EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Michael Des Barres (Part Three)...

So, we have come to the third and final part of my interview with Michael Des Barres the other day. I was quite surprised how it ended up as three parts, because it was only meant to be a quicky. However, when Michael and I get chatting, we talk for ages. And we talk about Bob Dylan, Damon Albarn, John Lennon and what killed Elvis, as well as all the stuff that we were supposed to be talking about.

If you have missed the rest of the interview check out  Part One and Part Two...

MICHAEL: Well my aim in life is to piss of the moral majority because the moral majority is an oxymoron – more moron than oxy.

JON: No, but you know what I mean.

MICHAEL: I do.  But I just wrote electronica song for this Irish girl called `Jesus was my boyfriend, our love will never end`.

You know, I write a lot of electronica, I love it. It’s not my personal taste but I love to write pop songs and I’ve been doing a lot of that, and will be doing a lot more. And because of the sound of Carnaby Streeta lot of people at the Recording Academy of which I am now a member contacted me to produce them which I will do eventually when I have time. In all types of music, country music, I love.  You know I’ve written a lot of songs in the last few months.  I must have 30 songs waiting.

JON: Well I still really like Chequered Past.

MICHAEL: Well Jonesy called me the other day and said let’s do one gig. Let’s reunite Chequered Past and do one gig.

JON: Hell yeah

MICHAEL: And you know, you know we might. If he wants to do it, I’ll do it obviously and make time to do it. That is a band that is, you know, live?  Oh my God, Clem Burke and Steve Jones. Unbelievable power.

JON: There are a couple of videos on YouTube that are absolutely awesome.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it’s great.  I mean they’re much better than the record.  The record has a couple of cuts on it. Live... sometimes I felt like I was in The Who or some massive rock band

What are you listening to right now?

JON: The new Bob Dylan album.

MICHAEL: Me too. 

JON: That and... have you heard Damon Albarn’s album? You know, the guy from Blur.

MICHAEL: I have not.  Is it a solo record?

JON: He’s written an opera about... you know John Dee, Queen Elizabeth I’s court magician?

MICHAEL: Yes...of course...the great alchemist

JON: He’s written an opera  called Mr Dee. No, Dr. Dee. It’s absolutely brilliant. That and the Bob Dylan album are my two favourites at the moment

MICHAEL: I’ve been trying to get into Tempest. It’s Bob Dylan so it transcends all critique, no question but I swear to God, Jonathan, listening to it gives me nodules.

JON: Really?  I think it’s the most accessible thing he’s done in years

MICHAEL: Yeah, his voice is all crunchy to me...it hurts my throat when I hear him sing

JON: I tell you what, Michael, I think I’ll go as far as to say it’s my favourite of his albums since Blood on the Tracks.

MICHAEL: I think that you are not alone. I mean, people adore it  – it’s the only CD I’ve bought in years because it’s Saint Bob, you know. But I listen to it and sometimes I’m so swept up in the experience and age of his voice, and then other times as a singer, I think Oh my God, he’s ripping his throat to shreds but lyrically it’s ridiculously clever and hard core... Roll on John. I listened to in the car and I literally sat at wept – I pulled over, parked my car and listened to the fucking song and it’s just unbelievable – what is it, your light is still shining – you know just beautiful.

Two slices of the new Bob Dylan album; his tribute to John Lennon which made Michael cry and his post-apocalyptic rewrite of the old folk standard Barbara Allen which is my favourite..

JON: I tell you another album which is out this year which is so much better than I thought it was going to be is the new Public Image album. The first one since about 1990 I think.

MICHAEL: I’m going to go see them on Saturday.

JON: Oh you lucky man. Their guitarist, Lu Edmonds, who I’ve known of, I’ve met him a couple of times, he’s been around for years.  He was with The Damned – he became The Damned’s second guitarist in 1976 or something. He’s absolutely extraordinary. He plays this weird Turkish thing and he makes Hendrixy noises out of a Turkish mandolin called a saz – it’s absolutely wonderful, a stunning record.

MICHAEL: Yeah, Lydon is something else man. How a kid from the East End of London could come up with this brilliant, you know this perception of the world it’s so fantastic, brilliant.  I’m going to see them on Saturday at the ?? Steam ballroom, Manhattan, New York city.

JON: Well you’ve got to tell me all about it. The record’s wonderful and I’ve seen them on television doing a couple of songs from it.

MICHAEL: And you know what?  He did it all himself.  I am sure you know the story.  He’s financed it all himself. He’s got no label, he’s got no management, he’s doing it all himself.  Very similar to me, although
I’ve got Rob and you guys, you know, but in essence I have no manager. You know, I’ve managed this whole thing.  I just don’t trust anybody.  I don’t trust management because I do this all day, and all night. Rehearsing, writing, playing or selling, it’s all the same organism and I just think that I work harder for me than anybody else could

JON: Well yeah, it’s the 21^st Century business model isn’t it? The music business as a business, is dead.

