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New album

Q: Let's talk about the new album to start with. In 2023, you had Bloodlines, which was really successful, as was the following live album, ‘Live Blood.’ Great production and mix. What can you tell us about the upcoming one due for release on September 11th?

 

RW: The writing process is ongoing. I write all the time - we all write. Somebody has to come up with a core idea. So, on this new album, out of the 12 tracks we recorded, there's 10 on the album and there's a bonus for Japan and a track which should be on the album, but the album is so strong, it just hasn't found its place. It is a shame, but it will appear out there at some stage of the game. I have nine songs which I initiated on the album, and Hugh had three ideas, which have become songs. We decided actually, when we were on the 70,000 tonnes of Metal cruise in January 2023, that the next opus should be maybe a little bit heavier, and that's kind of been my remit in the back of my mind. It's still very Tygers but I think it's definitely in a slightly heavier direction. We were always a hard rock band with a toe in heavy metal but I certainly wouldn't call us a heavy metal band, but we're bridging the gap.

 

Q: Yeah, I'd go along with that. Your solos were always based in blues, transforming over to metal.

 

RW: Yeah, that's where I'm from. When people say, have you got a guitar hero or who are your guitar heroes? I'm a bit of an oddball as I don't really have any. There are about four guitar players which I always used to admire, and I think their work is very listenable and very melodic but heroes as such, none. I've never really been “Oh, this is my hero” or anything like that. I've just listened to everything, and my brain, the sponge inside my cranium, takes what it wants to take in and doesn't what it doesn't. So, the four guys who I probably would name as nice players, would probably be Bernie Marsden, a great blues player, great all-rounder and a great singer. I've always loved Glenn Tipton's solos in Judas Priest; They fitted perfectly and I've always found Mick Box's wah-wah guitar playing very cool. The last guy, standing alongside the other three would be Brian Robertson. If you listen to a lot of the early Lizzy stuff, his wah-wah incidental guitar is just so appropriate, really nice. As a bonus, I’d probably name somebody like Eddie Van Halen, because he was a kind of innovator of that tap and different stuff, different tunings and all that. If I could play one percent like Eddie Van Halen, I'd be delighted. (laughs) My guitar playing is, well I'm a bit like a doctor - I'm still practising. You know, some days, I complete the operation and some days I walk away and the patient isn't on stage. It's normally a bloody G-string or something that breaks.

 

Q: Have you got Tue Madsen in the chair again for this one?

 

RW:  No. Before Tue was involved, when Francesco first joined the band, we recorded an EP and that was mixed and mastered by a guy called Marco Angioni, who is a fellow Sardinian to Francesco, but living in Denmark with a recording studio. He plays in two or three bands, guitar, keyboards, sings, a great all-rounder. He also has a really good ear, listens to what you want and makes it happen, so we decided to go with him. He's absolutely done us proud. The production is outstanding. We're not talking Roy Thomas Baker or Mutt Lange, it's not overly complicated and it's not overly layered with lots of guitars, which the previous two albums have had. This is probably back to Chris Tsangarides days, Wildcat and Spellbound. I think with less instruments, you can hear more and John and I have got great guitar sounds on this. As John was coming into the band, we were in the process of recording and rather than put a massive workload on John, because we were up against a time frame, we asked Marco, if he wouldn't mind playing three or four guitar solos for us, which he's done. When you purchase the album or the CD, in the booklet, it tells you who's played what. We want everybody to get the credit that is absolutely due to them.

 

Q: When is this coming out?

 

RW:  Friday, the 11th of September so we've got a way to go and each month there will be a single released from the album. The first one, Electrifyed, will be released on May the 4th. which has a video attached to it.

 

NWOBHM

Q: Now then, I've got a couple of questions for you about the 70s and the 80s…

 

RW: OK.

 

Q: We all know where the name came from. I was wondering if you recall if any other names were considered.

