Thursday afternoon, and at the appointed time I give Alan
Nimmo a ring. It’s just one interview
for me to do, but for him it’s inevitably the umpteenth of the week as part of
the promotional campaign for the upcoming release of King King’s new album Exile & Grace.
So as an opening gambit I ask him what the question is he’s
primed for me to ask, because he’s heard it so often already. He doesn’t answer the question, but it
evidently resonates, because he immediately laughs.
“I’m at the stage,” he responds, “where I’m about to put
together a whole bunch of answers, and say ‘Here you are everyone, and here’s
the questions.’”
Joking apart though, one of the recurring topics will
inevitably have been about the vocal problems that unfortunately caused King
King to postpone their UK tour in support of Exile & Grace while he took a three month lay-off. It’s a situation that I guess isn’t just a
worry for him personally, but must make him feel frustrated for the rest of the
band, when together they’ve been making big strides in the last year or so.
“Yeah, of course,” he says. “I mean obviously aside from the personal side
for me, which
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| Alan Nimmo beardless in Breda - February 2017 |
can be very worrying, when you’re thinking “Hang on a minute,
that’s a couple of times things have gone wrong now.” At the end of the day I just didn’t let it
recover properly, and we went back to work and we just did so much, trying to
fit in the rescheduled stuff with the current stuff, doing the album at the
same time, all that. It just got to the
point where, you know, if I get ill or anything like that it just seems to be a
wee bit worse.”
“So,” he sighs, “I kinda learned the hard way a little bit,
that I’ve got to take a lot more precautions now in terms of my health, and
looking after myself. So we thought
well, let’s be cautious, and let’s take everything out for a while, and just
concentrate solely on getting properly recovered, so that this doesn’t happen
again. I’m doing four or five hours a
day of this stuff [ie interviews], which is not ideal at this stage of recovery
when I’m under strict orders not to be talking too much. But the work still needs done, and I’ve tried
my best to convert a lot of these interviews to e-mail. But there’s ways around it, and I just want
to get back to normal, get properly recovered, doing work with a vocal coach,
and getting the strength built back up in the voice again, and getting that ‘memory
trained’. So all we can do is do what we
can, and hopefully everything’s all cool in the end.”
The fitness kick
Judging by some of his Facebook posts, he’s also been
hitting the gym a bit, and getting outdoors for some long walks. Is that just by way of recreation away from
the road, I wonder, or also part of his recovery plan?
“It’s part of the recovery as well,” he confirms. “You know, one of the things is you don’t
want to be carrying too much weight when you’re trying to do this for a living,
so all of it plays its part I suppose.
Plus, it’s just better for my health, so I thought let’s make it part of
the whole recovery programme while I’m off.
“There’s three things I’m doing while I’ve got this time
off,” he says by way of elaboration, “and that’s basically it, that’s all I’m concentrating on. One, is getting my voice and my vocal chords
back into good shape. The second is a
very strict health and fitness regime.
And the other is I’m using the time to just do a bit more writing,
writing more songs for, indeed, album number 5 when it comes. So I might as well get ahead of the game with
these things, and keep myself occupied, and out of mischief!” This was said, of course, before Nimmo took on the gig depping for broken-armed brother Stevie on his current UK tour.
The opportunity to sit back and do some writing could be
seen as a bit of a blessing, I suggest, given that he’s said Exile & Grace was the first album
for which much of the songwriting had to be done on the road because the band
had been so busy.
“Yeah. The thing is
I’m already through the first month though, so the time passes quickly. So before you know it, we’ll be back on the
road anyway. To think about ‘oh, we’ve
got loads of time off’ – you don’t really.
The time flies by!”
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| King King getting down . . . |
No danger of him sitting in the house contemplating his bad
luck then?
“Goodness no - if I run out of things to do I’m sure the
wife’ll have me out doing things in the garden!”
Returning to the subject of his fitness regime, I noted that
he had recently shared a personal gym playlist via Spotify. Most of the entries were the kind of rock and
blues fare people might expect from him.
But the list also included outlaw-style country artist Chris Stapleton,
and I recalled that three out of the four King King members had picked his album
Traveller as their favourite of the
year back in 2015. So what was it about
Stapleton’s music that appealed to him?