MICHAEL: But the music is very much alive.

JON: Exactly, music is alive, and it’s up to people like you and me celebrating the sort of liberation of having got rid of the music business.

MICHAEL: That’s it man and you know, it’s good. It’s so healthy – you might not sell as  many records, but how much money do you fucking want? I mean do you want to be autonomous in your life- do you want to own your own life or do you want to give 60% of it away?

JON: You’ll probably make just as much money because you’re not having an enormous fucking entourage

MICHAEL: There’s no question. And entourages are so...they’re a bit like cigarettes, you know they are so uncool.  What is this the Memphismafia? That’s what killed him.....

JON: That is the perfect place to stop Michael. When your life calms down a bit, we’ll talk again and you can tell me all about how the weekend went and...

MICHAEL: I’ll look forward to it.

If you have not done so already, check out Michael's Gonzo Artist Page

LINK: I am Entertainment Magazine - Michael Des Barres interview

IAE:   Please tell us where you’re from and what influenced you to pursue a career in music some four decades ago?
MDB: I was born in England and as a teenager I discovered blues music.  Like many other young musicians I feel in love with it's (blues) passion and  remain entranced by it.  Blues music has been my primary influence and can be heard on my album 'Carnaby Street' which, in essence is an homage to
the music I heard as a teen.
IAE:   What was the first record deal you signed and what was it like touring the world with so many legendary rock bands?
MDB: My first record deal came about when I was playing an androgynous rock star in a nude musical called "The Dirtiest Show In Town". Andrew Lloyd Webber saw the show and suggested I form a rock and roll band, that was Silverhead, and the rest, as they say, is history.  Touring is a strange beast; a heightened reality that alternates between temptation and boredom...my favorite form of self expression is live performance.


Read on...
If you have not done so already, check out Michael's Gonzo Artist Page

EXCLUSIVE: Michael Des Barres Interview (Part Three)

On to part three of my mammoth conversation with Michael Des Barres on monday evening. I feel very priveliged to have such intimate conversationsd with Michael, in which he opens up so readily about his music, his motivation, and his life...

Jon: I was listening to the Detective stuff the other day. I did what you told me, and I didn’t know you guys were so tight

Michael: It was ridiculous then. Shocking. A lot of those cuts they were like huge here. That band here is one of the seminal bands. The guys at Classic Rock, they’ve all acknowledged it. Classic Rock and Mojo have all given Detective kudos for being seminal bands that never sold millions of records but made great records. You know, sonically. I think One More Heartache is one of the great rock ‘n’ roll tracks, as do a number of people, and that’s enough for me.

I remember listening to it back with Page and Plant – it was obviously on their label - and even though the obvious influences of Led Zeppelin were on that album, it was still felt that when playing it for those two, well first of all getting them both in the same room, is all another chapter.

Barney Hoskins has just got a big definitive Zeppelin bio coming out which I am very heavily quoted in. I knew them very well you know. I mean Pamela was with Jimmy for Christ’s sake and Jimmy was a huge Silverhead fan – why else would he sign us to Swan Song, you know?

Jon: You ought to write your autobiography

Michael: Well I have. You know we have a 95-page proposal out. I was raised in an England which was Lindsey Anderson’s public school in If. It was like Oliver Twist in Dickensian life. I am a marquis, I was raised as a blue-bloodied British elite, which I loathe and despise to this day, and I have a very interesting life just lineage-wise, apart from the rock ‘n’ roll and show business elements. But the abuse that I went through, the extraordinary struggles.

At sixteen I’m a star in To Sir with Love, and my mother is in a lunatic asylum, and my father is in jail. It’s a hell of a fucking story. And I’ve told it. And I’m not going to go in the slew of: "born poor, write a hit record, buy mum a house, OD on heroin, get sober and work with rescue animals..." That is NOT my story.

(He did mention a couple of names there, and I can think of a couple of others, but in the interests of peace, love and harmony between all sentient beings, I have discreetly expunged them)

It’s a real savage attack on the hypocrisy of the British class system. It is also a cold clear objective compassionate view of what sobriety is. See I don’t believe in the twelve steps. I believe that if you are using drinks and drugs and alcohol, there are many more steps to your life than 12 of them. I believe that AA is an incredible organisation. But there are many more rooms than this in that house.

And I talk about that which is extremely controversial given the stance of most of the celebrity rehab stars that now get on the cover simply because they put down a bottle of vodka. Your life starts when you put down a bottle of vodka – it don’t end. You don’t instantly become spectacular and philanthropic and a wonderful human being simply because you quit heroin. There’s a lot more to it than that, Jonathan, as I’m sure you are aware. I am sure someone in your family, I’m sure you have experienced this. We all have.

Jon: I’ve been through a lot of drugs

Michael: Yeah, of course you have and the thing is you probably understand what I am saying. That clarity, and compassion and essential life living in the moment means that you live in the moment, that you don’t subscribe to some dogma.

As I said drugs and alcohol are for kids.

