“I think of myself as a magician”

Medicine Head, Box Of Frogs, British Lions

Interviewed by Eddy Bonte 

 

John, if we go back in time from now to the early days, how would you describe your career?

John Fiddler:
To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever thought of myself as someone who has a career, I never had that in mind. I just do things creatively and it stretches from visual arts to music and poetry. I’ve  always thought of myself as a journeyman. Obviously I do have a ‘career’, it’s just I never thought of it like that personally, that's how others see me. So many people have documented what we’ve done over the years and I’m happy to still be writing, recording, creating, so I do have a kind of career (laughs). It’s  just my nature to think of myself as a creative person. I don’t play every day, but when I do  I’m so excited  by it, I love to pick up a guitar and play and  wow, that’s just how I how want to feel about things, fresh!  I think that’s why I get so many comments  from people saying how ‘fresh’ our music from years and years ago still sounds and that’s a fabulous thing. I think it’s essentially due to that feeling. The paramount  thing is to make a great vibe, a great feel on something and make everything work from that and forget about the technicalities. Make the heart feel good. I guess what you’re trying to achieve is not to be someone who’s here one day and gone the next. I always think about “the Now” you know, I’m here this moment and here I am doing something, and the next moment I’m doing something again. It’s a bit Zen-like in a way , but I love that, it allows me to be in my place. 
 

FRIENDS AND LOVERS

Was that your philosophy when you started out? Somehow, your hits were almost hits by mistake.

John Fiddler:
Not thinking consciously about any philosophy, but yeah, totally, we had a lot of luck too. You can do something,, but you need luck –  Albert King covered the “Bad luck” aspect! We’ve been lucky from the very start. But also, you have to realize, we put the work in, the sweat, the hard, tough times, we did a lot of breaking down doors, literally, gate-crashing places and say ’Can we play?’, arriving at clubs, gigs, before anyone got there, set up our little bit of  equipment and either be asked or allowed to stay and play, or be thrown out (laughs heartily) because we had told the door guy we were  Jethro Tull or some band, then Tull, or some band would arrive, and obviously we were not them! So we made a lot of luck as well, by being assertive and making things work, making things happen. We also had a lot of help from Friends and Lovers!

When we started, John Peel was very influential. We needed to be heard somehow, we needed some kind of recognition, because what’s the point of playing  on the couch? I like to play for people. If only we could get recognized, that was what we needed to be. John Peel was playing locally one day so we gate-crashed the place saying we were the headline band, we weren’t , and when the headline band did arrive, they were up in arms about it, but, we were able to stay and play!.

But you had made your point.

John Fiddler:
Yeah, they said ‘OK’, they kind of liked the idea we gate-crashed the place! John heard us for about a minute, but he liked what he heard and saw and gave us his address and said ‘Send me a tape’. That was the famous kitchen tape we did in mono on an old tape recorder, but the feeling was so intense, Peel played it to John and Yoko, Eric Clapton, Pete Townsend and people like that. John and Yoko went crazy for it, they loved it. You could touch the feeling on this recording and Lennon sort of insisted that Peel signed us and should release the tape as it is, in Plastic Ono Band fashion, or like The Velvet Underground, the real nitty gritty, the real deal. And he did release it, that’s how we started off. I think the connection was the feeling, the whole idea of what I try to do is to stay within the feeling and to express and share that’.
John Peel's friendship and influence was enormously important to us. I can't thank him enough. Peace and Love to you John.

PETER HOPE-EVANS

You’ve released several solo albums over the years. What is it that you do now?

John Fiddler: 
I do a lot of solo stuff,  also Medicine Head/John Fiddler.  I’m  gonna try some new things.  There’s a friend of mine in the US, Joe Harless, who manufactures the Shaker microphones,  which in fact are harmonica microphones  where you get  a real individual sound.  I said to Joe I wanted to  have that microphone on a harness, so I can get that electric sound  of the harmonica and play the guitar at the same time. So he made me the prototype of this thing and I’ll be using it in the future. I’ll put a mic on the floor by my foot like John Lee Hooker, the electric harmonica and the guitar, it will be fun!’.

