Gazza interview

Gazza very much on the subject of one certain Mr. Becker...

Interviewers: Brian Sweet and Dave Edney.

Published September and October 1989

It was one of those occasions -- China Crisis were on tour and we were supposed to be interviewing Eddie Lundon and Garry Daly, but it was midway through the tour and Garry had fallen foul to a froggy throat.

Consequently their tour manager introduced us to bass player, depty and (it transpired) all-around nice bloke Gazza Johnson who was left with the dubious task of trying to answer our questions.

We parked ourselves in the hotel lobby, only for our conversation to be punctuated by reversing waste trucks with hooters blaring, stiletto heels marching purposefully across the marble-effect floor and the overheard cheery greetings from the three hotel receptionists at the desk.

Is Walt a hard taskmaster in the studio?

He can be, yeah. I remember once doing Flaunt I was four hours doing a bass track and we got to the end of it and he just said, "We'll leave that and maybe come back and have another go at it tomorrow." I was gutted, you know.

You know what they used to say about drivers, when they get behind the wheel they change; Walter was like that. Once he gets behind the mixing desk he takes no prisoners. But he was a lot more relaxed on the new album mainly because he was at home and he'd worked with us before.

Is he particularly hard on the vocalist?

Not really, because he's got a lot of respect for Garry. They way that he tends to work it is he goes a lot for composites -- doing about three or four tracks and piecing them together and seeing what he's got. And then doing another three or four tracks, and he has the track sheets actually out there and the ones that he likes where he's got a word there he'll underline that and keep on going until he's got a full track.

Did he go his own way after you'd finished recording or did he socialize with you as well?

Usually once we'd finished he tended to get off then. When we did Flaunt we were in Sussex so we'd just go back to the cottage he was staying in and listen back to what we'd done that day.

He's just like an observer more than anything else; he reads loads of books and for Christmas we all went home -- we had two days off, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day -- and we invited Walter to come back to Liverpool with us and he just said, "Oh no, I'll just feel even more out of it." So he went to London and stayed in a hotel and just went to the movies.

What other contemporary groups does he admire?

He gets a lot of stuff in. He's really curious about lots of things, anything that he sees that he can pick up on. When we were there he had a Sugarcubes album sent over.

Does he have a big record collection?

Yeah, a lot of jazz.

Has Walter inspired the members of China Crisis to go out and investigate any particular jazz artists?

Garry had been listening to Benny Goodman around the house and when I got over there I started picking Walter's brains and he gave me this Sonny Rollins CD, and I'd ask him about this and he'd say, "Yeah, go out and look for this, look out for that."

Did you originally intend to have Walter produce some tracks, and then Mike Thorne the others?

No, the thing with Walter is he approaches everything as a complete project, which isn't necessarily the way the record company looks at it. The record company had definite ideas on potential singles.

We wondered if it was coincidence that St. Saviour's Square and Red Letter Day, the first two singles from the album, were both produced by Mike Thorne?

Actually, single releases have a lot to do with... it's not just the band, there's the management...

You don't necessarily choose the singles yourselves?

It depends really. You can get involved, but at the end of the day, you want to get the record company totally behind you. They canvass everybody from radio promotion people through to marketing people, and even the reps go around and canvass in the shops.

Were you under any pressure to include anything on this LP that had commercial potential as far as the charts go?

Record companies are always looking at that. It's the easiest way for them to market the album. If you've got a couple hit singles on the album, it actually takes the album along with it. Whereas if you don'thave the hit singles, they've got to start thinking laterally, of different ways to market the band to sell the album.

The easiest one all the time is going to be the hit singles, so that's what they tend to go for.

What was a typical Hawaiian studio day?

Mainly it started around one/two o'clock and we'd work through until about nine, because had his girlfriend and kids. We'd get one day a week off.

Very stable working hours -- it wasn't like you were going in whenever inspiration took over.

It depends if you were having a bit of difficulty over something. If something wasn't working, then maybe you'd leave a bit earlier, or if something was going really well, then you'd carry on a bit later.

Isn't Connie Reed who did some background vocals on the album Roger Nichols' wife?

Yeah. Roger's a real audiophile and he's got incredible equipment at home so she does songs of her own at home.

Was that part of the reason why you went to Village Recorders in L.A., because Roger Nichols is obviously very familiar with that studio?

We worked with Roger in the Village Recorder and that was partly because Walter didn't think they could really mix in Hawaii, so they wanted to go and do it in L.A. They looked around a few places, and they had to try and get a good price. They knew the people at Village really well and they knew what the room sounded like, too.