“Do
you know what?” he reflects, “There’s a quality to his songwriting which was
refreshing, and then when you hear a guy sing the way he does, you think wow –
what a tremendous voice. I think it’s an
added freshness to the music scene that’s been missing – another bit of
genuine, passionate, honest music coming out at us – regardless of the style. You know, when you listen to these kinds of
people, it’s like ‘I can tell that guy means it,’ and it’s just wonderful to
hear.”
No routines
As
a non-musician, I’m always intrigued about the genesis of the material. Does a bit of doodling or jamming suddenly
conjure up a Eureka moment? I recalled
talking with Alan’s brother Stevie about this a few months back, and he said
that for him it was the other way round – if something doesn’t grab him right
away then he bins it. So how does it
tend to work for Alan? Turns out there’s
no magic formula, but a mixture of spontaneous moments and professional graft.
“Well,
quite a lot of songs come out of absolutely nothing. You know, you’re sitting there
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| . . . and tearing it up |
with a guitar
in your lap, and you’re having a chat and a cup of coffee, or you’re doing
something else – you could be sitting watching TV, or in the studio recording
another song and somebody’s sat at a desk doing something, and you’ve got a
couple of minutes sitting waiting before you get started again, and you end up
noodling around, and riffs and ideas are born out of that.
“But
I don’t stick to any sort of process or routine for song writing, it’s just
whatever comes first comes first, and I build around that. I can have a chord riff, I can have a melody,
I can have one line of a lyric – anything.
Whatever comes first, I’ll build around it. If it’s for example a lyric, I’ll think about
why it came to mind – why did those words come to mind? And it’ll remind me, or it’ll make me realise
what I want to talk about in that particular song. And then the content of that song will
determine maybe what style I want to write it in, whether be a slow kinda
ballad, or a fast paced rock thing, or something quirky, depending on how it
goes. But as I say, no formula – it just
comes when it comes. And definitely I
agree with Steven, an idea’s got to grab a hold of you before you’ll pursue
it. If something’s a load of nonsense
it’s not something you’ll even think about, you’ll just dismiss it. If it’s not something where you think
‘there’s something in that’, then you’ll crack on.”
Songs
can also take time to mature, he adds, or to fit into the right album.
“One
of the crowd favourites nowadays from Reaching
For The Light is ‘You Stopped The Rain’, and it was written when we were
recording Standing In The Shadows. But it didn’t feel right to go on that album,
it felt right to go on Reaching For The
Light. And equally, the bulk of
‘(She Don’t) Gimme No Lovin’’ was done when we recorded Reaching For The Light, and it didn’t go on that album – it wasn’t
right yet, so it was right for this album.
And equally, along the way, doing this album, there’s been songs that
were either dismissed completely or there’s songs that will go onto the next
album.”
Practice and
passion
The
guitar intro to the aforesaid ‘(She Don’t) Gimme No Lovin’’ is the first thing
anyone has heard of the new album, and it’s a slightly unusual, prickly
effect. So how did he achieve that?
“It
was done with a great deal of practice!” he says, laughing. “What I tend to do with it in a live situation
is I’ll literally pick every note, pick every part of it using a wah-wah
pedal. But on the album I wanted it to
be a bit more even than that. Because if
your foot moves when you’re balancing on one foot with a wah-wah pedal then the
note changes immensely. So what we did
was we used a delay, and I picked it, then I had it repeat, come back, and I
picked it again. So I got the evenness
over it, which was good.”
Quite a lot of work involved for just a few bars then . . .
“Oh
yeah, absolutely. You know, like anything,
if you want something to be quality, and you want a quality album, then you
don’t get it by not doing the work. So
put the graft in, and hopefully it pays off.”
It
strikes me there’s an underlying mood of tension to some of Exile & Grace. Songs like ‘(She Don’t) Gimme No Lovin’’ and
‘Long Time Running’ may be exuberant, but several songs have taut riffs and
quite dark, anxious lyrics. ‘Betrayed
Me’ is a case in point – it may be a relationship song, but it’s a brooding
one. So did it have any particular
inspiration?