 

RW: Yes, I can. Only one. So, you have to picture the scene. Rocky and I are sat in his mum's lounge, it's early ‘78 so there was just there was just Rocky, Brian and myself - we haven't got a singer at that point. We were about to advertise in our local newspaper but we needed a name for this little trio that we got together: we were playing songs which I'd written and had taken to Rocky and Brian and we developed them further. I had been thinking, what about Achilles Heel and Rocky liked that but at the time, he was a big fantasy science fiction book reader so he says, what about Tygers of Pan Tang which he explained came from elements in the Michael Moorcock Elric books. I thought, you know, there's always somebody who's got a bloody trump card… (laughs). Anyway, I said, that's absolutely awesome. At the end of the day, you're going to remember something like that. You know, we've had various names in the music business. I remember David Coverdale calling us the Pirates of Penzance and we've had all sorts of different kind of incantations of it but it's it still works to this day when you Google tigers with a ‘Y’.

 

Q: Back then there was yourselves, Venom, Raven, Satan, who all came from the same area…

 

RW: They were but they were all after us.

 

Q: Granted but given there were so many, I've often wondered, before the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was so named in London, by Sounds editor Alan Wilson who coined the name for a Geoff Barton article, was a new wave of Metal happening in Tyne and Wear/Newcastle, before that?

 

RW: No, I don't think so. Back then, all the bands tended to play in their own area so it was kind of safe. I remember somebody booked, I think it was our management, booked us a show in Sheffield, which was Def Leppard territory and they came down to the show. We were playing upstairs in this nightclub but it was always like, just coming down to make sure you behave yourselves because you're playing in our territory; it was all that kind of all that kind of stuff. I remember going to the Mayfair and seeing Son of a Bitch before they were Saxon with the Queer Boys supporting them and then they changed the name to the Quireboys. So it wasn't really until late ‘78 and then through ‘79-ish when everybody started sort of breaking out of their own area and moving around the country and then all the big tours started to happen - certainly for us. Conrad, the bass player in Venom, when we first went to Impulse Recording Studios in Wallsend to record demos was the teaboy in the studio and we used to give him 20p and say, “Can you go get us a bag of chips and a cup of tea? Come on! Chop chop! Off you go!” and off he went.

 

Q: I think it's an era that's never to be repeated…

 

RW: Absolutely.

 

Q: Glory days. There was yourselves, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden and Saxon. You were the big four that signed to the big labels. You were on MCA, Saxon was Carrere, Maiden was EMI and Leppard went with Vertigo. Then there was Girlschool who went with Bronze, Praying Mantis went to Arista and all that but what spiel did MCA gave you for you to sign to them?

 

RW: Well, let me tell you the story that's how it happened. We released, on Neat Records, the label that was attached to Impulse Recording Studios, ‘Don't Touch Me There’ – original copies are worth about £500 now and I still have mine. They pressed up a thousand copies, which was a lot back then. We took about 200, selling them at the clubs we were playing, purposely finishing the set with that song and we sold all 200 over, I think, three weekends, possibly six shows and Impulse Studios probably sold a good 600 so Neat Records were going to repress.

MCA and all the big record companies at that time, everybody seemed to want to sign their own New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands after Geoff Barton had written about it and luckily - or unluckily - MCA had seen the single and all the reviews and they approached Impulse and said, we would like to acquire the Tygers. A deal was done, palms of silver were crossed and we found ourselves belonging to MCA. They repressed the single and with the huge MCA machine behind them, they sold 50,000. Then we found a producer. I was around our manager's house (Tom Noble) and we were playing Magnum’s Marauder live album and I really liked the guitar sound. I mentioned that to Tom and he said it's a guy called Chris Tsangerides who was quite new on the scene. He had worked with Black Sabbath as an engineer learning his trade and he'd just produced some Gary Moore stuff. So we contacted him and there we were, booked in late summer, 1980, to record Wildcat. 1980 started off for us when we did three or four weeks opening up for Magnum which cemented my amazing friendship with Bob Catley and Tony Clarkin. Just the pair of them were like Morcombe & Wise – hilarious! Then the next year when we released Spellbound, Magnum came out as our special guests. It was so sad when Tony left the planet. Then and I could have the timeline wrong here, I think we did Scorpion's Love Drive tour, opened up for Saxon on the Wheels of Steel tour did shows with Iron Maiden. we did On Through the Night with Def Leppard.

