Part Two

Pete: It seems what the record company, Avex, is trying to do, whether they're misguided or not, I don't know, is do what Pete Waterman tried to do and recreate a Tamla Motown situation, where the record company gets a following, and the artists are just part of the record company.

And anything they put out as a record company, because they do a certain style of record, will be liked by the public at large and the record company will get followers.

I don't think it worked particularly well for Pete Waterman. I think it was still the artists that got the following, not PWL Records. But I think Avex are trying to emulate that. I might be wrong.

But it was an Avex rave. It was a strange situation, but we did what we were asked to do.

We were supposed to go and perform all our remixes, but they wanted live vocals, and then they wanted live vocals with tape, and at one point we didn't know what the hell they wanted. We had to do the stuff off the album with one remix, and they were very satisfied with it.

I don't know what to feel. It wasn't a disaster. It was just something that we did, and I'm on robot mode at the moment, just trying to get over there and do a proper tour with a live band which we've been putting together over the past few months. We've got two new musicians involved who are EXTREMELY competent musicians .

And it means we'll be able to go out and ditch the tape situation. If we get budgets that afford us sound people and the technical equipment that's necessary, I'm ready to move into a slightly different area.

Maybe I'm jumping the gun a bit, maybe Japan's not ready for us to do that. I have a suspicion we're going to have to go back and do some club dates, which I think would be a good idea, just to whip up the hysteria that we had. You know, up until the early 90's, we had a big hysterical following. We need to regenerate that somehow.

I'd be a bit afraid of going out there and doing big stadiums cold, you know.

Pat: How did you find the new musicians, Pete, how did that come about?

Pete: By accident. I met one at a club. He brought a friend along. It was nothing exciting, but he was extremely experienced in playing keyboards. I like to do things acoustically, and he has the ability to do that.

When we were writing the stuff for Fragile, we had no musicians involved. It was just me and Steve messing around with keyboards to program things that I might sing. And it was really too stressful to continue to work like that.

But the new guy Cliff, he's particularly good. And he's a nice person, and you don't meet too many of those. And he's been treading water for awhile...It's early days yet. It might not work out. But I'm starting writing next week.

Pat: Great.

Pete: Whether that's for a new album, I don't know. I don't know what will happen with Avex, whether they've ever going to actually say, "Right, we want twelve new tracks now. "

Because it seems like they just want to keep remixing old stuff. And I have a feeling they're going to want to do another album, like "Fragile 2", with six old tracks, like "Come Home", "Baby Don't Say Goodbye", and stuff like that, re-recorded, and probably add six tracks to it.

I suppose it takes some strain off us creatively, but I wonder how long......actually, we've got a lof of material to re-record and remix. And maybe it will get heard by more people next time around.

Pat: Well, I was going to say that they might be on to something here, because I know a British band called the Nightcrawlers, who are friends of a friend of mine. They had a song called "Push the Feeling On", which didn't really hit until somebody in New York named MK took it and remixed it.

And really, the song was completely different by the time it was remixed. But, it did so well as a remix, it launched that group and enabled them to go on and do other things. And if that's the way it's gonna work...if it gets the thing going, I'm for it, quite frankly.

Pete: Yeah, I am, too. Usually, I just stamp my foot and say "No way, we've got to do new stuff". But I realise some of the stuff hasn't really been heard.

I mean, there is material I still love on "Fan the Flame" that needs re-recording and editing down, with some of the more meandering areas taken out, and re-recorded in a different style and brought more up to date, with better vocals.

It's like editing off the rubbish and the frills that made it too middle aged. There''s stuff on there I'd like to re-record and redo. They were some of the best songs. So maybe they are on to something. It's just that we're still in that awful area of communication problems, because there is a huge language barrier between us.

And they can make themselves understood when they want something, but we can't make ourselves understood when WE want something.

Pat: Yeah, it's funny how it works that way, isn't it?

Pete: Yeah, but they've really been no problem. There was one hiccup last year when there were some club PA's booked. But nobody had asked us about them. And it was not gonna happen. You have to establish your ground rules to some degree.

It's not as though we've turned into wet wimps about it. I just think that they have thought this out, they're investing money in this. They've spent some serious money on these remixes. They've had them done in next to no time. And I rejected a whole bunch of them, they had them remixed again, and I rejected them a third time, and they've got to pay for all that stuff, you know.

And I'm thinking, it's quite nice in this day and age that someone's willing to pay for an entire album. If they had just taken one or two tracks off Fragile and put them on compilations, which they're doing anyway, because Avex is like THE compilation album specialist...

Pat: Like K-Tel, or something.

Pete: Yeah. If they just paid for just one or two, I'd think "Oh well, nothing much is going to happen." But because they paid for the entire album to be done, and we're thinking, "Oh, we'd really like to put two more songs on it, but I don't want to upset the applecart at the moment". Because on the one hand I can feel really negative and think, ok that's it, we're fucked, we're not going to get on with them.

And on the other hand, I think, "Don't rock the boat and see what happens." Let the natural process take its turn.

TO BE CONTINUED...

(c) Copyright 2001 Pat Geary. Not to be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.