Apart from the fact that you’re playing solo and not as a duo or a duo with extra players, do you sound any different from the 1973-74 Medicine Head period?

John Fiddler:
I should first point out that the other half of Medicine Head, Peter Hope-Evans, was massive. He was huge. I sang, played harmonica, bass drum, hi hat and guitar, Peter also played harmonica and percussion and things like that. He was a very big presence, we made a lot of noise for two people, a huge  amount of noise!  We always shocked people, but in a good way.  There were times when Peter couldn’t make it to gigs, if he was sick or something, but I would do the gigs anyway, as a sort of one-man band. So, for me what I do as a solo artist now has always been part of what I do, I do quite a few things at the same time. Some people ask me ‘What do you do in your spare time then?’ ha ha!

Peter is a fantastic harmonica player, and has been an enormous influence on me, and it’s sad we don’t work together any more but that’s how things go sometimes. Things grow and change through the years. The only constant thing is change (laugh).

 

RETURN OF THE BUFFALO

Can you comment a little on a few more recent recordings?

John Fiddler:
In the nineties, I put out an album titled ‘Return of the Buffalo’, which was re-released with bonus tracks as ‘The Big Buffalo’. The record really is about the return of the buffalo! Though not in a fanatical way, I‘ve always been interested in and concerned about the plight of the Native American Indian, the way they’ve been treated, treated so disgustingly bad. I’ve always tried to share and spread the love and the peace about people who are disadvantaged  and they’re one of them. It’s a racist/greed/power situation and it breaks my heart. In a way, ‘Return of the Buffalo’ was a tribute to them, saying  ‘I waited and waited, waited so long , I’ll give  a personal demonstration of how to hang up your guns , I’m looking for lovers, searching for soul, and the return of the buffalo’.  I'm sort of trying  to bring people together and address things peacefully  in an appreciation of  a people who are almost wiped out and treated like dirt. ‘Return of the Buffalo’ is very significant for me. It was critically acclaimed, got five-star reviews, and well, it’s still available.

More recently I put out an album amusingly  titled ‘Fiddlersophical’.  People sometimes tell me I talk philosophically.  While I was doing a nationally syndicated show for National Public Radio in the US about my ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ album, which I released before Pink Floyd's album, I was asked what was the title of my new album. I had been playing around with words (again!!), joining ‘fiddler’ and ‘philosophical’ and out came ‘Fiddlersophical ‘. Again, that album’s been massively received critically, I wish it had sold as well! It’s still selling and the interest seems to grow rather than diminish. That album is also available with a holographic cover, only through my website store, www.john-fiddler.co.uk.  I’ve been living under the massive Arizona skies, and when I designed the cover for ‘Fiddlersophical ‘ I was thinking of these massive blue  skies and I imagined a huge question mark  up in the sky and in that question mark are thousands, perhaps an infinite number of question marks...   When the design was done, I sent a copy to my good friend  Jeff Robb , an artist working in three-dimensional imaging who’s  becoming very popular and making some waves now. He decided he wanted to make a lenticular hologram of the cover artwork’.  Thank you Jeff! Check him out at www.jeffrobb.com.

Last year, some demos I’d done were put out as ‘State of the Heart’ and this one too was received well critically. That’s fantastic. I’m very lucky, people are very positive towards my work.

 

BRITISH LIONS

You were also in a band called British Lions which never made any waves on the Continent. Can you tell us what sort of band it was and how it came about?

John Fiddler:
Well, Peter (Hope-Evans) left Medicine Head a couple of times during the seventies, but in 1976 he decided that he was quitting and never coming back. So I finished  the remaining Medicine Head dates with help from Roger Saunders, who had been in the five-piece version of Medicine Head, and my wondrous friend Morgan Fisher, while I was thinking what to do next. Peter had said ‘You take the name, it’s yours anyway, do with it what you like’. We parted like that. I will always do Medicine Head shows.

