Singer-songwriter Russ Ballard talks late nights with The Beatles, working with KISS, and touring in the 70's

WE SAT DOWN WITH RUSS BALLARD, THE LEGEND BEHIND SOME OF ROCK’S MOST ENDURING ANTHEMS, TO TALK LATE-NIGHT SUIT SHOPPING WITH THE BEATLES, WRITING FOR KISS, AND WHY HE’S STILL HITTING THE ROAD

BALLARD IN 1974

ANOMIE: Hi Russ! You came up at such an interesting time for British music, during the 60s and 70s. We're curious to know what that atmosphere was actually like when coming up. Was there sort of a sense of community?

RUSS: It certainly was with guitar bands. In the late 50s, the guitar thing happened. There was a new kind of music you probably know about called Skiffle (a genre of folk music with influences from American blues, country, bluegrass, and jazz, usually performed with a mixture of homemade or improvised instruments). Every kid of fourteen, even younger, bought into it. It was very easy to start a group because you could do it in a very cheap way with no instruments. My first guitar was ten guineas (around £300 today). I went with my dad to a little music shop and he bought me that guitar- I looked for the most expensive one and took it home without a case. I had Bert Weedon's ‘Play in a day’ guitar tutorial book (Weedon was an English guitarist whose style of playing was influential during the 50s and 60s. He was a major influence on many leading British musicians, including Clapton, Brian May and McCartney). Every guitar player I knew learned from Bert, whose tutorials taught you the basic chords, the simple progressions being the C, F, G. Very, very simple. Throughout the 60s, those were the mainstays of the song. At that point, you learn those chords, you know, then you've got a band. I played and played until my fingers bled, it’s difficult, but life develops what it demands. So you persevere and you find, wow, I'm getting this together. I love doing it and I couldn't wait to get my hands on my guitar every day. I got into a band with my friends, two or three had guitars, and it was quite exciting. There were no drums, we had a washboard. You've never seen a washboard before, have you? No, probably not. Your grandmother or your great-grandmother, certainly your great-grandmother, would have had a washboard. Basically, it's kind of a metal thing that is flat. You do your washing on this scrubbing board, but we used it as a poor man's drum, really. It's exciting when you're playing together when you're a kid. So that's how we started. And then you develop as a band, and then the Rock and Roll scene happens big time, and the electric guitar becomes your focal point. So there's Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard. It was an exciting time, you know?

ANOMIE: I'm wondering at that time when you were coming up and the Rock and Roll scene was everywhere, before MTV and glossy PR, how conscious were you of image?

RUSS: I was always conscious of image because it seemed that, right from the early days, it was important. Everybody wanted to be James Dean. They wanted to be James Dean because he looked cool, great looking guy. He was sad and moody, I couldn't understand the moody thing. I could understand there was a quality about that that girls liked. And then you had the Marlon Brandos, and in the music scene, you know, Elvis Presley, who looked a bit like a moody angel. He had the most fabulous image, and he could sing really well. Couldn't write songs, but he could sing well, and he looked great. And of course, in England, it happened with Cliff Richard. Everyone desperately wanted to be Elvis. Later on, Buddy Holly happened. He wore glasses, and that was different. He was the only rocker with glasses, so he had his own thing going on. Image was still very much important.

ANOMIE: Nowadays, social media plays such a huge role for artists, it’s almost everything. Image has become such a big part of how people connect with music. Do you think that focus on image takes away some of the mystery or magic behind the music itself?

RUSS: Hmm, I don’t really think so. I mean, the great artists I can think of, they’re aware of image, yeah, but they don’t get caught up in it. The trouble starts when you try to stick to an image, you know? Once you start playing a part, you stop being yourself. You’re acting all the time, and that just... leads you somewhere weird. There are a lot of rock and rollers, even some of the older ones, who are still kind of living that part. I could never do that. I was pretty shy, but people thought I was moody. I wasn't being moody, I was just so shy, and I found it very difficult. Unless people got into conversation with me, I never usually got into conversation with them. I think people, artists, are more interested in their art. People like the Beatles and stuff, they were so obvious. They had the biggest image of all. They looked absolutely amazing.They had those qualities, you know… Brian Epstein was their manager at the time and he insisted that they look tidy. They looked like rockers initially, wore leather, and wanted to be rebels. Epstein insisted to them, “if I'm gonna get involved with you, then you look tidy, you look good”. So, you know, it's more kind of universal appeal. It looks great to angry and aggressive kids, but you're not appealing to the universal population, it's not as digestible for everyone, yeah. They didn't want to do it, but they did it, and they all wore the same clothes, the same haircuts, and I think it was the most fantastic image. There wasn't a band around that did that, and on top of that, they had great songs.