You spent about eight weeks doing Flaunt The Imperfection, but four months on Diary of a Hollow Horse. Did you plan to spend longer on this record?

Because Walter said after Flaunt The Imperfection that he enjoyed doing it for that very reason. He had eight weeks and he said he had serious anxiety towards the end because he wanted to put some percussion on the album but time was running out.

Was that partly the reason you dook longer over this one?

No, it was just we actually did preproduction over there in the studio and it was just the way it worked out. We spent 10 weeks doing Flaunt and 12 weeks in Maui and then two weeks in L.A. We went over by about two or three weeks on this one, so it was never preplanned that we were gonna take longer. Walter had a fixed idea -- he thought we might even finish early.

Was he the first person to work on it?

Yeah, Mike Thorney did the three tracks at the end. We did those in November/December. Walter didn't feel too happy about the idea of being told to come up with singles -- keep an eye onthe singles. He wasn't too happy about that idea, because he likes looking at it as a whole project. It's an album, and that's what he does.

Did you do an album's worth of songs with Walter?

Yeah. We did them again just to see how they would sound -- if the stuff Mike Thorne produced hadn't turned out to be as good as the Walter versions, we would've used the Walter ones.

I notice on Walter's production numbers there's additional musicians, for instance Tim Weston who was once with Dr. Strut.

Tim was the studio gopher on the tape op on I think it was the first Steely Dan album.

He was on Countdown to Ecstasy. He got a namecheck on it anyway. Is Walter still writing songs, do you know? Because after Flaunt he said he was inspired to go out and get a drum machine and a little four-track tape.

Yeah, he's got stuff set up in the house.

This was George Benson's studio you used, wasn't it?

Yeah, in Maui. Lahaina Sound.

Have you any idea how Walter's going to use the material he's writing in the future?

I don't know. That's the funny thing when it comes to business, he keeps it all under his hat. I know they had a little period where Walter was in touch with Donald and Donald came over to Hawaii and he couldn't stand Hawaii.

He wouldn't go into it and he's not the kind of bloke that you push him on it. Because he'd just run you around the houses and just lose you and sort of change the subject.

Does Garry write the lyrics first and then you put the music to them after?

It's a very flexible working arrangement, really. Sometimes somebody'll come up with some chords or a riff and then we'll just sort of build on that and Garry'll sing along and just work something out.

But then he always has lyrical ideas that he carries around with him. He takes a diary around and writes lines down and things that come into his head.

Which one of your songs has given you the most satisfaction?

(long pause) I think one of the most successful ones that we've ever done was when we did You Did Cut Me with Walter. I think we were all very happy with that one.

What about on the new LP -- anything that stands out?

It's very difficult when you've just finished an album, you need to distance yourself from it for a bit before you can start to be objective about it.

Do you still listen to your old material?

Oh yeah. What you tend to do is you never listen to it before you go into record or before you start your writing period because it influences whatever you're gonna do. The only time we maybe do it is after we finish recording the album -- we listen to all the other ones and see how that one fits in with the previous ones.

Was it Walter who suggested you go to Hawaii? I heard Eddie saying it was because of the cheap rates.

Walter originally said he wouldn't come back over to England. The record company wanted him to work here but he said no, it's too much to be separated from his girlfriend for that amount of time again, but what he didn't mind was working in Los Angeles.

He and Roger wanted to work digitally, so he said there's a place down the road from where I live on Maui that we might be able to get, so he went down there. Apparently, it's hardly ever used and the idea of a three-month block booking meant he could get a good rate on it. As well as that the exchange rate was really good, and seeing as none of us live in London -- we all live in diverse places all over the country -- we would've been living in London hotels so you may as well be staying in a condo in Hawaii for the same price.

The record company ummed and aahed and said, "Let's see some figures on it" and Walter came back with a good price and they had to say, "Ok, then, go" and the final parting word was "We don't want to see any great suntans when you get back."

Did you find it difficult to get down to work over there?

No. With having one or two days off, it made it easier. Sometimes you felt like we should have been working harder, but sometimes we thought it's going a bit slow so why don't we forget about the day off. But Walter always said, "Don't worry, it's all going OK."

Did he deliberately reduce his playing contributions to a minimum, because he was only on two tracks?

Yeah, he did have a guitar solo, but he got Tim to replace it. It was very strange...

Apparently, he's very slow doing a solo, isn't he? One bar an hour.