You experiment and you see and you know and you either end up like Aleister Crowley living on heroin and boiled eggs alone in Hastings or you don’t. I don’t see the glamour and the melodrama of drugs, I know what it is and it’s not glamorous. It is a brief glimpse into a consciousness that transcends the physical but it is not something that can continue because it will then do the opposite. It will sedate your higher self and destroy it and I that is not my vision for me, or humanity.

Jon: Well you do too much to be able to sedate yourself, don’t you?

Michael: The Devil makes work...... My hands are never idle, except when I was working for Steve Stevens (Billy Idol's guitarist)

Jon: The other day, I thought bloody hell my wife and I have seen you on television in various things we had watched and didn’t realise it was you

Michael: Well that’s it really. Nobody knows from whence .....but I can’t go anywhere without ‘Hey Michael’, whether it being on Roseanne’s show or killing people on MacGyver or singing on American Bandstand, you know, Dick Clarke’s thing, a lot of holy water has passed under the bridge

Jon: I'm looking forward to the album coming out because I’ve seen the rough edition of the video – I haven’t seen the finished one yet but it’s bloody good.

Michael: It is good – it’s going to be better. There is a sync issue that I don’t know if you spotted but I am such a perfectionist that I’m going to fix it. I’m going to fix it actually tomorrow morning – I’m going to get in there and really fine tune that video. But you know, Rob is the most supportive – I cannot tell you how great he’s been. And you know this, because you and Rob are friends, but I don’t know this and my experience of going into partnership with him I’m telling you has been the greatest and we are going to fucking make history, him and me.

There’s an article The Boss played in LA a couple of nights ago and a piece written how disappointing it is that he’s moved in the direction of the new album, and how he is incorporating loops, and this, and that his audience want to see a rock ‘n’ roll show which - when he does play - is majestic in what he does. It’s gospel, it’s church.

There’s very few bands capable of doing what I can do and when I say I, I mean the whole unit that is Carnaby Street – there’s a timbre to that voice and that keyboard like you picked up on immediately, that D3, that Wurlitzer keyboard is something that is so subliminal and means so much that people don’t even know what they’re listening to, but they know it – it makes them feel different and I am convinced that that is a secret weapon there.

Jon: I think so, because somehow you’ve managed to tune into the Zoot Money mojo, and it works and it’s something that people don’t do anymore

Michael: No, people don’t do it. I keep saying it’s below the waist music, so therefore you have to have some kind of sexual confidence or a love of the carnal which is not hidden or clandestine or masturbatory or secretive, but is exulted and joyous, you know, we have bodies, you know, use them.

Jon: I tell you what, something else I’ve noticed and this is really, it’s weird when I’m getting all this just from the one track – the only one I’ve heard and that live video you sent me of one of the other tracks, but although you are referencing the 60s, it’s not retro.

Michael: No I love that you say that. It’s not in any way whatsoever – it seems that plagiarism is a talent even now and the one who plagiarises the best. In my case it’s me, it’s in my blood that stuff and the sounds have a certain immediacy that transcend any evocation of the past...

And so it ended. I enjoyed our conversation very much, and I am sure that we shall speak again soon. In the meantime, if you have any questions that you would like to ask Michael Des Barres, email me on jon@eclipse.co.uk, and I shall pass them on.

If you have only just started reading this series you can read:

Part One Here
Part Two Here

EXCLUSIVE: Michael Des Barres Interview (Part Two)

Michael Des Barres is one of the easiest people that I have ever had to interview (I won't tell you who the difficultest ones have been) because when you talk to him (or at least when I am talking to him) the conversation goes into free-fall and we talk about all sorts opf esoteric stuff without actually meaning to...

Jon: It’s something I’ve noticed, because ever since we had our first chat I’ve been researching the Michael Des Barres career going back and you’ve always done a lot of different things. Haven’t you?

Michael: Yeah, because one things informs the other. I know.... you’re writing about Rick Wakeman, or you’re writing about Eric Burdon, or you’re writing about any of the guys you’re writing about. Each one informs the other, because you have context. I just want to express myself. That’s all I want to do. I don’t care in what shape or form it takes, I just want to express myself and that comes in a myriad of ways, you know.

I’m very physically fit so I love to run. Running to me is like performance art in a way, it’s a way of expressing your strength, your vitality, your stamina, it’s as important to me as writing a song, going for a run. You know, when I look in my garden, and I know you live in the country and can totally understand, Walt Whitman is a rock star.

Jon: Oh totally

Walt Whitman is also - believe it or not - a favourite and an inspiration to the uber-anarchopunks CRASS who do a totally different thing to that done by Michael Des Barres..

Michael: You know 'I sing the body electric'. He saw in nature what I see in Chuck Berry or .. you know, it’s the same thing. The rhythm of nature and the beauty of roses is as important to me as a melody. Why wouldn’t it be? So everything, if you can see it like that, you can see that every frame that you are looking in is worthy of your absolute, undivided attention, then of course you are going to go in different tangents. Some people call it ADD, I call it a blessing.