 

Q: You threw in Reading Rock Festival in there in 1980 as well.

 

RW: Yeah we did ‘80 and ‘82. Reading 1980, we had got to the point where we'd been opening up for bands that had two guitar players and our management and our agent at the time thought that we could really do with a bigger sound so they set the wheels in motion for an extra guitar player and of course, along came John Sykes.  John's first show was at Wallsend Community Hall I think. It was upstairs above a supermarket and we'd advertised the show under the name of the Wildcats to try and not give anything away…

 

Q: Not the most inventive, anonymous idea, was it?

 

RW: (laughs) No and I have to say, that wasn’t me. The place was rammed. I think it held about 250 or something like that and our road crew, because we couldn’t afford a dry-ice machine, had smoke bombs which you used sparingly because they smoked for bloody hours. Anyway, they'd been a little bit ambitious and set a few up across the front of the stage. They set them all alight, and the smoke slowly starts coming up and coming up and coming up. The intro goes on, the lights start flashing and as we walked out on stage, there was so much smoke, none of us could see the audience. Without a word of a lie, we couldn't see the audience for the first 20 minutes. It was so overkill; Spinal Tap, long before Spinal Tap and when we could finally see the audience, at the end of the fifth song, going to the sixth, there was a cheer and I could see people choking! That was a funny night and I think it was not even a week after that, we played Reading. Whitesnake were headlining and Ozzy was supposed to be on but he pulled out and they put Slade on. I'll never forget it, a wonderful, very drunken night with Noddy Holder in a little B&B in Bayswater Road when we were down doing some recording in London and he was down there doing something with Slade. We just sat in the corner together and got as drunk as monkeys and had an absolutely marvellous time.

 

Q: I'm going to rewind a little bit because there's a couple of things I want to ask you. The difference between Wildcat and Spellbound is quite big, even though it's Chris Tsangaridies and his assistant engineer, Andy Warwick, doing them both. Basically, the sound is a lot bigger on Spellbound. Granted, you had John Sykes and John Deverill in the band then for the second album but was there any directive from you or the label to make Spellbound bigger.

 

RW: I don't know so much from the label. I think it was always going to happen naturally. John Deverill had an incredible vocal range so that in itself was going to give us a lot more melody and a lot more different ways to layer his own vocals.

 

Q: Did adding the two Johns change your songwriting approach?

 

RW: Not really, because we used to write separately. I used to write on my own and the two Johns who lived together in a flat in Whitney Bay used to write together as well. At rehearsals I’d said, “OK, well, I've got this” and then John Deverill would take it away and write the words and the melody for it. John Deverill did all the lyrics, the melodies for all the songs and John Sykes and I wrote all the music for them. I don't know why, but ‘Take It’ is the only song that John Sykes and I actually wrote together and that came that very quickly. When he first joined the band, he came around to my house - my mum and dad's house I should say - and we were running through the live set, the Wildcat songs and we got to the second afternoon and I think my mum had just done our lunch for us and we'd gone back upstairs.

After playing one of the Wildcat songs quite enthusiastically, he says in his lovely Cockney accent, “’ere mate, are you fucked off with this? I've got this idea for a fucking song...” and he plays me this this little bit of ‘Take It’ and I said, “Oh, I like that! What about this?” So I put the next bit to it and then within about 15 minutes, if that, we had ‘Take It’ written.

 

Q: For Crazy Nights and The Cage, you went with Dennis Mackay and then Peter Collins. What was the train of thought at the time, changing producers and how do you view that in hindsight?

