+ Hi Iain! Thanks so much for being up for this interview! How are you? Still making music?
Hi Roque, I’m fine and yes I’m still writing songs and occasionally getting out to play. My music is quite different from before though.
++ Let’s go back in time. What are your first music memories? Do you remember what was your first instrument? How did you learn to play it? What sort of music did you listen at home while growing up?
My parents had an HMV record player, very large and solid, and my mother used to take it out for me after school. We had some cardboard story records, which we played over and over again. We had an album by The Seekers and my mum used to play The Carnival is Over, one of the top ten biggest songs of the 1960s and based on an old Russian Folk tune. It used to give me such a sad feeling that I would beg her to turn it off! Now I love it. I think my dad used to fancy Judith Durham, and many years later so did I! I love her voice. We were a household in which emotions were never expressed let alone discussed, but there was all this emotion coming out of the golden speaker on the side of the gramophone.
We had a piano at home and I had lessons which I hated. I wanted to play pop songs but my teacher only had school tunes. I gave up at around eight years old, and made sure my own son didn’t have lessons until he really wanted to. The piano is still going, and sounds amazing, it’s 120 years old now. My son loves it.
I can’t remember when I started writing songs, certainly when I was seven or eight years old. I was a very nervous child, and would learn songs to sing in the bath to let everyone know I was okay. I know that doesn’t make sense now, but it did then.
When I was ten we moved to Torquay in Devon, and I got a mono cassette machine with an earphone. That started a decade of frantic home taping, starting with Top of the Pops in 1972. Harry Nilsson was No.1 with Without You and that was another masterpiece that confirmed my emotions were real. I was always a singles chart person, though I bought albums on cassette, Bowie and Elton John. My parents had a hotel with a jukebox in the bar. A jukebox with ever changing records in my own house! 10p for three plays. Johnny Cash, One Piece at a Time, Polk Salad Annie. I was so fortunate. We had all new releases, and it was great for listening to B sides. When I was fifteen I moved on to Leonard Cohen and Janis Ian. I read a lot of poetry and even Dory Previn’s memoir Midnight Baby. I wrote tremendous amounts of inky poetry of my own. I still have it all in a bag, but I daren’t read it. Music and poetry allowed me to develop my own inner world when the outer world just seemed so painful for me.
++ Had you been in other bands before Preacher Harry Powell? What about the rest of the members? If so, how did all of these bands sound like? Are there any recordings?
When I was thirteen my friend from school, Steve Rawson, and I loved mystery stories. We made up short plays and recorded them using two tape machines. We’d pass the tapes around at school. Steve was very musical and we began adding our own music. That led to us writing songs together when we were fifteen and sixteen. We recorded at a friend’s house and then hired an eight track studio in Torquay. We were so pleased with the results we went to London and Rough Trade Records. To my surprise Mayo Thompson listened to them in front of us and was very complimentary and encouraging. He was such a gentleman. He must have seen how young and naive we were, and not cut out to be in the music business at 16 years of age!
Steve and I put together a band called The Shift. Steve was really talented and we eventually we were really tight, playing a funky sound, with my rather droning vocals. We supported Joe Jackson at a gig in Cornwall, but the best gigs we put on ourselves at nightclubs in Torquay. We were so lucky to be in Torquay at that time. I saw Suicide, The Clash, Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Slits, Aswad, all in my home town, it was fantastic!
++ Where were you from originally, Torquay?
My family moved around a lot before Torquay. I was born in Coventry, like Frank Ifield, whom I’ve just written a song about! We lived five years in Buckinghamshire, and I feel a closeness to John Otway, especially in his pastoral songs like Josephine, which brings up deep memories of May Day dancing. He’s even written a song ‘For Ian’.
++ How was Torquay at the time of Preacher Harry Powell? Were there any bands that you liked? What were the good record stores? Or what about the pubs or venues to go check out up and coming bands?