Jon: I hadn’t thought of it like that. Yes, because I’ve been studying what you’ve been doing and there is a mate of mine who is an old punk rocker – he’s a journalist in Texas – and he’s been inundating me with ....’Shit when you get on talking about the stuff he did with Steve Jones let me know.’

Michael: Well, Steve Jones, you know, I can answer that. Steve Jones is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll guitar player I ever played with. Very few people have stood next to him and sang. And I happen to be one of them. I’ve also tried to play his fucking guitar, and he’d sit down and smoke or whatever, and I’d pick up his guitar and it would sound like shit. As soon as he picked it up it sounded like Steve Jones. So he’s got a magic touch and an incredible, how would you say it.....there’s a savant aficionado knowledge of the history of rock ‘n’ roll. This guy is as knowledgeable as anybody I’ve ever known from Hawkwind to the Arctic Monkeys. He knows what’s happening and when they think it was just these four tearaways that picked up instruments - wrong.... it was Matisse, that’s what it was.

It was minimal. Brilliant. Because the less bollocks – if you will pardon the obvious pun – the better, the cleaner and simpler it is for anybody that was brilliant. The choice of the note, the stroke of the brush, you know I’ve said it a thousand times, but Steve Jones was the greatest rock ‘n’ roll guitar player I have ever worked with coupled with Clem Burke who I just played with in Texas, last week because we had a big jam on the night of the wedding.

There was Clem, the infamous BP Fallon, and two local Texan guitar heroes and we just played 'Honky-tonk Women' and 'Hoochie Coochie Man' all night, and it was fantastic. Clem Burke is Keith Moon – he has an altar to Keith Moon in his dressing room before he goes on stage every night with Blondie. So there’s a lot of lineage and knowledge and feel and Steve is a God to me – he gets me off – I listen to the Pistols daily when I’m running or I’m in the gym or something.

Jon: Well I know he’s putting some questions for me about Chequered Past for you at some point so.... I’m trying to keep the stories about you on the blog daily up until the album’s come out and we can’t think of anything else to ask each other. And I don’t think that is going to happen any time soon.

Michael: Oh fuck no. We could talk about a blade of grass, you know, in terms of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s all encompassing. There are so many experiences. I can tell you about evenings with Jimmy Page, I can talk to you about, you know, the first time 20,000 girls took off their tops and threw them at John and Andy Taylor. I could tell you about the first gig I did with Power Station, when I walked out live – it was in New York we did a secret show which thousands of people tried to get into because it was announced an hour before on the radio.

I walked out in the middle of that stage, and I felt like Charlton Heston in 'The Ten Commandments' when the Red Sea parts, because one side of the room went to John and the other side went to Andy and I was looking at a complete vacuum down the middle and I thought how wonderful fame is, and I learnt something from it. I learnt so much ... if you pay attention and you get your ego out of the way, and by the end of tour they were throwing their tops and their bottoms at me.

Jon: There’s nothing I can say to that

Michael: The point I’m trying to make is that one’s life has just been a series of vignettes – just violent joy.

Reading this interview again, the one thing that strikes me is that Michael, for all hios fame and accomplishments is essentially a very humble man. When he describes extraordinary events that have hapened to him, he doesn't do it in a "Hey, look at Me!!!" way. He just tells what has happened and attempts to offer un some analysis of an extraordinary situation. That, is probably, the main reason why I like the man...

EXCLUSIVE: Michael Des Barres Interview (Part One)

I have become very fond of Michael Des Barres. Since our first chat about five weeks ago, I have been doing my research, and he really is a remarkable man who has done some remarkable things. But he also seems to have an inner integrity which is something sadly missing in many members of the human race at large, let alone within the business that we call "show".



He recently reformed Silverhead (his band for a few years in the 1970s) for a brief Japanese Tour, and I have been really looking forward to asking him about it...



Jon: You sound like you had a good time in Japan.



Michael: It was insane on every level. It was an extraordinary adventure. I would describe it best by saying, you know, as a band 38 years ago when we broke up and 40 years ago when we formed, we spent 99% of our careers trying to seduce audiences into our world – that is trying to win them over to our side. Our side was a very decadent and different side from what they had been presented with in the past, so it was a tremendously difficult job. Fabulous job, but difficult especially when we were in Mobile, Alabama in our silver jumpsuits, you know, in front of shall we say - casually - a red-neck audience where the girls all looked like us and wanted to fuck us and of course the lads all looked like quarterbacks - well-fed football players - and wanted to assassinate us. So it was an incredible dichotomy.



What I am trying to explain is, even with the unbelievable jet-lag that I’m going through, (JON: He sounded massively jetlagged) is that the majority of our career was spent trying to win people over. In Japan, when we played last week, it was the opposite. The people of our age that had dug us then came, with their children, with all the teenage internet Silverhead fans and they knew every syllable.