 

RW: Dennis Mackay, I can't remember who suggested him; I don't think Chris was available. Crazy Nights and Spellbound both came out in the same bloody year and we hadn't toured Spellbound enough, really. It still had legs and the record company said to our management, we want another album and we want to put it out in November. This was probably, I don't know, May. Our management said that was crazy but we'll do another one next year and MCA said no, we want another one out this year. It was a mad scramble. Dennis Mackay had great credentials. He produced Pat Travers, worked with Judas Priest, David Bowie and Tommy Bolin. He was English but he lived in the States so he flew over and he was a lovely fellow but it was a disaster. We recorded in five different studios. After two weeks of doing the backing tracks, he flew back to the States to do a further week or so with Stanley Clark and then flew back for us. When he was away, we went to Rock City out in Shepperton, those studios were owned by Denny Laine, the Wings guitar player. The record company wanted not only a blooming full-length album, but they also wanted to put out a free 12-inch single - which we hadn't written so with John in one room, me in another room, John came up with ‘The Stormlands’ and I came up with ‘Slip Away’ and John Deverill wrote the words for both. We were assigned a 17-year-old female trainee house studio engineer and you can imagine a 21-year-old lad thinking, ‘Right, OK, is this going to work at all?’ but anyway, we all set up. She got the sound she wanted. We did a take and she said, come in and have a listen and see what you think. We were absolutely blown away. We were speechless. The look on everybody's face. We were looking at each other thinking this is what a rock record should sound like because we'd heard all the stuff that Dennis had done. When we went into the control room with Dennis and I said, “The drums sound a bit thin… the kick drum's not very big…the snare drum's very thin…the guitars sound a bit like, wasps…and he said, “Oh, I'll fix all that. I'll do all that in the mix.” So I play the 12-inch single with relish and if anybody mentions Crazy Nights, I kind of shut my eyes and think, “Oh no…” Anyway, that came out on November the 5th, 1981 and we didn't do many shows to support it. The fourth album, The Cage, we were all called into the boardroom at MCA and they said, “We've got some songs here that we'd like you to play.” Two or three of them were from Steve Thompson, which was the brother of one of our managers so that was kind of all right. It was sort of within the family borders but then there were songs from outside songwriters. And I just didn't really feel comfortable doing other people's songs. Why should I? I wrote 90% of Wildcat, it with Rocky who wrote some lyrics and stuff and that charted in the National British Charts. I think that went to 13, something like that and we were in good company with Michael Jackson, Gloria Gaynor, David Bowie… artists with massive albums all around us. I think Spellbound charted at 18. Again, half written by John, half written by me. Who's to say they're going to be any better? Anyway, the record company, I think they have this vision of us being, MCA's version of Def Leppard and don’t get me wrong, I'm not decrying Def Leppard because I think they're great. Anyway, I think we only had about three songs that we'd written but MCA had decided we needed a more commercial AOR poppy approach so they drafted Peter Collins, who'd been in the charts with Alvin Stardust and The Lambrettas. He came with an amazing studio engineer called Phil Harding, and the pair of them knew exactly what they were doing. We recorded downstairs at the Marquee Studios on an amazing Eastlake 24-track state of the art desk. Peter Waterman was managing Peter Collins at the time and one day he just kind of flew through the door. We're all sat listening to a track and he went, “Hi lads, you all right?” We all look at each other thinking, ‘Who the hell's this?’ and he says, “Right lads, I've just come down from Great Pony Street, (which is where the MCA headquarters were) and this is the idea for the single for the album, ‘Paris by Air’.” We were wondering who this bloke was and how he knew that was going to be a single but it was, because he'd been let into the inner sanctums of what was going on with us. Then says “We're going to give away a free silver earring in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, and we're going to tape to the front of the single; It'll sell millions! It's brilliant! What do you think, lads?” I won't use the expletives but if I had a KitKat, I'd have stubbed a finger off and said, you need a break, mate. Then as quick as he came in, he spun on his heel and walked back out again and the door slammed. We all looked at Peter Collins and he looked at me and went “That’s my manager.” So, we all looked forward to the day that ‘Paris by Air’ came out with a free silver earring and it sold about 10, maybe 11 copies. I think my mum bought one.

 

Legacy

Q: Let's come up to date, Rob. Tygers of Pan Tang now, the promoters are asking for you. You've got shows lined up until September that could collectively be called a world tour. The reception's been great wherever you've played. Are the Tygers finally getting their place in music history they deserve? I think so.

