Q: First and foremost, how’s your health Dave?

DC: Well I’ve got an MDS (Myelodysplastic Syndrome) which

is not curable but is controllable and it’s being controlled at the moment.   

Q: That’s great and a word of encouragement, a friend of mine’s father had it and lived for another twenty-two years.

DC: Oh I’m not sure I could cope with another twenty-two… (laughs) It’s a little bit restricting in that I have to be careful where I go. If I get an infection, I have to report to hospital so I have to avoid mixing in crowds and that’s quite difficult.

The Magic Of It All

Q: Settlement (2021) was written through Lockdown, The Magic Of It All had a very different birth and evolution. It took you to a place where you had never been before and by that, I mean educating younger people about recording a band in a studio. A film crew in there as well, was it a bit overwhelming or were you riding the crest of the wave?

DC: The film crew were there every minute of every day when we were in that studio but after the first five minutes or so you took no notice. They didn’t put lights up or anything like that and it was pretty much fly-on-the-wall stuff. We went into the studio, they followed us into the studio, they filmed every minute of that and then when we went back into the control room they followed us in there and filmed there as well. They were watching every minute and it was an invaluable experience for the students. There were about a dozen of them and they helped set the studio, mic the drum kit and learning all about that because nowadays, young people recording use computerised systems and they don’t see anything about a studio this was an unbelievable experience for them. The guitar amp had been put in a corridor so it didn’t blare across the whole studio, they noticed little bits like that and then ever so often during the playback they’d say ‘Why are you doing that?’ or ‘Can you explain what that is?’. They asked during the recording ‘Can we sample this?’ and we said ‘No! It hasn’t even been issued yet!’ (laughs) They were not in awe of it, they were just keen to learn and I was so pleased that they were able to do it. When it came to lunchtime, we all went outside and sat in the sunshine, had our sandwiches or MacDonald’s or whatever and all mixed in together. It was just good fun.

Q: What did you learn from them?

DC: I learnt what music they were into which was very different of course to what we were playing. Songs are not made as songs anymore, they are pieces of music with words attached that don’t necessarily have any relevance to anything or to the music itself but the songs on this album are quite deep and every line has got a meaning to it. I’m not being pretentious but I’m writing about what’s going on in the world around us and again, they were very interested in that.

Q: Did you manage to talk to people who were there in the seventies and learn more about how much Strawbs music meant to them back then?

DC: Yes we did. It was quite remarkable. We were staying in Stellenbosch which is about three-quarters of an hour outside Cape Town and every night we went into a different café or bar and had a meal and got talking to the locals and it was fascinating talking to them. I knew very little about the whole Apartheid situation and it really was a terrible time but what happened was people were going ‘Oh Strawbs! Oh yes!’ and we began to realise how popular the band was – we had no idea. I knew from the record company in the seventies that we were selling records in South Africa but we couldn’t go over there and play and I had no idea of the sheer volume we were selling over there and that we were one of the biggest bands in South Africa at the time. The album that took off was essentially Grave New World because they identified with the songs. (Dave recites the opening lines to New World)

        There's blood in the dust
        Where the city's heart beats
        The children play games
        That they take from the streets
        How can you teach

        When you've so much to learn
        May you turn
        In your grave
        New world

They identified with that, very much so. Similarly, Part Of The Union became a rallying call for the union movement over there but we had no idea of that until we were there.

Q: That’s quite incredible the power of that song. It got you banned in America for a while as well.

DC: Of course it did but then in Canada, there was a radio station that went on strike and for twenty-four hours, played nothing but Part Of The Union. (laughs). It’s still got that rallying call. 

Q: It is a very special song.

DC: It is and that’s why I’m so pleased to be working with John (Ford) again. It’s an old friendship that never died, we just went our separate ways and came back together again. It was the Settlement album that got us together really because I had some words that I was interested in and John said he had a tune and we put the two together and it became Each Manner Of Man. That was one of the biggest songs on the album.

Q: Is there a release date set for the documentary?

DC: No. We’re doing Cropredy and filming the whole show and clips of that will be used in the documentary. Then the crew are off to America to do some interviews with people like Tony Visconti I hope and we’re also hoping to get Jerry Moss from A&M which would be really lovely. So, the documentary will come out towards the end of the year, how it’s going to be distributed, I can’t tell you yet as I don’t know. The publishing is held by Sony so I’m talking to them about it but who knows.

Q: The new album this month and 2021’s Settlement hasn’t had a much of a live airing yet. Cropredy 2023 has been announced as Strawbs farewell concert and I don’t want you to give too much away but what can you tell us you have planned?

DC: Ooohhh…It will be a seven-piece band. John will be there, Blue Weaver, Brian Willoughby, Cathryn Craig and the backline will be three South African guys from the album. The whole point is the continuity in that the album is called The Magic Of It all, the documentary is called The Magic Of It All, the guys will fly in from South Africa for Cropredy and the whole thing will link together. There will be a couple of surprises as well.