I don't know. We can only compare it with when we worked with him before. Roger actually reckoned he should put the solo on for the stamp, but Walter didn't seem to be confident about it, so he got Tim to replace it.

Which track was this?

Sweet Charity in Adoration.

I thought there was more use of saxes and flutes on Diary of a Hollow Horse than your previous album. Was that down to Walter?

Yeah, it was funny, actually, because there was gonna be brass parts on it and Walter had somebody flying over to Hawaii to do the charts, but the bloke couldn't make it. Walter just came in and said, "I see this as a sign from God. There ought to be no brass parts on this album, there'll just be sax solos."

So he said all the brass parts will be played by keyboards and that was it, so we rang up Jim Horn, who Roger had worked with before on John Denver stuff, and he came over and doubled on recorder and Walter said, "Just bring everything and we'll just see how it goes." It's very much the way Walter will work sometimes -- just try and keep things flexible.

How responsible is he for the arrangements on the album, because they're credited between yourselves and Walter?

When we'd demoed this album the record company were coming up with different ideas of people to work with -- it's very difficult at the moment to get a producer who thinks the way that we do, because they tend to use a lot of samples and drum machines now.

We just use acoustic drums, that's the way we go. Walter heard the demos and he rang Ed, because we'd had a few people whose names were tossed in the hat, and we were hanging around for something like six weeks waiting for people to come back with answers, but we didn't get any, so a couple of us said the least we can do is send a tape to Walter to see what he thinks about them.

So we sent the tape off and Walter came back and said he loved it. He thought we were playing great, thought the arrangements were great, just a little bit of fiddling around here and there needed. He was really keen -- wanting to do it.

What other names were mentioned?

What record company people tend to do is pull out a copy of Music Week, see what's in the Top Fifty, see who produced it and then they start ringing round.

Walter's producing Rickie Lee Jones' album now, isn't he?

He was gonna start it as we were leaving, he was gonna take a month off and then he was gonna go over and talk to her. But all the time we were there he was trying to keep it under his hat. They were going to do it in Los Angeles, but they were searchin' around for a studio at the time.

If you're having such difficulty finding a producer who thinks they way you do, do you think it's likely you'll do another album with him?

You can only say that when they next album comes around, we'll see how we feel, talk about it. We definitely wouldn't exclude it, because it's the first time we've gone back to a producer.

How did you come to work with him first of all back in 1985?

Respect, more than anything else. I remember the first day that he came over, we heard the car pull up and we were rehearsing in Barwell Court. He got out and as he came in through the door I was trying to play, because you've gotta try and impress, but it was really difficult because my hands were shaking. But what happened was: we were touring with Working With Fire and Steel and we were in Warner Bros.' Burbank offices having lunch and they were talking about the next album saying "Did we have any idea who we wanted to work with?" and Eddie said, "Oh yeah, we want to work with somebody from Steely Dan.

And he was thinking at the time Gary Katz or Michael Omartian or somebody like that. And so they said, "Yeah, Michael Omartian's a big fan" and they put the feelers out to see what's going on. We went back and started working on the songs for Flaunt.

We spent the whole of the summer doing that, and somebody rang up from Virgin and said we've had this inquiry from Warner Bros., they want to know if you're interested in working with Walter Becker. We said yes, great. We didn't think it would get that far, but he came over and he met us and apparently he was nearly as nervous as we were, because he'd never worked with anybody else and hadn't done anything for four or five years.

Do you know what songs or what particular album it was that convinced him to work with you?

Fire and Steel. He liked the titles, and when he heard it there was a song on it called Papua, which is a real jaunty pop song with a little sequencer thing going through it, but it's actually about nuclear holocaust. We said Garry doesn't want to make the mistake of having a little pop tune with serious lyrics, because it detracts and Walter turned around and said, "I thought that was brilliant, the way you did that. That was the work of genius." He likes all that kind of stuff.

He was quoted as saying after Flaunt the Imperfection that he was attracted to China Crisis because the lyrics didn't make any sense!

(smiling ruefully) He said apparently that's the way that Donald used to do it. They'd go in and he'd just sing impromptu lyrics, just to get the feel of the vocal down. They didn't really seem to make much sense -- it was just the rhythm and the meter of them that mattered more than anything, but sometimes, no matter how obtuse they were, they'd just leave them in, because you just got used to the sound of them after a while.

Some of the session musicians who have worked with Steely Dan in the past remarked what a strange fellow Walter seemed to be. Did you have any experiences which would confirm that?