You hear this often from bands, I’m sure you know the guys you have worked with, and been on tours with, the most satisfying thing in the world is looking out and seeing them singing the words along with you and we never experienced that, Jonathan. That was not our experience. Our experience has always been win the fight, let’s go out there and take names and let them know who we are. Well in the interim, the 38 years since we’ve been together, clearly something had happened, and that was it. We didn’t know that until the second song, so the vibe on stage of looking at each other and realising what was happening, was one of the most overwhelming experiences of any of our lives because it was such a sense of recognition and a sense of closure in a sense, you know, in that mission accomplished.



Those two shows are one of the most magical evenings that any of us have ever spent so that would be the great dichotomy between then and now. There were many other things. After not having seen each other in so long, how quickly in rehearsal we could turn into the 22-year-olds that we were when we made the album. That would be ‘hey man turn it down’ , you know what I mean, even though emotionally we were like so brothers it was still the same.



We’re still a loud raucous rock ‘n’ roll band trying to hear each other over the chaotic din that we manage to create whenever we’re together, so the habits that we had established as young men exhibited themselves, shall we say today and we lasted the only difference being we didn’t end up in some esoteric quarrel, but weactually were amused by our own time travelling.



Jon: I was so proud of you when I heard that you already had people from the reception desk telling you to turn down. When I got your email telling me that, I had various colleagues of mine - scientists, not music people - in the office, and we all cheered.



Michael: Yeah, is that the greatest Jonathan or what? I mean how funny is that. But the irony of it was that, you know, those songs – they’re all about sex and they’re all about hedonism and when I was working on them in my car driving along I would literally pull up and be singing...."Rollin’ with my baby".... and I would be getting shifty looks from some little family in their Volvo that stopped aside me and looked at me as if I was completely bonkers and of course they’re right. But the irony was not lost upon me either.



Being told to keep it down whilst singing 'More than you can hold' had too much duality and irony for me not to communicate to my dear friend Jonathan.



Jon: I’m really proud of you



Michael: Oh thank you, my brother. I really appreciate it. It was an amazing experience, and it’s all on film and the guys doing this doc on me, they shot everything, you know, they shot both shows on four cameras, they were at rehearsal, every tear drop, every smile, every shopping excursion, you know, because the minders had two hours off, and the minders said to me ‘Michael would you like to go to a temple?’ And I said ‘No, I would rather go shopping.’ And they took me shopping. I didn’t want to see the cherry blossoms, I just wanted to buy clothes. Shows a lot about my character, but nonetheless , incredible, love Japan, wonderful – want to go back, absolutely had a great chat with some guy from a Japanese magazine, and he’s based in Florida, but a lot of his staff from the magazine went and they were all singing. You know they treat me like a God in Japan.



You’ve heard this a thousand times, it’s so boring, you know, any blonde with eye makeup is treated like a God, but the hotel scenes, they were everywhere I went, there they were you know, it’s an amazing thing for me in all seriousness at this stage of my life to have more power , be more powerful in what I can do now than I did then, and that is a real blessing. It’s not any adolescent narcissism that makes me need it, I don’t need approval any more, but I want to connect before, I keep saying I just want to make people realise that everything is possible, if you let people into your lives. I have said it a thousand times and I will keep on saying it. You know I said it at the wedding that I officiated two days ago in Texas, it’s the same principle, you know, you just want your community, which is all of us, to not diversify, but to communicate, and what better way of communicating to these kids who do not speak English than music?



It was very clear to me that the reason that they were moved was because of a rhythm that they can feel, an energy – their whole culture is based on energy and ritualism and I clearly fit that bill.



Jon: I’m really, really pleased. So what’s going to happen next? Is there going to be more Silverhead stuff or .......?



Michael: I anticipate us maybe playing a festival a couple of times but my focus is Carnaby Street and when you hear it you will see why. Because, my band is young, and the energy behind it is very, very powerful and sharp, and I’m not a time traveller in that sense.



I have no sense of nostalgia or sentimentality. I believe in the right here, right now, and the music that I’m making today is as bold and as rockin’ as it ever was and I really want to concentrate on my album. Of course, I do, I just recorded it! So while loving Silverhead’s material with all my heart, and I will do a few Silverhead songs with my current beautiful bunch of guys, if at all possible, and if its logical and pragmatically possible, we will play, but there are no plans to, official concrete plans because I only deal with official concrete.



Yes there have been tentative offers from a number of promoters throughout Europe for us to play again, and we’ll see, but the majority of my efforts are spent on doing the video for Carnaby Street, for doing the press for Carnaby Street, from playing with my band and keeping it tight and here in LA – not publically – but just for us to play finishing the series, you know the finder which is very demanding, and I had to take those two weeks off from all of this stuff to go and enjoy the Silverhead experience, which I dig with all my heart but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to, you know, float into a definitive re-united tour.



