Here’s the second part of the Darling Buds interview as promised. For those that missed the first part, the interview took place in early November ’91 with the band just about to depart of the States, on course to record their third LP with the help of Don Fleming.
An ever generous Harley returned from the bar with his round. It was ‘cheers’ all round and on with the conversation.
I asked the lads what they thought of the south Wales music scene, and more to the point, was there one. I suppose the question could relate to most areas.
“I don’t think there is one unfortunately. It’s probably true that nothing’s come out of Wales, but there again no-one’s given a shit about Wales.” Harley was serious.
Do you think the talent’s here? “Yes, definitely”, Harley recently revived his record label, ‘Darling’ to back this up. The last release on the label was the Darling Buds first single, ‘If I Said’. The new release is by Cardiff noise-merchants, Slow Jam.
“There’s talent everywhere, but they tend to give up because the music industry just concentrate in certain areas. – Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Scotland, for example”, added Chris.
Harley agreed, “When you think of it, there aren’t many bands that come out of London, the one’s that do have all moved there. We could have done that but we didn’t want to, why should we? I like Newport and I like Wales, I was brought here. On saying that, I wouldn’t mind living in the States for a year or two! It would be nice to experience things. I’ve got so many friends that do the same job, day in, day out and not much else. What’s the point? “
It was easy to see how much he valued being in band, although as he said, as a band they hadn’t produced anything for a long while. He wasn’t too disappointed with this – he felt the break from recording had brought the band much closer together.
Harley was more than happy to discuss the general structure of the band and the people who work around them, “I hate been told what to do. I like to be the one who gives the orders. It’s really weird because we employ our manager, we give him a wage, yet he’s the one tells us what to do. It makes me think’ there’s something wrong here’; and he gets more money than us as well! We tell him what we want, he tells the record company and then he gets paid. What’s the point? There are so many bands that’ll go along with that because they want to be popstars, it’s crazy. We’ve had enough of it. We’ve really been badly ripped off in the last year. We even asked CBS to drop us; we want to go back to an indie label. We couldn’t believe when they said, ‘No’. I mean they dropped bands that were selling but wouldn’t drop us. They dropped Halo Jones, The Psychedelic Furs and a load of other stuff. The problem for us was that the second album sold really well in the States.”
Speaking of America, what’s it like for British bands at the moment?
“Well, there’s a few that are doing OK –EMF, Morrissey and Jesus jones, but that’s about it really. We were out there recently and we didn’t hear of anyone else. The British press try to hype things up but there again they can create a scene anywhere. NME and Melody Maker are well read throughout Europe but I tried to get one in the States and I couldn’t anywhere. You can get mags like Vox, etc, but not NME. In Europe the press dictate what the kids are going to buy. They’ll buy the paper and it’ll tell them what to listen to and what to look cool in. They’ll tell you to wear a Morrissey t-shirt and you’re cool. You can chat up a bird in a Morrissey t-shirt!”
“America is totally different, the fans like you for what you are and not what the papers say. If you’ve got a bad review the fans don’t give a shit. If they like you, they like you. That’s it. Basically, anything goes, there’s no particular trend.”
“I was in this bar in L.A. and MTV was on. EMF came on and this girl turned to me and said, ‘This really reminds me of REM.’ She couldn’t really see anything; she didn’t understand the image or anything about them. She could just see that she liked REM and she liked EMF, so they both must be similar. And I thought, ‘No, no’. We’re all conditioned, I mean look at Chris’s t-shirt, does he think it’s cool?” I honestly can’t remember what t-shirt Chris was wearing as he hit back, “It was free and it’s clean.”
Do you have any say in what singles are released? Harley again, “we get together and discuss what songs we’d like to put out as a single. Then we tell the manager who has a heart attack. The record company call a meeting, talk about it, then they put it out, and it sells f**k all! It’s true. The record company aren’t into the record so they don’t promote it properly. Another way is to do a deal. The record company will say, ‘let’s release this first in a stupid cover with lots of gimmicks, then we’ll put out the one you want.’”
We could have talked until the cows came home but unfortunately there aren’t many cows in Newport, so there we had to leave it.
The Darling Buds are genuine and sincere, look out for their return.
Interview by Darren Jones