Not really. I think he's a brilliant fellow, I think he's really great.

Walter had some personal problems in the early part of the Eighties. He said if he hadn't got out of New York when he did he'd be dead by now.

He said that about Los Angeles when we first met him. When he was flying across country he tried at the time not to fly via Los Angeles, he always tried to get a flight via San Francisco. He said if I do get into Los Angeles and there's a bit of a stopover I try not to leave the airport. It was a dangerous place, he thought.

Donald and Walter always professed to hate living in L.A. It's funny, when we were working with him in Sussex he didn't really drink alcohol, and we went out one night to Brighton to see Durutti Column, and it was really strange because I went over and got a bottle of Newcastle Brown, and he looked at it and went "Newcastle Brown, my favorite" and he got a bottle too. I didn't think he drank anything at all. He wasn't a fanatic about it or whatever, he'd just have one bottle, maybe two bottles and that'd be it, he'd be perfectly happy and stay out.

We went to a club afterwards and we were really drunk and he was quite happy standing there talking and listening to us talking complete rubbish. A good bloke.

Has he ever said anything to you about the real reasons why he and Donald split up?

No, he didn't really talk about it. You get a little bit more about it when he's with Roger. I mean Roger's that kind of a guy, Roger's always the one for the storytelling.

Does Roger still teach scuba diving?

Yeah, he taught all of us. We all qualified as divers. Roger would take us out in the mornings before we started work.

He's a bit of a case, a complete one-off is Roger.

Eddie made a comment recently about your disappointment at the lack of singles success and he said your time will come. Have you set yourself a timespan within which to achieve that success?

Not really. The whole thing about it is when we finished the last album we were a bit disappointed about Arizona Sky not doing the business, and there were a couple of other songs on there that we thought could have done a bit more, but the encouraging thing was we got bigger in America. The last album did quite well in the States and we've just had a really favorable response to Diary of a Hollow Horse in Billboard, which is really good.

Have you found that since working with Walter, especially in America, that there have been more people listening to your stuff because of the Steely Dan connection?

It's funny actually, 'cause they don't make so much of it over there. The one disappointment was we were with Warner's when Flaunt came out -- we're with A&M now -- and Warner's, despite it being their idea to work with Water, in the end just couldn't find a peg to hang the record on. We spoke to Walter about it and he said he was disappointed with Warner's because they had just done a crap job on the album. In America the record company people make very little of the Steely Dan thing.

What is your following like in America?

The problem that we had beforehand was that Warner's weren't too keen, didn't know what to make of us really.

Because they signed us as part of a package and their original publicity photo said that we were Scottish. They knew that much about us; I think they bought us in a great big bargain bin with The Smiths and a couple of others. We turned up and there was five of us and they were really shocked, they thought there was only two. So that's the only way we can judge it, because we only feel like we started to get a fair crack of the whip on the last album with A&M, you see.

A lot of people we spoke to said that Flaunt the Imperfection was only really available on import half the time, because Warner's weren't following it up.

Are you planning on going to America and touring?

Oh, yeah. You tend to find that you do well in certain mediums just because it's based on radio play, so you'll get to Kansas City and there'll be maybe 150 people there, then you go up the road to Minneapolis and there'll be perhaps 2,000.

We get to New York and we're always good for a lot of tickets in New York. It's one thing that we notice is that people tend to be more interested in the Steely Dan thing here in England, you don't get asked that much about it in the States. I think, that with them being American and all that, they like what they perceive to be a little pop group from Liverpool, who suddenly start taking on this strange pseudo-American kind of thing. Whereas in the States, that's what they're used to -- we're actually seen in a different light, 'cause they didn't go through the Christian, Wishful Thinking thing. We're seen as a new band over there.

Does that concern you that they pick up on the Steely Dan thing more over here? One or two reviews I've read of the LP mention that if you take away the vocals then it sounds just like Steely Dan, which I don't agree with.

I can't hear that at all. The only thing is a lot of producers tend to put layer upon layer upon layer, whereas what Walter tends to do, and one thing that we learned from him -- which maybe was why he didn't have to do so much arranging on this album -- is that before you actually put anything on tape... pay a great deal of attention to the drums and the bass and make sure it's right, then you don't need layer upon layer, and that's why there's a distinctiveness between the Mike Thorne stuff and the Walter stuff on the album.

Does he start with the drums and the bass, get the rhythm track down?

No, he gets everybody playing together.

That's surprising, I thought Steely Dan used to do it track by track.