I have been lucky enough to have seen the rough cut of the video for 'Painkiller'

which, as all regular readers will know, you heard here first and it is all that one would wish it to be. The bits I have heard of the new album are astounding, and I confidently predict that Carnaby Street will prove to be the defining album of Michael's career so far! Note, please, that I said SO FAR.



I only meant to have a quick word with Michael about the tour, but he was in a chatty mood with that strange lucidity that jetlag often brings, and I was in a chatty mood with that strange lucidity that bourbon and coke often brings, so we talked for enough time to mean that this is only the first of THREE parts of this interview, which shall be disseminated across the aether in the next few days.



Slainte...

SILVERHEAD LIVE

I have been mildly disappointed that Silverhead's Japanese fans seem to have been so well-behaved. I have been scanning YouTube each day hoping for some cameraphone bootleg footage of Michael and the guys on stage last weekend. (Memo to Le Grande Fromage: Is it totally out of order for me to be asking for bootleg footage on an official blog?). The answer is probably a resounding 'YES' but, the Facebook descriptions of the show have been so enthusiastic I would break whatever bounds necessary to see some footage.

But there isn't any, so here is Silverhead back in the day with 'Rolling with My Baby'.

MICHAEL DES BARRES IN TOKYO

I got an email from the Marquis Des Barres this morning. He was demanding that I send him cake, and in return he sent me some fantastic pictures from the Silverhead visit to Japan last weekend...

LINK: Michael Des Barres: Interview With an Optimystic – Part

What happens when a group of sixty-something year old guys who haven’t even seen each other for thirty-five years jump on a plane, fly halfway around the world and leap onstage to play a down-n-dirty set that they wrote as teenagers? Silverhead, the glam-tastic, bluesy rock n’ roll band borne of the sleazy 70’s showed a packed house of die-hard fans exactly how it’s done with an unforgettable lesson in how to make rock history. Early reports say that the reformation of all five original Silverhead members, Michael Des Barres, Robbie Blunt, Rod Davies, Nigel Harrison and Pete Thompson, brought down the house tonight at Shimokitazawa Gardens, and because once is clearly never enough for these guys, they’re going to do it all again tomorrow.

Read on...

Michael and the rest of the reformed Silverhead have returned from Tokyo, and I shall be talking to Michael early this week about all his adventures. In the meantime, here are some exclusive pictures...

MICHAEL DES BARRES SENT THIS PICTURE (taken from the stage in Japan last night)

SILVERHEAD IN JAPAN LAST NIGHT

MICHAEL DES BARRES JAPANESE TOUR POSTER

MICHAEL DES BARRES: Flyer for the Tokyo shows...

MICHAEL DES BARRES: Silverhead are in Japan on the reunion tour.

MICHAEL WRITES: "Doing vocal warmups with Silverhead classic "More than your mouth can hold"..Did cause concern for my fellow hotel residents and warrant a call from the front desk..
"

EXCLUSIVE: Michael Des Barres on the set of the 'Painkiller' Video

On Friday, Michael Des Barres shot a video for 'Pain Killer', the song which is going to be his next single, and which you heard first Here on the GOnzo Blog. I can't tell you what the video storyboard is, I can't tell you anything about what it looks like, whether there are dancers, or whether it is a 20 minute long mini-movie featuring Gonzo big cheese Senor Ayling himself jumping naked out of a cake, but I can give you four exclusive pictures from the session.

Use them wisely my children...

WORLD EXCLUSIVE: Michael Des Barres new album cover art

Regular readers will know that for the last week or so, Michael Des Barres and I have been keeping up an ongoing dialogue about his forthcoming album, various groovy chunks of mid 60s rock'n'soul and my wife's home made cake.

Here, for the first time anywhere as far as I am aware, is the cover art for the eagerly awaited new album.

I spent much of the afternoon writing the release sheet for it (or to be more honest, sitting in my favourite armchair with the Orange cat and dictating it), and once it has been approved by the Cheesefinder General then I shall share it with you guys.

In the meantime, here is another chance to hear 'Painkiller', the song wot is going to be the first single. A little bird tells me that they are filming the video for it soon, so I will do my best to pinch you a few stills...

MICHAEL DES BARRES: The Power of Wow

My email interchange with Michael continues apace. He sent me this video interview which covers subjects as diverse as Sonny Boy Williamson, Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron. The best quote is "The best way to be authentic in everything you do, is to be authentic in everything you do". I am getting to like this dude more and more...

MICHAEL DES BARRES: True Brit

This arrived this morning, and it immediately rang bells in my subconscious. Where had I heard something about a celebration of British music before. And then it clicked. YESTERDAY. Or rather the wee small hours of the night before last, when I was talking to Michael des Barres in America. (Or rather, he was in America, I was struggling with a recalcitrant telephone and a MP3 recorder in a tumbledown cottage in rural North Devon..