“Ach,
you know, everything’s written from life experience,” says Nimmo, “whether it’s
something current, or if you’ve not got much to say in terms of what’s
happening right now in your life you can dig into the past as well. And you know, we’ve all been through certain
things in life, and certain relationship ups and downs, and tragedies, and
this, that and the next thing. But you
can take that, and it doesn’t have to be an exact description of what went on,
but you can take various things from different parts of your life and piece
them together, ‘cause at some point you’ve felt that way. So it’s no’ like it’s faked, it’s still
honest and there’s passion there. I just
tend to try and draw from life experience, and write about it, because I think
it’s the best thing that can come across to an audience listening to it, if
they believe you mean it.”
So
rather than any kind of specific narrative, it’s a mood and a feeling he’s
trying to convey?
“Yeah,
at the end of the day, what a songwriter needs to do is,” he ponders for a
moment. “I can be thinking about something very specific, but as a writer you
have to find a way to make that universal, so that people understand and relate
to it from their own life experience. It
may not be exactly the same thing that you might be talking about, but you can
make it so that they think ‘Yeah, I get that, something similar happened to me,
I can relate to that.’”
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| "Gonna get funky!" |
Four Symbols
The
album has a very elegant cover illustration produced by artist Chris Robinson,
and I’m intrigued by the four symbols that appear in the corners – a flower*, a
bee, a globe and an eye. Is there a
story behind them?
“These
are all spiritual signs, I suppose, of hope,” says Nimmo. “Hope, peace, love, all that kind of
thing. And you’ll notice the pattern
going round it, is the feathers of a thunderbird [a Native American image akin to the phoenix in European culture], a
symbol of hope and peace. And if you
listen to the lyrics of some of the songs, then I suppose you could say the main
theme of the album is a definite feeling of unease about the state of the
planet, and the state of the world, and all the conflict that’s going on. People’s gluttony and greed are getting the
better of us, and things seem to be kind of falling apart a little bit, with
various acts of terrorism and things like that.
In no way am I interested in chatting about that in a political sense,
that’s not where I’m coming from with this.
It’s purely from a human side of things – I’m talking about, where is
the compassion for the world as a human race?
And so these things all came together in a sense of – I just wanted to
be hopeful for the world, rather than be negative. It’s easy to be negative when you’re writing
songs, it’s easy to sing about everything that’s disastrous, and there’s never
a happy ending, but it’s about being hopeful for the future.
“The
title is delving into a little bit of that as well,” he continues. “Plus it’s a sideways reflection of looking
at the band as well, in terms of our own struggle and our own hard work, and plight.” The title comes, in fact, from a couple of
lines in the song ‘Tear It All Up’, recounting the band’s experience supporting
Thunder in big venues like Wembley. “You know, feeling a little bit exiled from
the mainstream, and from the music world, and trying to fight our way in, to
the graciousness of being humbled and content with what we’re achieving.”
And
appreciated, I suggest.
“Yeah,
of course, yeah,” he agrees. “But you
can reflect that against the rest of the world and what I’m talking about in
some of those lyrics, and say if you can find a bit of peace and a bit of
contentment with what you have in life, make the best of what we’ve got, let’s
not be greedy, let’s not be selfish.
Let’s make a decent world for ourselves, for everyone.”
Finding your feet in the shadows
Digging
into the past a bit, I mention reading
an interview where Nimmo said that after Standing
In The Shadows he thought they needed to toughen things up a bit, because they’d "kind of nailed the smouldering soulful thing". He laughs in response, and I explain that I understand the sentiment,
because if a band doesn’t evolve it’ll stagnate. Nevertheless, I say, it’s an extraordinary
album. Unusually, about half the songs
are slow to
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| Alan Nimmo does his best to smoulder |
mid-tempo, and the music and lyrics seem to me to come together to
create something really expressive, emotionally. For Nimmo though, the outcome wasn’t
purposeful in any way, but part of his development as a songwriter.
“With
Standing In The Shadows, we were – I
especially, was still trying to find my feet in terms of songwriting, and just
gaining more experience from the album before.
Like you try and do for the next album, and the next album, you’re just
trying to hone your songwriting skill, and you’re trying to relax more. With the more experience you get in
songwriting, the more relaxed you become, the influences that you have, and had
as a kid listening to music, you find bubbling to the surface. The kind of
smouldering, ballad-y type things, that’s the kind of music I love. Everyone knows I’m a huge Thunder fan, but
Thunder are so well liked for their ballads, as well as the energetic rock show
in a live sense. Dare I say it, they are
best liked for those rock ballads, the slower ones.”