ANOMIE: Definitely, and hey, it worked out pretty well for them.

RUSS: *laughs* It worked out pretty well.

ANOMIE: We read a couple of your interviews where you spoke about the Beatles and mentioned that in the early 60s, you sometimes played in the same areas or the same venues as them. What struck you about them as people rather than the sort of cultural icons that they became? Were they approachable, were they funny, competitive?

RUSS: They were all that, actually. They're very approachable, very funny. They were just sort of Liverpool lads, you know, and fabulous personalities. I worked with Ringo in 1978 for about three months. I started an album with him. He asked me if I had any songs and we went to Copenhagen and we got on really well. *laughs* I said “look, what do I call you? Your girlfriend calls you Richard and Richie. What do I call you, Richard, Richie or Ringo?” He said “any one of those”, so I used to call him Richie. I was sitting next to Paul McCartney in 1963, they were number one at the time in the charts. Their second solo had gone to number one as well, which was ‘Please Please Me’, and they had just put ‘She Loves You’ out, and it was huge, it was enormous. Paul turned to me and said, “Do you know where we can get some good suits made in London?” I said, “why don't you go to our guy, Dougie Millings? He makes our suits, he's amazing, you know, he makes fabulous suits, he's a great guy, on Compton Street in London.” And then I saw Lennon and Harrison there a few weeks later.

ANOMIE: You can take full credit for their look then, eh?

RUSS: I wouldn't mind that. Dougie, the tailor, was actually in the movie A Hard Day's Night, and they had those suits on in the movie. He was just a fabulous guy, Dougie, he was very, very funny. He made everybody's suits. When people came into London from America, if they had money, they all went there. I remember I was speaking to Sammy Davis Jr., who had a five-week season at the Palladium in London. Amazing, amazing entertainer. He went into Dougie's and he asked for five suits to take back to America. How the other half live, you know?

ANOMIE: Was there anything about the Beatles, especially Lennon and McCartney's dynamic, that struck you as unique from a songwriter's point of view?

RUSS: They all seemed to want to please John Lennon. He seemed to be the funny man of the group, the guy that they all wanted to sort of impress. And Ringo was funny, he's just a funny guy *in Liverpudlian accent* Very, very dry, you know, very dry.

ANOMIE: If you ever get sick of music you can get into impressions you know.

RUSS: I remember we were in the Carlton Hotel in Yarmouth. Paul was sitting next to me, Ringo was just behind him, and John Lennon was sitting on the floor. He started talking about music, and about playing at the Star-Club in Germany. And I said, “how do you get through those? You know, you're there for two weeks, three weeks, and you're playing five hours a night. How do you get through it?”

ANOMIE: Surely not just drinks.

RUSS: We played in Germany, doing the same thing. We used to go to the pharmacy and buy these pills you could get over the counter. Big with students that wanted to stay up swatting for their exams and stuff. On the weekends, we were doing nine 45-minute spots. Nine.

ANOMIE: God, how does your voice keep up?

RUSS: You go to the pharmacy. We take the pills with the beer.

ANOMIE: Very German of you.

RUSS: *laughs*. You know, you can hit amazing notes. You think this is just sensational. Why hasn't anyone ever told me about these, you know? And then the next day, you're totally depressed and feel suicidal. Which is not good. The next night, you have to take two, instead of two, you take three or four, and maybe three beers, and it's downhill from there. I later chatted to a doctor who knew what was in the pills, an American doctor, and he told me it was speed and could lead to a heart attack straight away.

ANOMIE: Wow. You've written a lot of songs that have really sort of outlived multiple music eras ‘Since you've been gone’, ‘God Gave Rock and Roll to You’. I'm wondering, when you wrote these songs, did you know that they had that timeless quality, or did that kind of reveal itself to you later as they stood the test of time?