This banner ad is from those jolly nice people at HMV, who (I hope) are not going to get annoyed with me for having hijacked their rather nifty promotional artwork to make a socio-cultural point of my own. But I have noticed this about the music busines; it is one of the most truly Fortean aspects of the whole thing that people from various disparate parts of the industry often seem to follow the same path at the same time for no apparent reason. This year it seems to be Britishness, which is a pretty cool thing to be exploiting.

Michael's new album 'Carnaby Street' is very much following the concept of him re-examining his roots bck in the grooviest era of British music - the mid 60s, when men were men, girls were chicks, and the Hammond organ was king. I am getting intrigued by all this, partly because I am somewhat of a devotee of the morphic resonance theories of a dude called Rupert Sheldrake. If you want to know more about him check out his website: http://www.sheldrake.org/homepage.html

Another interest in this whole affair is that like Michael I am very much into the music of that particular era. I keep on finding lost gems that I had never heard of before, and I think that if I pick Michael's brains enough then I will probably find some more lost gems that I otherwise would not have heard.

But my main interest is that I am seriously impressed by the first track to be posted from the forthcoming album, and my chat with Michael the other night has enthused me even more. It is probably me being OCD, but when I get impressed by something I am like a terrier with a rat, and this new record is making me feel particularly terrier-like.

So, this is probably a good time to repost the rather excellent 'Painkiller'...

MICHAEL DES BARRES: Exclusive interview

I like being a journalist. OK my craft has come in for somewhat of a battering in recent years, and I usually don't tend to admit that I once wrote various odds and sods for The News of the World. But I still - on the whole - enjoy what I do, and one of the things that I enjoy most is the fact that I end up talking to such nice people. Last night I email Michael des Barres. As regular readers of this blog will know, yesterday I posted a sneak preview of his upcoming new album; a slinky, funky (and ever-so-slightly-sexy) bluesy number called 'Painkiller'. In the lunchtime post my new MP3 recorder arrived, and I spent much of the day trying to work out how to use it. I emailed Michael asking whether I could talk to him at some point, and - much to my pleasure, (and I have to admit, slightly to my constevrnation) - he emailed me back with his telephone number.

I shooshed Prudence out of my study. She was asleep on the floor and snoring loudly, and I was afraid that if she had stayed, then Michael would have thought that I was suffering from a particularly embarrasing digestive tract disorder. I grabbed a bottle of diabetic pop, plugged in my new MP3 recorder and telephoned him. It had been years since I last did a pop star interview, and I have to admit that I was a little nervous....

MICHAEL: Hi Jonathan
JON: Is that better?
MICHAEL: Yes, much. Now you sound like Anthony Newley where before you sounded like Eno
JON: I'm telephoning from a tiny village in North Devon that no-one has ever heard of. We are in the middle of nowhere, and the telephone lines are not great
MICHAEL: That's absolutely spectacular, I haven't been in Devon in 40 years. I think with Silverhead my first band, during the 70s when it was the de rigeur thing to do to get a cottage in the country and make an album, I think we went down there, but we ran out of coke so fast, we all ran back to London
JON: I think in the little village that I am in no-one has ever heard of coke; they think its that black stuff that comes in bottles
MICHAEL: (laughs) but you can have it with Jack Daniels...

...anyway I am delighted that you have picked up on the song. The whole album is really rough; its a real lineage album. Its not a homage, but its kind of part of my roots; that whole growing up in the mid-60s, going to The Marquee and seeing Zoot Money and Georgie Fame. The whole trajectory of the British Edwardian dandy blues guys. I wanted to make that album, and that's what we've done.

JON: It is interesting that you say that, because I thought when I first heard it that I could hear Zoot Money's fingerprints all over it..

And it was perfectly true. There is something magickal about the hammond organ driven bluesy rock/pop from the mid-1960s. I was only a boy at the time, and discovered it all many years after the event, but I discovered Zoot Money playing on a Kevin Coyne album in the late 1970s and fell in love with the sound. My old friend Tony 'Doc' Shiels, the Irish bluesman, gunslinger, surrealist and wizard also spoke (and speaks) very highly of George Bruno 'Zoot' Money, and the whole English funky blues sound that Money pioneered can be heard in wallages on 'Painkiller'. It was his love of this sound that inspired the band to search for authenticity with the correct keyboards, and a masterful musician - Jebin Bruni, who plays with Fiona Apple - to play them.

Michael spoke of his teenage years in swinging London. Mitch Mitchell, drummer with the Jimi Hendrix Experience had been a classmate, and together they had seen many of the musical legends of the time. "Did I remember Terry Reid?" he asked. "Well Duh!" I wanted to say, but decided not to. You don't say "well duh!" to someone you have only just met, and whose vocal ability you have admired for yonks. Yes, I told him. I did remember Terry Reid - the amazingly unrecognised singer who apparently turned down the post in the nascent Led Zeppelin that eventually went to Robert Plant in favour of a solo career that went nowhere fast. He is one of the most under-rated singers of his time...