No, they used to work with bands. They used to get a full line-up there, that's what we were talking to him about -- they used to get a full group in and they'd sit there and would work out who they wanted and then they'd ring up the people -- usually the rhythm section, bring a guitarist in, a piano player, bass player and drummer and sit there and work at it and see if they were happy with the rhythm track and then get to the end of that.

If it worked, great, if it didn't they'd just go and get a whole new rhythm section and they'd come in and do it, but they used to do it one song at a time.

They used to write with specific players in mind, so for instance, they'd write a song with Steve Gadd in mind for the drums or Tom Scott for the sax...

That's what he told us. We were talking about Aja one day, 'cause we had this drummer who had this apocryphal story about if you sat close enough you could hear Steve Gadd dropping his stick during the middle of the drum break of Aja. Walter said, "Look, he doesn't even miss a beat" and he nearly fell off his chair; he said it was complete rubbish, he said if he'd done that they would have stopped it...

Aja was a second take, I think, wasn't it?

It was actually a cross-cut, but you can't hear it. It's two different takes put together, but it's something like the first and second or second and third. Kevin's the only drummer ever to have a complete first take accepted. It was on Strength of Character, and Walter had to listen to it for five days first before accepting it! He said if it ever got out, people in Los Angeles would think he was going soft.

After Flaunt the Imperfection, Musician magazine dubbed China Crisis "an intriguing, upbeat hybrid of Dire Straits and Haircut 100." Have you ever heard that one before?

(laughing) No, it's really strange the way anybody'll go to incredible lengths to pigeonhole you.

We noticed you haven't been doing any promotional interviews in the British music press. Is that because you won't talk to them or because they don't ask?

They haven't asked. I think the thing is with the MM and NME is they tend to have editorial policies. I remember we did an interview for Sounds a few years ago, and he took all these photos and because it was Sounds we really hammed it up. And Eddie did this photograph with a double-barrelled shotgun and when we saw the photographer a few weeks later, he thought it was brilliant, he thought this is the last thing anybody'll expect, really good.

When we saw him again about three months later we said why hadn't you used the photograph, 'cause they just used the stock promo photos. He said the editor just said we can't put them in the paper. Nobody'll believe it's them. So that's what they did. They do have a fixed editorial policy...

If they don't like you, it doesn't matter what you do they're gonna take you apart.

That was the biggest surprise -- that we actually got a really good review in the NME -- we were just sort of poook!

Walter said that he considered that Steely Dan developed such a perfectionist attitude in the studio that it became more of a problem than a solution. Is that something that you want to guard against?

We don't actually guard against it, we just work different ways. It's like with Stranger By Nature, that was actually started by Walter. We did the bass and drums and Tim did some guitar and we had that as a backing track, but it became a bit of a thorn in Walter's side and he just didn't want to finish it.

We took it back and maybe just because we've got a more open attitude we put everything else on it in about two days and we were perfectly happy with it. So you know sometimes Walter would drive himself like a dog chasing his tail to find something he's happy with. Whereas we've got more of an open attitude, so as ourselves, I don't think we could have that same addiction to perfection.

Walter said after Flaunt the Imperfection that he thought the songs were good but would benefit from being enriched a little; "adding a little dissonance" as he put it. Has he offered you songwriting advice?

Well, if anything Garry might have benefited a bit from it, 'cause at the time of Flaunt, Garry was doing all the keyboards, 'cause we didn't have a keyboard player and we got a session player in. Walter said he came into a room and "there were these people playing songs with three-note chords, so what I did was just went over and put the fourth finger in." That's maybe what he's done more, but we've got Brian playing keyboards now. Garry'll come up with simple chordal arrangements and we'll just work around it.

Another one he mentioned was Gift of Freedom, which he said sounded like Miles Davis from his '60s' Kind of Blue period, and he said he added some synth figures at the end of it. Does Garry listen to Miles Davis?

He does now. He never used to then. You see the actual whole thing with the song was originally me and Ed, and it was just like a riff that we did in Ed's bedroom one day. Ed had a guitar, so we just doubled it with the bass then started putting chords over the top and did a little bit of guitar over the top, so that was one of the ones that went into Flaunt with the bare bones of its structure, not a completed song.

The main thing that Walter did with that was the brass and chord voicings and then they keyboard player that we were using came in and put a little bit more rhythm into the keyboard parts. I remember he had the brass people down -- the Kick Horns -- and they all turned up and were all really excited about working with Walter.