With so many great bands playing in Torquay, loads of us were inspired to start our own. The most amazing was called Dayon Beat, later Wounded Knee. They comprised the three Twose brothers as well as other really talented musicians. We would all collaborate on arranging various gigs. There was an older generation of musicians too. It was just so vibrant, though at the time it just felt normal. The Town Hall had the bigger gigs, via promoter Lionel Digby, but clubs like the 400 had the reggae bands and more dancy acts. The record shops were pretty good but I’d mostly buy second hand from Ronnies in the market. He had lots of ex jukebox records from the hotels, and some albums too. I remember buying Trout Mask Replica for £1.25! I still have it of course, but I never properly looked after my records, so they are not worth anything now!
++ When and how did the band start? How did you all meet? How was the recruiting process?
In my final year at University I got very depressed and didn’t know what to do with myself. I let some of my friendships slide, especially with Steve Rawson. Then after university finally ended I moved in with the Twose brothers and they encouraged me to learn the guitar. I moved to Bristol for a year and lived on the dole. There were no jobs then and I didn’t want one. I wrote my first solo songs and listened to some different music. I was obsessed with Astral Weeks, and on the live scene I saw The Smiths supporting The Fall. Best of all I saw Marc Almond singing some Brel songs at the Batcave, and that moved me closer to the chanson style. Eventually I moved back to Torquay and Steve Milton, the drummer from the Shift and I put together a new band with Richard Hele on bass. We did some recordings in Torquay and they still sound good. Then I decided to move to London and recreate the band there, though to be honest my memories of that time are pretty vague. I was living on a houseboat in Battersea. It was a great life, but boat living isn’t for everyone.
++ And what’s the story behind the name of the band? Is it because of the novel The Night of the Hunter?+++
I’m a big movie fan. In Torbay there were five cinemas and I always had money from working in my parents’ businesses, so I went all the time. I was interested in horror but actually I’m pretty squeamish, so more drawn to psychological horror. In the Night of the Hunter the anti-hero is the self-styled evangelist Harry Powell, brilliantly portrayed by Robert Mitchum. These days you’d say he was a gaslighter, but what appealed to me was the shadow-self in Powell. We all have a dark side and are torn between love and hate. My songs wanted to put the two sides together. Healing is whole. Of course these days the film is much better known, and if you start googling it you’ll see Harry Potter coming up everywhere, which is not what you want!
Speaking of novels, is that one your favourite? Or what would you say are some of your favourite books?
I am not a great reader of novels. I really don’t know why that should be. I read Decline and Fall recently (by Evelyn Waugh). It made me laugh a lot and there is a lot of wisdom there for such a young man. Unfortunately a bit of crass ignorance too! I used to read a lot of philosophy, Nietzsche and J.Krishnamurti, whom I met once in my mystical period. These days I read more psychology books and memoirs. I re-read Dory Previn’s memoirs last year and they blew me away..again. I love her survival story, and her songwriting is such a big influence on my current style.
++ How was the creative process for you? Where did you usually practice?
My current process is that I make up the lyrics in my head. This can take forever. Only when I actually have the whole thing made up do I look for the chords on the guitar. If I have a performance coming up I say to myself, better find those chords! I’m not a great musician and never will be, but I can put over a song and structure is very important to me. I will walk around with the words in my head, turning them over and over, refining everything to get the most impact. My recent song, The Psychiatrist Who Taught Me To Yodel, is very long and I would wake up at night going and then go through it six or seven times before going back to sleep. Then I was shocked to find it’s only three chords, which took only a minute to find.
++ At the time you were around, the mid and late 80s, there was an explosion of bands, many now categorized as c86 bands. What do you think of this period? Why do you think this happened? And what would you say are your favourite bands of this period?
In the mid eighties British cities were underpopulated and depressed. There was lots of cheap accommodation, even in London, and lots of small venues. As well as this there was a good record buying public and sophisticated marketing, print media and distribution by lots of small labels, like Golden Pathway! There had also been high unemployment amongst the boomers and government schemes like the Enterprise Allowance that kept us all in food and basics whilst we got artistic. The result was a thriving creative scene in cinema, music, art, everything really. Financialisation killed it all, but hey ho.