So, Morgan Fisher is a very close friend and he’s a fantastic musician. He was the keyboardist with Mott The Hoople, toured with Queen ( check out http://www.morgan-fisher.com). After Ian Hunter left Mott the Hoople, they tried a thing called ‘Mott’ but that was unsuccessful. They wanted to do something else and during that time, Morgan was having dinner at my place, the phone kept ringing for Morgan, and I only later found out it was the guys from Mott pressing Morgan to convince me to join them! We called the new band British Lions, I wasn’t very keen on the name, but what do you do? If four guys out of five say it’s a great name, you go for it. We released two albums that were reasonably successful in the US where they entered the Top 50. We toured in the US, did some dates in the UK. We didn’t tour in Europe, I can only remember a TV show in Germany’.

 

YARDBIRDS aka BOX OF FROGS 

You were also in The Yardbirds for a while, only the band wasn’t called Yardbirds.

John Fiddler:
In 1984, that’s right. Historically, you have to go back to the time when I played with Peter (Hope-Evans) and one day we were introduced to Keith Relf, the singer with The Yardbirds. Keith actually produced ‘Pictures in the Sky’, Medicine Head’s very first hit. Keith became a very good, close friend, he actually moved his family, and lived next door to me in the Midlands. Keith also produced my Medicine Head album ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and played bass on it. Soon after this, everything changed for Keith, he formed a band called Armageddon and moved to the USA, and that’s when we lost touch. Tragically, in 1976,he passed away. Keith is the reference in this story. When the other Yardbirds wanted to reform the band after Keith’s passing, they contacted me, I think because of my connection with Keith, we were a bit like family. So Jim McCarty comes to me and says ‘We’re trying to put The Yardbirds together again’ (imitates McCarty’s accent) and we all go to Jeff Beck’s place  and play for a few hours and it all seemed to work. Everybody was happy and they wanted to make a new album. They asked me to join and be part of it. I think my songwriting was a big reason why they asked me too. I joined them and suggested we should change the name from The Yardbirds, out of respect and love for Keith. Everybody knew they were The Yardbirds, everybody knows Keith was the singer. So I suggested we change the name and after some consideration, they graciously  agreed. We called ourselves Box of Frogs, I don’t know who came up with that name. Anyway, we make that first album and it was really big in the US, so the record company wants us to tour there. We had the no. 1 rock track, the no. 1 rock album and heavy rotation on MTV. Plus, basically the music on that album is meant to be played live.

The record company was shouting and screaming for us to go on tour,  which was part of our contract. Our manager, Ernest Chapman, was ready to go, I was ready to go. Sadly the other guys said ‘No, we ain’t gonna tour’. I couldn’t understand why, we had an album that’s doing so well, and music that is made to be played live. We would’ve had a ball! I know they regretted it later. Either way, their refusal to tour changed everything.  Epic  Records had worked so hard to establish us, and were really disappointed by the guys’ decision not to tour. The second album is just miserable. Even though I co-wrote a lot for that album – I own 25% of both albums, but I left during the recording of the second album. Jeff Beck was there and they wanted Jeff to play on it and he said to me ‘John, are you still involved?’ I said ‘No, I’m not, I can’t do it’. And Jeff said ‘Thank god, let’s  go to the pub’. We went to the pub and that was that. Jeff didn’t play on it. It was so sad, because it was a beautiful  first album, we were a great writing team, we had good fun, we’re still friends. If only we had toured, the second album would have worked but instead it became  a ‘project’ you know. I’m not keen on that. We should’ve played gigs and come back with all that togetherness from playing on the road and made the second album after a while. Anyway, I think I was involved because of my relationship with Keith and here we were. It was fantastic though, I loved working with Jim McCarty and Paul Samwell-Smith and Chris Dreja. Paul gave me a credit for my contribution to the production of the album. Basically, among other things, I produced all of the guitar work, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Rory Gallagher, Steve Hackett, Dzal Martin etc. It was a great, really good, very positive time, except they wouldn’t tour,  the silly boys….

I suppose that more or less covers your recording career? Anything we’ve forgotten?

