheep Farming In Barnet” is groundbreaking.

The sounds, the arrangements, the songs, the originality, they really deserve a larger audience. And sadly within the world of music, if product isn't out there and if people aren't being told that this is groundbreaking, they don't always discover it for themselves. So I just look back on “Sheep Farming In Barnet” and I think you are a remarkable album. When I’m long gone you are going to remain a remarkable album

Listen to the interview ↓


See also the Sheep Farming In Barnet 2020 Special Feature