Thunder
weren’t afraid to tell serious stories either, I suggest, thinking of the likes
of ‘Till The River Runs Dry’, which related a tale of domestic abuse.
“Yeah
of course,” Nimmo agrees. “Because
there’s a great lyrical content, that gets the platform to be showcased because
of the style of music that’s being played as well, and you hear that, and
there’s an emotional content because of how you can make it sound, as well as
the lyrical content that you’re able to put across, and it all pieces together. For us that’s just something that comes as a
natural thing – you can’t fake that, you can’t process that, because it’ll
never come across as true, it’ll never be real unless it is real.”
Tearing it all up –
The Red Devils
Most
King King fans probably know by now that the band is named after a 1992 live album
called King King, recorded by an LA outfit
called The Red Devils and featuring Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Mr Highway Man’, which the
KK boys also covered on Take My Hand. The Red Devils’ album was re-released a
couple of years ago, and I mention seeing that they’d been touring in Europe
earlier this year, with a Dutch guy called Big Pete taking the place of late
singer and harp player Lester Butler. So
I wondered what it was about the Red Devils that resonated with Nimmo.
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| The Red Devils in black and white |
“Do
you know what,” he says, “it was kind of like where King King are at the
moment. King King aren’t reinventing the
wheel here, we’re playing a classic style of music with a freshness. And I think that, in 1992, when I discovered
The Red Devils, that’s how I felt about that band. They were playing a classic style of blues
music, straight up blues, nothing overly fancy.
But they were doing it with a freshness that was absolutely necessary at
the time. They kinda just waltzed in, and just blew the whole of Europe away –
and then disappeared. Because
unfortunately the singer” - the aforementioned Lester Butler - “had died, and
it was no more. That guy was the front
man in that band and it was very difficult to replace him. And I think the reason they get away with it
now – Pete’s a great guy, and he’s great at his job – but I think it had to be
twenty odd years later before they could do that. I think they needed the gap, to come back,
and for the nostalgia as well, for it to work.”
Having
listened to the Red Devils album, I say I wouldn’t want to call them raw, but
they certainly grab it by the scruff of the neck.
“Yeah!”
he bursts in, scarcely letting me finish the sentence as he warms to the
subject. “It was raw though, that was what was great about it! It was raw, it was energetic – they managed
to evolve every song, every night. They
managed to do it in a way that you would hear ‘Automatic’ one night,” he says,
referring to the opening track on King
King, “and if you heard it another night it would take another path, but
still have the familiarity of being that song.”
He
must have seen them live a few times then, I say – and by now he’s really off
and running, words tumbling out as he recalls the experience.
“Aw,
they were fantastic man! I remember
watching them in King Tut’s man, and you can imagine in King Tut’s,” he says,
referring to King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, a basement club in Glasgow, “a tiny venue
with a band showing up and this guy was completely off his head, shouting
through this bullet mic, and then this band– the way they sparked up playing
something and then the way they managed to find that raw energy, to make it go
where they needed to make it go for themselves, as well as the audience. And it was because of that, they did it for themselves, that we went with them as an
audience – oh man, it’s just euphoric, it was tremendous. And there’s never really been a blues band
like that since. And of course, with it
just being the one album there, it just became this cult, iconic, underground
thing that came and went – they didn’t have a chance to spoil it by bringing
out a bunch of ordinary albums.”
And
then it’s time for Alan Nimmo to go off and lubricate his throat with a cup of
tea. But that burst of passion as he
talked about The Red Devils is telling.
“It was because of that, they did it for themselves, that we went with
them as an audience – oh man, it’s just euphoric, it was tremendous.” That sounds to me very like the kind of connection
Nimmo’s own band have generated with their fans. And it’s that passion that drives all the
hard work, and ensures that with Exile
& Grace King King are about to demonstrate again that they aren’t
making a bunch of ordinary albums either.
*I discovered later that what I thought was a flower is actually a Hamsa, otherwise know as the Hand of Fatima.
You can read Blues Enthused's appreciation of The Red Devils' King King album here.