Words and Music

Q: You’ve stated that every word in your lyrics is important and you do paint a picture with every song you write. Magic Of It All has that wonderful line ‘It’s hard to see a stop sign, walking ten feet tall’, Hangman and the Papist, October To May, My Friend Peter…so many great lyrics over the years…

DC: Well The Magic Of It All is a travelogue of the places we’ve been to play and the history of the band all in one but it’s also about not getting to the top of the mountain. We were always climbing, almost there but then the management decided to withdraw support of the band so the band went bust and I went into the radio business. I call it my twenty-year sabbatical.

Q: What I got from those lyrics was even though you never became superstars, you were not at the top of the mountain as you put it in the title track, you have no regrets whatsoever.

DC: No. I’ve done lots of things, many things that I perhaps regret but I have to move on all the time. Life is a journey - even though that is a very corny phrase – and every day you are living a different experience and you have to learn to live with that. The condition I have got, I had to learn to live with it and I live it to the full as much as I possibly can and all the time, you can get through because if you just feel sorry for yourself and curl up in a ball, you will just shrivel away. It’s important for me to be creating and all the time there are new songs coming. Someone will say a phrase and I will pick that phrase up and think ‘Aahh..now where can I go with that?’. I have a new song going called The Waiting Room which came from when I was sitting in a train station when the last train went by and I thought where is that last train going? Why did it go by? I was there, waiting for it…why didn’t it stop? That sparks the imagination about where I can take this. That’s how I do it. I work from the smallest of phrases and then develop them.

Q: Well that’s why I and many others consider you to be one of England’s finest lyricists. Anybody else, including me, would have just jumped up, got angry and sworn at the driver.  You take that experience and write it.

DC: Yes but I turn it into an imaginary story. The Magic Of It All started with me coming up with a guitar phrase and I thought sounded like John Denver believe it or not, it was just the way I played it with a dropped D. Then I started to get other chords and then the line, The magic of it all, came out and the travelogue part of it.

            The streets of New York city to San Francisco Bay

            Denver to New Orleans, well-wishers all the way

            Those who walk beside you, ready should you fall

            The magic of it all

I’ve had lots of support all the way through. I’ve had letters from young girls saying ‘I was in hospital having electric shock treatment and I got through it by listening to your music’. That was in the seventies and it’s extraordinary to have that. People in America in particular coming up and saying they got married to The Winter Long, that they had their first dance to it. It’s flattering that people have taken the words to heart.

​

Q: Everybody Means Something To Someone really hit home with me as and I’m getting on in years as well so I wrote myself a note to once a month, call someone I’ve lost touch with to see if we can be back in touch. If I hit one in ten, it’s worth it.

DC: I agree with you. There is actually a piece of driftwood in the front of a cottage just down the road from here. It’s a carving of a fish and I saw it on the wall as I was walking past it. It’s only about twenty yards from the sea and it’s an art exhibition.  There is a little plaque beside it which is the title of the art exhibition and I read it and it said ‘Everything Means Something To Somebody Somewhere’. I made a mental note of it and adapted it to suit myself. I had to refer to that piece of driftwood and also, it’s a notorious are for shipwrecks so hence the shipwreck in the song came in. Nowadays, all we do is talk online but it’s not communicating. You are not actually communicating with people anymore so I thought how do you communicate? You write a letter, send a message or pick up the telephone, those are the three simple verses. I deliberately wrote them simple to get the message across.

Q: When playing live you seem to put the same passion into a song that you had when you first wrote it. Sometimes you take a little step back, close your eyes and tilt your head back with a smile on your face and I wonder where are you? Are you back in the year you wrote it, reliving that memory?

DC: No, not necessarily. I’m singing the words and quite often, the words, although they are the same words, will be affected by the emotions I have got going through my head at that time. For example, Down By The Sea. I live by the sea and one strange lunchtime I did an interview with the music editor of the Daily Express and very casually she asked what I was doing that weekend. I said nothing so she invited me down to see her parents in Dover which is just down the road. We went, they were very nice people, we had a lovely time, had a meal and then walked along the harbour and the sea came crashing over the top of the boardwalk. Down By The Sea came out of that. There was nothing in it but when I sing that song now, if someone has really upset me, I can sing it with the most violent feeling.

            They build their homes upon the seashore

            The quicksand castles of their dreams

They can have a different feeling I will snarl them out sometimes if someone has upset me but other times I can sing them more open with warmth and feeling. The lyrics of my songs are a vehicle for me to express my emotions.

Leicester

Q: Being a Leicester lad myself, I was somewhat pleased to learn that you studied at Leicester University in the sixties and received an Honorary Doctorate in January this year.

DC: I was absolutely thrilled with that. Two years ago I was given a Lifetime Achievement for music by the university and then to receive an Honorary Doctorate was really unbelievable. The difficult thing was that I wasn’t able to go up and receive it in person because I had just been diagnosed with MDS and the doctors had advised me not to mix in a crowd. There would have been twelve or thirteen hundred people at the De Montfort Hall and there was no way I could have gone there and not shaken hands with loads of them so I had to say no. Luckily I could go up there about a month ago, very quietly, on the train with a mask on all the way, wiping down the seats as I went and oh my god…Anyway, we got up there and met for coffee with the vice-chancellor and he gave me my scholarly scroll which is really the most proudest achievement I’ve ever had.