The thing is, I was twenty-five then, and was moving on to a more acoustic based scene, such as the Troubadour Coffee house in Earls Court. I listened to all the bands on John Peel, but I don’t think I’ve seen any of them, even Primal Scream! I was a voracious reader of the NME so I must have had the cassette, but by then I was listening to a lot of Blood on the Tracks Dylan, Leonard Cohen’s 80s stuff was magnificent, and of course my favourite album of the period was The Wishing Chair by 10000 Maniacs.
++ I read that you had some big names as fans like Momus or Natalie Merchant. Did they use to attend your gigs? Was a friendship born?
I became a good friend of Nick’s, and I was so flattered by his Niche memoir where he called me an ‘unsung genius’. I was such a big fan of his records. I loved the first two albums so much that I don’t think I fully appreciated how good the next ones were. We went to see Leonard Cohen together at the Royal Albert Hall and I thought ‘Now this is Heaven’. He really tried hard to get me noticed, writing an interview in the NME, and setting up a demo with Island Records. But there is a part of me which is a hopeless case, working against myself. He also had me singing on Hippopotamomus, which was great. He sent me a lovely picture not so long ago of the two of us together on a bench in what looks like Regent’s Park, we look so happy! I’d love to see more of him but he went to Japan, then Berlin and I became a family man in Ireland.
Natalie Merchant was never a fan, though I worshipped her from afar. I wrote to her from the houseboat and she wrote me two letters back, which of course I still have. She said she liked my songs, which I think were the ones that Graham recorded on the boat on his Tascam four track. Again, such happy times! Anyway, Natalie came to London and supported Tracy Chapman at the Donmar Warehouse, I think, and Julia who was in the Troubadour band Miro was there on cello, so somehow I was there as well. Julia introduced me to Natalie and I was totally overwhelmed, and Julia said something like ‘he thinks you’re wonderful but he can’t speak’, and as I remember it Natalie pinched my cheek and went ‘aw’. It was something like that anyway, but a bit of a blur. Then like a klutz I told her I would have preferred a bit more dancing in her songs, without realising she’d had some health issues. What a fool I am!
Last year I saw her in Bath with two female friends. We were all in tears by the end, including Natalie. Then, by a strange coincidence she mentioned Katell, whom I immediately realised must be Katell Keinig, also from the Troubadour, (where I was compere for a long time). Katell lent me her twelve string guitar for that Island demo! Anyway, great that she and Natalie are friends. I kind of hope that I’ll play Buffalo one night on an open mic night and Natalie will be there to hear my new songs, I think she’d really love them. I have one called ‘Sexigenarians’ which I think would make her laugh, and cry in places.
++ And who would you say were influences in the sound of the band?
The band on the single were the only influence. We just played as we felt it. I never tried to get any particular sound, just what came out of our instruments. I didn’t want an electric guitar sound though.
++ As far as I know you only released a 7″ single. It came out on The Golden Pathway label. How did you end up on this label? And how was your relationship with them?
Graham is from the South West of England so we all just got to know each other. I’d sent around tapes from the Torquay band and Golden Pathway wanted to put his out as EP. Again, like an eejit I refused, but they offered to help distribute the single, which is an EP on the B-side. Again, my memory is poor!
++ I always wondered about the art for the record. First of all it had this big jacket, bigger than any 7″, and then there are vintage photos and cryptic texts. What was that all about?
I’ve always loved good sleeves. We used a black and white folded format that Crass had used for their singles. I was a collector of antique postcards and strange photos, and I loved poems and strange writings. It was how I felt at the time, but it’s open to interpretation as it ultimately it’s art and about a feeling of lost world’s and melancholy.
++ The 7″ EP had the title of “Devil in the Priest-Hole”, why that name?
That was the name of the short story on the sleeve. It’s a bit freaky, but I’m not here to censor myself, I wrote it just as it came out.
++ Where were the songs recorded? And how was that experience?