John Fiddler:
Not a whole lot I think. Well, I recorded an album with another friend of mine from the 70s, a guy named Scott Gorham from Thin Lizzy but that never got released. After The Yardbirds aka Box of Frogs, I just went into a sort of home & husband situation, raising the kids and all that, which was priceless! At the same time, you think ‘I should be on the road’.  Well, I started again in the late 80s and I’ve done a lot of gigs since. I’m 68 now and still do it, it’s great, why stop?’. 
 

COLOURED PICTURES

John, you’re not only a songwriter, a musician and a poet, on your website I discovered you’re  also  a graphic artist. Is this something recent?

John Fiddler:
I’ve always been involved in art. I went to the ‘compulsory’ art school for Rock 'n' Roll, but I wanted to be in the real world and not be subsidized by grants or anything, I wanted to stand on my own two feet, and I had no idea it was going to take me in the musical direction.  in fact, I don’t think of myself as a musician. In fact I like to tell people I’m a magician - I make people think I’m a musician. Anyway, in 2013 I lost my hearing, I went deaf, after forty-five years of making music. Music, it fills your heart with love, the joy it brings... I think I was, not sad, but I was wondering how I would replace music if my hearing could not be fixed’.  

I started making visual art again, some can be seen on www.thesoulcolouredpictures.com. I now have pieces on walls in USA, Europe and Australia.

Before I had the surgeries on my ears, I was wondering If I would ever play or sing on stage again. I was trying to play, and I could feel my voice resonating through my body, but the guitar was inaudible to me.

I’d been communicating with a guy called Alan Niven who had managed Guns N’ Roses, he’s an English guy living in Arizona, USA, and I was googling around and found this company called ‘Tru-B-Dor’. People often tell me I’m like a modern-day troubadour. After contacting Alan, I got a an email straight back, saying ‘This is amazing, we used to get stoned to you guys, when I was at Oxford, we'd get stoned to Medicine Head’. So this guy had managed Guns ‘N’ Roses and we start a dialogue and he says ‘Do you wanna do a benefit show over here?’. They’d had a huge fire and nineteen fire-fighters had died in that fire and the benefit show was for their families. I replied I was deaf, but yes, I wanted to do it. Alan asked ‘Can you do it?’ and I replied ‘Yes, I can do it’. So, I  went to Prescott, Arizona and played at the rodeo grounds there. The sound check was crazy! As I said, I could feel my voice resonating through my body, but my guitar sounded like  so small, so I kept asking the sound guys to turn up the monitors as high as they could. They did a great job. Afterwards, Alan told me he’d never heard monitors like it, so loud they almost blew his head off. Anyway, there were 4,000 to 5,000 people all singing my songs and this gave me faith. Following on from then, time has been devoted to my ears, reconstruction, surgery. In September 2014, I went to  Australia as I was asked to co-write an album and it was like test-driving the ears. I spent the time in the studio working on Rebeka Rain’s second album. I was invited to play a few songs at a festival where Rebeka was appearing, the promoters found out I was there, and asked if I would make a special appearance there, and play some of my songs. So I did, it was  successful, the ears stood up to it, it was like another door opening up.

 

LOVE & PEACE

John, when we started to correspond I noticed straight away you signed your messages with ‘Love and Peace’. I sometimes do that and I hadn’t seen anyone else doing it for a long, long time. Why do you find ‘Love and Peace’ important enough to sign your mails and messages?

John Fiddler: 
Eddy, It’s totally important, and when you see it is not ignored, people actually register it when you say ‘Peace and Love’, ‘Love and  Peace’. Whatever you say, like ‘Best Wishes’, say ‘Peace and Love’ as well,  because that’s what we need.  It’s not disposable,  it’s something everybody on this earth needs, we all need empathy, love and peace to help each other. Call me old-fashioned , but I love that’.

Eddy Bonte (redactie web site 23JUL2020)
Interview conducted by Eddy Bonte at the Cabbage Patch, Twickenham, and edited for publicaton on www.keysandchords.com, Januaruy 2016. This edit first pubkished on www.keysandchords.com,