Q: Leicester university and DeMontfort Hall are just up the road from each other – literally a three-minutes’ walk. When you were studying there back in the sixties, did you ever see any gigs at the De Montfort Hall?

DC: I saw many gigs there, yes. I saw Modern Jazz Quartet, Miles Davis…I saw Gene Vincent hence Be-Bop-A-Lu-La coming into one of the songs now – I’m looking back on that. I saw a Beethoven concert…loads and loads of stuff and I made a point of going there because I was a senior student in the halls of residence on Regent Walk so I could just walk there and see these astonishing people. Then in the seventies, there we were going back to the DeMontfort Hall and playing!

Not Strawbs

Q: Despite being known mainly as being a Folk Rock musician, you’ve often been involved with a lot of Heavy Rock/Heavy Metal musicians. You had Roger Glover from Deep Purple on your first solo album, you recorded a vocal intro for Def Leppard and later, you formed Dark Lord Records with Chris Tsangarides and he produced you. Are you a secret Heavy Rocker?

DC: Not a secret Heavy Rocker but some of the music I enjoy a great deal! The curious thing about Def Leppard is that when Brian Willoughby and I used to go around the Folk clubs – this was when the management decided they were not supporting the band any more – Joe and the guitar player used to come and sit in the front row at our feet and come to see us play and we became really good friends. They gave me the first EP that they put out and I’m really pissed off that I can’t find it. With the recording, I just happened to walk in on the studio to see Tom Allom who was producing them and Joe was reading the poem and he said ‘I can’t read this, you do it.’ (laughs) I saw him when ELP did their last show as Def Leppard were on the bill. I walked up to him and said ‘If I were to say to you When The Walls Come Tumbling Down, what would you say? and he said (Dave adopts Sheffield accent) ‘Fucking Shakespeare.’ (laughs)

Q: There are big debates about the digital age. Streaming, the death of the major record companies, downloads, etc but one area that is rarely touched on in all those debates is one of your passions, radio. What’s your opinion about how the digital age has affected radio or has it not been affected at all?

DC: There are two separate streams but the digital revolution as they call it as far as downloading music, has forced bands of a certain age to go back on the road and play because the royalty stream has dried up. The record companies are abusing it in my opinion, they are the ones who get the money from the streaming services. They are paying royalties which in our case would have been around 13-15% depending on which stage we were stage we were in our contract and for example, if it was 15%, they are taking 85% and we, five members of the band, are sharing the 15%. So bands are really on their knees with regards to the royalty streams. It’s inevitable that sales go down and they are defending it by saying that the music is there and that they are introducing us to a new audience – no you are not because are old audience are all dying off! It’s a dwindling stream and it’s forced bands to go back on the road. I can’t go back on the road again. I’m doing Cropredy and that’s it. I’m not risking my life to go and play The Bull’s Head in somewhere. The radio business, I went into it and spent twenty years in it, twenty of the happiest years of my life, especially the first ten years because it was a growing industry and totally new. We were doing stuff that was new and I had an open palette to do anything I wanted with that radio station, so I did! I had my Christmas lunchtime shows, I had Dame Vera Lynn presenting it, I had Barbra Dickson on presenting the morning show for a week…I did some wonderful stuff of which I am so proud of. I did series called Rock Of Ages where I interviewed Pete Townsend, Cat Stevens, George Harrison, about their religious beliefs and how it affected their songwriting. I’ve got them and they are extraordinary. Cat Stevens had just become Yusuf Islam and I was the first person to interview him. I interviewed Bob Marley and that was one of the last interviews he did, we interviewed him about being a Rastafarian and how that affected his songwriting; to hear Pete Townsend talking about Meher Baba was fascinating. But then the radio business began to consolidate as groups began to form and so on and that was very disappointing. Then it was the demise of the Capitol Radio group as they got taken over. That was all very, very, sad as it took away the individuality of the stations. They began to stream programmes and share programmes across the network but the one good thing that has come out of it is that there are now about four hundred community radio stations around the country playing lots of different types of music and are actual community radio stations. I was going to send out Everybody Means Something To Someone to the local stations here as I think that would be a song that the community stations would pick up on but unfortunately, because I got poorly, I wasn’t able to do it.

Q: Well as with many of your songs, that one has a message that is relevant right now and I suspect will be for many years to come.

DC: People say ‘What do want Strawbs to be remembered for?’ and it’s the songs. The common denominator that runs all the way through Strawbs, no matter who is playing them, is the songs. They tell the story of my life or what I’ve seen. It’s almost like going back to the 1800s when troubadours used to go from village to village singing the news of what was going on. That’s what I’m singing:

           Politicians with their hands all smeared with grease

Q: Isn’t that the truth!

DC: (laughs) I don’t think I’ll be joining the Conservative Party any time soon.

Q: Me neither. Dave, as a long-time fan of your songs, this has been a real pleasure and I thank you for taking the time to talk to me. All the best with the new album and for Cropredy.

DC: It’s been wonderful. Thank you.