It was in Dorset, on a kind of weekend away in my little 2cv van. We played the songs acoustically the night before and I think the tape of that is better than the final recording.
++ Did the band appear on any compilations?
No. I nearly appeared on a Troubadour compilation but the song, An Acid Bath for Tim, was considered too long and too dark. That was the problem I had with the Island demo. ‘I never want my kids to hear this!’ Sometimes I’m darker than I mean to be, as I don’t always know what my words mean!
++ What about unreleased tracks? Are there any?
Zillions, but Graham put loads on 3 CDs during lockdown. I’m not sure how well they stand up now. I’d love to redo some of them.
++ I think my favorite Preacher Harry Powell track is “Beauty Grows”, was wondering if you could tell me the story behind this song?
I think it came out of my Krishnamurti period, which was all about sudden transformation based on awareness. It’s also about understanding your own darker side, which I’ve already talked about.
++ If you were to choose your favorite Preacher Harry Powell song, which one would that be and why?
I still play ‘Runaway to Sea’, which goes back to ‘the musty smell of the records in your mother’s old boxes, they played to a child after school as she watches’ that was really about me.
++ What about gigs? Did you play many? All over the UK?
I have a few favourite open mic places where they let me play. I play at Catweazle in Oxford, which has its roots in the Troubadour. It’s about being yourself, being vulnerable, and connecting with everyone else in the room. A special place thanks to Matt Sage and his gang.
++ And what were the best gigs you remember? Any anecdotes you can share?
I played at Catweazle two weeks ago and it was fantastic. I did a new song I’d just written and everyone was laughing, people were joining in on the choruses. It doesn’t get any better than that.
++ And were there any bad ones?
Many bad ones. I played an open mic recently where no one was interested in the music at all, but there was a grey parrot in a cage on the bar. Children were running round in front of me talking to the parrot!
++ When and why did Preacher Harry Powell stop making music? Were you involved in any other bands afterwards?
I can’t really remember, but maybe 1987? I went solo, though I did put out another single called 2CV of Love. It had a great b-side which was very dark but hilarious called ‘How Strange is this Thing the Unconscious Mind’ which I still play now. I don’t think I sold any copies at all!
++ What about the rest of the band, had they been in other bands afterwards?
I think so. We all love music too much to stop, but family gets in the way.
++ And then you moved to Ireland, right? Whereabouts? Are you still there? Do you miss anything from Torquay or London?
Ireland is a whole other thing. I’m not able to talk about it even. Maybe one day. I live in England now. I loved growing up in Torquay, and I’d love to live in London, but obviously it’s changed.
++ Has there ever been a reunion? Or talks of playing again together?
No.
++ Did you get much attention from the radio?
No.
++ What about the press? Did they give you any attention?
I was in the NME twice, photos!
++ What about from fanzines?
Maybe. Not much though.
++ Looking back in retrospective, what would you say was the biggest highlight for the band?
We played some mad boat parties in London. There was a disused wharf by the boat, which was used for scenes in Mona Lisa. Playing there with friends was wonderful.
++ Aside from music, what other hobbies do you have?
I still play football every week. I don’t follow sport any more, but I love playing. I can’t believe I’m still going, but I never got injured so I turn up even though I’m by far the oldest. I’m basically a goalhanger, but I do it well enough.
++ Never been to Torquay. So I will ask for some recommendations. If a I was to visit your city what shouldn’t they miss? What are your favourite sights? And any particular food or drinks that you think one shouldn’t miss?
I refuse to be unkind to Torquay, though many are. I don’t go back much but I’ve read about The Blue Walnut Cafe, which looks fab. I hope to get there soon on an open mic or cinema night.
++ Anything else you’d like to add?
Yes, these days my songs are about vulnerability and some quite rude innuendo. I’m an elder now and that carries some responsibilities. I’m playing under the name ‘Iain’s Eden’ and my music is about liberation from anxiety, setting yourself free to be your true self, and having a proper laugh. I’m channelling a feminine energy as much as I can. I really hope I can take this to a wider audience, as many people so far seem to like it.
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