RUSS: No, I never knew. What I did know was that I thought they were good songs. They were very universal, because they were simple. I think they had good lyrics, you know, I thought the idea of ‘God Gave Rock and Roll to you’ was a good idea for a song. I never thought it would do what it did, but I thought it could be a hit. The song is quite simple. It really is timeless in that way. I think you really kind of hit the nail on the head there. It feels… not like a classical song but it feels like a classic.

ANOMIE: You speak a lot about passion and it’s clear how passionate you are about what you do. I think for a lot of people, it’s hard to find that, or even if they do, they don’t always pursue it because of the security of a nine-to-five job or other pressures. What do you think made you so determined to follow this path? Was there ever a moment, when you were trying to get the band or your music off the ground, where you thought, maybe I should just take the office job instead, or was it always music for you?

RUSS: Do you know, there was nothing more, nothing else. It was music. I was playing piano when I was eight, nine, ten, eleven. When I started to play the guitar, I was so passionate. I would play and play and play. I was learning classical on the piano, which I wasn't too interested in, but you know, it was good to learn the theory. But my passion was learning the guitar, learning Rock and Roll guitar. I learned the solos by Cliff Gallup, Scotty Moore, James Burton, and Chet Atkins. I would study all these, the way they used to play and the runs they used to do. That was my focus. My dad would say to me “Get out and play football with your friends. They’ve just knocked at the door and asked if you were going to play, go out with them.” I’d say “No, I'm going to do this.” He couldn't believe that I didn't want to play football. I just wanted to play the guitar. I didn't know where it was going to lead. It wasn't easy. I was in quite a good band when I was 15, a local band. We went into Abbey Road when I was 15.

In 1961 we went in to have an audition with Norrie Paramor, who was a big famous producer. He was the producer of ‘Cliff Richard and the Shadows’, who were the biggest thing at the time. Helen Shapiro had two number one songs, and was only about fifteen years old. We actually backed her one night in the East End. She went and told Paramor about us and said, you know, this band is fabulous. So we went there and he offered us a contract, it all looked great. We tried a couple of tunes that he gave us, but they weren't very good songs. We never did find a song, and our singer backed out. I think he got cold feet *laughs*. When I was sixteen, I got the job with Adam Faith as a guitar player. My friend Bob Henrit (member of Russ’s band Argent, and The Kinks) had joined and then I got the job. So that was great, being a lead guitar player from when I was sixteen. Bob and I were always very close, we sort of grew up together. I was learning more and more guitar, and he was getting better and better at the drums. He was the best drummer around. And we both got the job with Adam Faith and became a bit more professional. Later, Rod Argent from The Zombies asked us both to be in this new band he wanted to form, so we became Argent. We recorded ‘Hold Your Head Up’ and ‘God Gave Rock and Roll to You’, and plenty of other tunes as well, which did well in America. I did about eight or nine tours of America with them in my twenties.

ANOMIE: We watched a clip the other day of Argent performing in 1972 on the Midnight Special, it was fantastic. You can definitely see what the hair style was back then, the popular style.

RUSS: Oh, that was ‘Hold Your Head Up’. *laughs* It's a little bit shorter now. I'm more sensible now, Sophie (Anomie's editor). Not completely sensible though.

ANOMIE: Maybe you'll disagree with this, but I think there was a bit of a lull in British identity in music in the late eighties, maybe the early nineties. Then Britpop came around, the whole Royal Britannia moment. As a songwriter, how did you view bands like Pulp, Blur, Suede, and Oasis? Did you see them as sort of carrying on some kind of British songwriting tradition or doing something entirely new?

RUSS: Well, they said Blur were heavily influenced by the Kinks, I can see that... It's a very East London kind of attitude.It's all down to the songs. If you like the songs, or you like the performance, it's brilliant, they all seemed pretty intelligent. I love Radiohead. They've got their own thing going and it's… you never really know where they're going. But it's all very, very valid. I loved it, I loved the energy, I think it was all about the energy much more than the actual quality of the music. But it's all down to the songs, Sophie, for me. It's down to the words, the music, the ideas, where they're going or whatever.

ANOMIE: Tell me a bit about playing with Mick Avery from The Kinks, such an influential band. What was your relationship with the members?