My conversation with Michael was like that. He was obviously supposed to be plugging the forthcoming album, which is called 'Carnaby Street' (fittingly enough for a record which revisits the scenes of Michael's mis-spent youth, but we soon realised that we were two men who still took music seriously, and I just enjoyed listening to him reminiscing about "magickal times", the memory of which are "what this album is all about". He waxed lyrical about the glorious mixture of blues and soul which produced such a rich vein of music over the years; a vein which he is unashamedly mining on the forthcoming album.

He is in the process of taking a reunited Silverhead for some reunion gigs in Japan. In December Michael told Japanese fans:

"I have always felt that Silverhead came alive in Japan. We were a very young band when we arrived. On landing at Tokyo airport we were greeted by car loads of fans who followed us into the city. They gave us such love. We realised that Rock and Roll could bring people together and help celebrate each other. We left Japan a better band. Now we return and will play our hearts out for you...These songs mean as much to us today as they do to you....May you come forever....!!"

But when he returns to America after the gigs, he will be starting real work on promoting the new record which will be out in the summer or autumn.

One of the things that I found particularly refreshing about him was the fact that he still feels passionate about what he does, as - apparently - do his fans. A lot of the people, about 80% he estimates of those who come to see the band, he told me, are young men and women who think that "we are an indie band". You could almost see him grinning as he said that. I told him the true anecdote about how I had played 'Painkiller' to a young lady of 14 who had been working in my office all afternoon, and how she was already talking about getting me to blag her a copy of the album and some tickets to go and see the band if they come to England. This actually appears to be a very real possibility if things go well, and it won't just be young Jessica trying to blag her way onto the guest list. I think her ageing Uncle Jon will be trying to do that as well.

The main emotion behind the album, he says, is "Joy. Its not angry, its not ironic, its just energetic"... "It's just the blues" I interject. "Exactly" he said. The opening track sets out his stall for the album. It starts with the line "I was 19 in 1967. I'm just laying my cards on the table. I'm not being retro, I am not looking backwards, I'm just saying that this is what happened".

"We are very proud of it, and its a great band" he enthused. The cover, by the way, according to Michael "has me bursting out of a Union jack".

He seemed so pleased that I had been so impressed with 'Painkiller'. "Its at a very early stage" he said, and went on to say that I was one of the first people who had heard it. He said that he was particularly impressed with Gonzo Multimedia, because when he met Rob Ayling it was so perfectly obvious that he, like Michael, and like me, was someone who still took music seriously and truly believed that it was important and life affirming. We talked about dogs, and we talked about cake, and scones, and I promised that if he wanted to, next time he is in England he can come down to my tumbledown rural retreat and play with my dog and eat my wife's home-made cake. He sounded rather enthusiastic at that and promised that he would pack his wellies alongside his high heeled boots. And I think that he might actually have meant it.

He was one of the nicest and most charming blokes that I have spoken to in a long time. His level of enthusiasm about 'Carnaby Street' has enthused me to such an extent that I am really looking forward to hearing more of it. Unless I have completely misjudged the situation, Michael des Barres is a perfectly charming, and completely sincere geezer who - blessed with a fine set of vocal chords, and the idee fixe that rock music is a good, noble and spiritually uplifting discipline, who has quite possibly just made one of the great albums of a long and distinguished career.

Bring it on dude.

MICHAEL DES BARRES - An exclusive sneak look at the next album

I have always liked Michael des Barres. Back in the mid 1980s when I was still a student and dating the girl who was to become my first wife, I heard a band called The Power Station. Alison (my first wife-to-be) was a massive fan of Duran Duran and so being as OCD as I am, I bought loads of Duran Duran rarities and spin-off records for her. One of them was the aforementioned debit LP from The Power Station. Its vocals were by Robert Palmer, a dude whom I always admired, and I was disappointed when I discovered that he didn't want to play live and so left the band after the first album but before they had started touring.

One day we were reading the music press and my future ex-wife said: "Oooh, they've replaced Robert Palmer with some bloke called Michael des Barres".

"Who the hell is he?" I grunted bad temperedly, but I checked him out and soon became a fan. Over the years I have got hold of stuff that he did with his previous bands, Silverhead and Detective. I also got mildly OCD about Led Zeppelin at around that time and as Detective had been signed to Swansong this was an added bonus. Over the years I have heard various bits and bobs that Lord des Barres (yes, he is a member of the British peerage) has done, and I have always been impressed.

This morning I woke up feeling dreadful. Bipolar and diabetes are not a good mix, and I have not been a well man for years, but this morning I was feeling particularly yucky. My sprits were lifted, however, by an email from the big cheese himslf. It contained an MP3 of a new song by des Barres, and a picture.

"This is jolly good" I typed back. "Tell me more".

"Well, its a sneak preview of a track from the forthcoming album 'Carnaby Street' which we are putting out in the late summer or fall" he replied.

I remonstrated him for not using the Queen's English. "It is autumn, dear boy", I wrote, but asked whether I could post the aforementioned sneak preview onto the blog.

"Go for it" he replied.

So I did.