They all naturally went to their first instruments and went through all the arrangements that Ed had worked out. Walter didn't like any of them at all. He said they were too predictable and the first thing he did was find out what each of the four of them played as a second instrument, which meant that the trombonist would play a flute and the trumpeter went onto flugelhorn.

They found it a real education, because they'd never ever thought of a different voicing at all -- they just usually went for the straight two saxes, a trumpet and trombone.

Are you all self-taught musically?

Yeah, well Brian got a basic classical education, that's all.

Does Walter need a lot of prompting to talk about Steely Dan?

Yeah. When we were doing Flaunt I used to go swimming with Walter 'cause I used to get up earlier in the morning and I used to go down into Hastings to the pool, then go for something to eat and he'd drive back and I'd just sit there picking his brains and rabbiting away, trying to get bits and pieces out of him. But there's certain areas that he doesn't really go into.

If you talk to him about specific things hell come up with things, but mainly it's a helluva lot easier with Roger around, 'cause Roger'll bring it up. Him and Roger'll just sit there and say "Remember when..." and that's just the way that they do it, but it's sort of funny. They just sit there, the two of them, behind the desk and you can actually sit there earwigging.

Can you recall any stories?

I don't know, there's so many of them. Tons of them.

What are Walter's ambitions now? He seems to be just coasting along and doing the odd production project.

I think that's very symptomatic of the island of Maui, though. He's got a great house over there, he's really happy with his family...

He's financially secure; hasn't he got anything that's driving him on?

I think he just sees it in terms of projects. I think the whole idea of any kind of world domination is completely gone now.

As he said compact disc has been very, very kind to him. As I say, it's very symptomatic of the whole of the island of Maui, it's an unbelievably laid-back lifestyle.

He said that in the Musician article. I've got my "groovy lifestyle" as he put it on the island, but I wondered if after four years the urge was returning?

Maybe. He was perfectly happy working with us, but one day he was saying he makes sure he gets at least one month a year, or two months, off Maui. He said if he has one or two projects a year he's quite happy. Because he's more interested in leisure and free time. I don't think he wants to go back full-tilt into music.

What does he do for relaxation?

Boogie board surfing. He gave us a couple of boogie boards.

It's hard to imagine the Walter Becker of old boogie board surfing.

That's one of the things that he said that Donald hated about Hawaii. You get out into the water and all that.

I think this is perhaps where they diverge.

Apparently, Donald's a real New York freak. Walter doesn't like the idea of being in New York, and Donald doesn't like the idea of being over there.

So the Steely Dan reformation is unlikely to happen, then.

Probably. One great thing ... when Donald turned up on the island with his girlfriend, Walter said he had these big chests full of books and records 'cause they thought they were turning up on some desert island. "So just in case they brought their culture with them."

There's another funny thing I remember that happened. Last time we played in Los Angeles, Ed and Brian met Jeff Baxter and he walked into the gig and came down for the soundcheck. He was really strange, 'cause he had long ponytails and he was wearing a policeman's uniform.

Apparently he's an ace marksman and he teaches L.A. policemen sharp-shooting. But when he found out Walter was coming to the gig he said he didn't want to be around, so he buggered off and Walter said if he'd thought that Jeff Baxter was coming to the gig he wouldn't have come down.

What was the reason for that?

I don't know. It's really strange, because the first time Walter came over we were looking for studios and we went down to Ridge Farm. Box of Frogs were there and Walter said, "I'm not too sure about this studio." Ed said Box of Frogs are in here. Jeff Baxter's with them, isn't he?" And Walter turned around and said, "Jeff Baxter's here?" He listed his head, sniffed the air and shook his head, "Jeff Baxter's not here."

Final question, on Gaucho there was this infamous story about this track which was accidentally erased. An engineer erased a finished track at the time and ...

Oh yeah, Roger started laughing and Walter started holding his head and going "Oh, no, no, no" -- it was like don't talk about the war. But once it had been erased they tried to redo it, but they never could, and they just decided that God moves in mysterious ways.

They were gutted because both Gary Katz and Roger said it was everyone's favorite tune on the album at the time. In one article they said it would have been the title track. That's what he said -- it was one of those ones that went like a dream, no problems, they just through it.

Walter seems to be a great believer in fate. That song was not supposed to be on the album because it was accidentally erased and you mentioned about the brass earlier. Is he superstitious?

I think he just -- for all his thing about perfectionism -- thinks it's as well leaving some things to chance. Sort of keeping an open mind.

By then our time was up and all that was left was to thank Gazza for talking to us and wish him well for the gig later that night.