RUSS: Yeah, yeah. I used to play with him as well in my brother's band. The Kinks are a great band in part because Ray was such a great writer. I mean, they still go out now! The originals were Pete Quaife, Dave Davies, Ray Davies, and Mick Avery. Bob was asked to join the band because we did gigs with the Kinks in America. We did quite a few gigs with them.

ANOMIE: On that, what makes you still feel fulfilled musically these days? Has that changed over time?

RUSS: You know, I do the same as I've always done, really, Sophie. I take things as they come along. Because I'm still developing. It's fascinating to me. Maybe if I didn't do thisI would just drift along and pop off. I don't honestly know. I'm just following. I'm happy to be able to go in the studio and engineer everything myself, play the bass, sample the drums, and everything that goes with it. We used to go into Abbey Road in the 60s, and do two songs in three hours, finished. It's mad. There'd be Sonny Day and the Dreamers, there'd be Gerry and the Pacemakers, there'd be the Beatles, the Hollies, Adam Faith and the Roulettes, Cliff Richard and the Shadows…. they'd all be in the same building. This was Abbey Road. They'd all get their three hours, because you've got to remember, music was only laid down onto four tracks at the time. So you had the drums on one track, bass on another track, then you had the rest on vocals, and any overdubs on the other two tracks. We used to record the A-side, and go and have a cup of tea. Well, I just wanted to keep going, you know. This is a three-hour session for two songs. And we'd go downstairs, have a cup of tea, about 20 minutes of our time is gone. So we’d go back and do the B-side, lay them down, and then the next week they were mixed. There's not a lot you could do with four tracks, you know, you just mix it together. But now you have 100 tracks so it's a longer process.

ANOMIE: Do you think there was a kind of magic in only having those four tracks to work with, having to get it done in that short window, compared to now, when you can spend endless time perfecting things and doing as many takes as you want? Which process did you actually prefer?

RUSS: You know, this, yeah, we get into the realms of psychology now. There's certain things you know when you play a tune, whether it's in the sixties or now. You know there's always other things you could do with the song. It was frustrating because back then, you knew you didn't have enough tracks to do what you wanted, so you just didn't bother *laughs*. Now you have the facilities to spend hours and hours on a track.

ANOMIEE: You've worked with some incredible artists, and written for a lot of people. When you're writing do you often write with a specific singer in mind?

RUSS: Most songs that I’ve written were for myself to be honest, there's only two that come to mind that I wrote for other people. It usually happens that I get an idea that I would like to do. I make a demo of it and their publisher gets hold of it and decides if they want it. With ‘God Gave Rock and Roll to You’, that song was obviously chosen for Kiss, and was later in the movie ‘Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey'. I met the bass player from Blondie outside of a record label office in the states. He went “are you Russ Ballard?” I said yeah and he said “We're collating songs for the new Bill and Ted film and your song would be perfect for this scene we've got in the movie”. That's how that happened I did ‘You Can Do Magic’ for America, ‘I Surrender’ for Rainbow, some stuff for Roger Daltrey, and for the ladies from ABBA. I also did a song with Nelson Mandela

ANOMIE: Did you really? You know that didn't come up in our research

RUSS: Yeah, I thought about it the other day, we never actually talk about this *laughs*. Funnily enough, myself and talented writer Chris Winter wrote a song called ‘Hope’ and that was very different from anything else we’d written. When they heard it, the South African Embassy said this would be fantastic for the theme of the South African FIFA World Cup. It just so happens that ‘Hope’ was the title of Nelson Mandela's autobiography and Obama’s autobiography was called ‘The Audacity of Hope’. They asked me if I would go out to America and talk about the song as the writer with Nelson Mandela, Obama, and Oprah Winfrey. Somebody came up with the idea to have Nelson Mandela speak on it, so he's on the record.

ANOMIE: Amazing. You seem as creatively driven as ever. You’re still writing, still touring, still clearly very committed to music. Do you think that kind of creative restlessness is what keeps you inspired?

RUSS: Yeah. You know, it's a very funny thing. You are what you repeatedly do. I keep saying this, but I can't stress it enough. If you keep the neural pathways active, you keep doing things. I'm playing the piano every day, mainly because I want to keep playing the piano every day. I finished another song today. I finished recording it, mixing it today. I certainly feel like as I get older life becomes more interesting, less of it, but much more interesting. I just do my thing and lovely things happen. I look back now and it's been amazing, you know. It's when you stop you're gonna worry.

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