 

RW: Yeah, I think so as well. It's just a shame that I'm nearly in a bloody zimmer frame. (laughs) Can we not just press the rewind button on my top loading VHS recorder back 40 years? That'd be good. I left the music business in ‘87 and came back into it in’ 99. I was just so disillusioned with it all. I'd recorded two projects, one of which CBS offered us a deal and a lot of money for it and that didn't come to fruition and I just got so disillusioned. I sold all my musical instruments as a kind of a dirty protest and then I got a call in ‘99 saying the Tygers had been offered a 20th anniversary spot at Wacken on the Friday night. Was I interested? I think it took me all of a nanosecond to say yes, I'll do it so I had to buy guitars and amps and start learning chops again and all that kind of stuff. Crikey!

 

Q: Time to give up your day job then?

 

RW: Well, I worked hard at it, getting the right people and coming and going and you know, it's still happening. It's nothing to do with the band, it that people's lives change and the whole thing, the whole business has changed now; the longevity isn't there. It is with me and Craig, the drummer with the Tygers has been with me for 26 years, which is when I kind of relaunched and put the band back together again. Jack's been there 21 years, Hugh's on bass and been in nearly 5 years and

we've just had a guitar player change. That’s John Foottit, who doesn't live too far away from us, he's now in and we've just finished recording the album with him.

 

Q: Well, the NWOBHM has come around and people are really starting to appreciate it now. It never really went away, but it seems to be the popularity is increasing. It was great when people asked me about those days because I was there and I do sometimes view it through rose-coloured glasses but when I really think about it, it was pretty awful. None of us had any money; It was the best times and it was the worst of times for me anyway. How do you view those years?

 

RW: I remember I was the manager of a jewellery shop in Whitley Bay at the tender age of 19…maybe 18 which was very young to be given that responsibility. I was a jeweller when I was just 16, which may seem a strange profession but it just kind of fell on me lap. It came with me finishing school in July. I was listening to a record the day after I finished school in the lounge at mom and dad's lounge, listening to a record on their stereogram with the headphones on and my mother was standing in front of me, pointing her finger and saying something. I took one can off me ear and she said, “Don't you think you're sitting, listening to records all summer young man! You go and get yourself a job!” And you know what? I thought to myself, well, if I put the earphone back on, she's going to clout me. We didn't have the disrespect that seems to be around now back then. You respected your parents and you got up and did something. I saw an advert for a worker in a jewellery shop, and got the job and really got on well with the boss. He said “Do you want to go in the back and make jewellery and repair it?” And I went, “Yeah, that's me!” and that's how that came about.

 

Q: So you're actually a silversmith as well.

 

RW: Yeah. I could do all that. I can't see now and my fingers have gone but yeah, I could make jewellery from scratch and all that kind of stuff. I became a member of the Guild of Master Craftsmen. Danny, the guy who owned the shop, he knew I played in a band and one day I said to him, I've been offered to become a professional musician but it's awful money. He said, “You've got to do it. You've absolutely got to” and he really drove me on and said “I'll see you all right for a couple of months with a goodbye wage”. Honestly, what a nice man he was. He eventually sold up and buggered off to Thailand but I went on the road with the Tygers and became a professional musician. Our management company, Pantang Productions, paid us five pounds a day. Tom Noble and Gary Thompson had an office in Whitley Bay and we got paid when we were on the road. It wasn't marvellous but he used to say we needed money in our pockets in case we ever came across anybody who's more senior to us and we needed to buy them a drink.

 

Q: So, so let me ask you this last question Robb. Which do you think you enjoy the most or enjoyed the most? The struggle and fun and innocence of the early days or performing now with the legacy and recognition you have now?

 

RW: I think now as there's no pressure now. It's a lot more enjoyable. I don't know whether we have more laughs but I think you understand the world a lot more and how it works and indeed, how people tick whereas back then, you were finding out and you could very easily drop yourself in it and make situations worse. Now you kind of look at things in a more measured way, in a more measured sense as it were and reason things out in your head. Hopefully before your mouth engages. (laughs)

 

Q: Robb, it’s been great to talk to you, Thanks very much and take care.

 

RW: You too. Bye, Glenn.