URIAH HEEP STAND ACCUSED: JOHNNY WALLER GIVES EVIDENCE

Too much of today's rock music - and the wasteful rock journalism that attends it, almost smotheringly so - is concerned with myths. Not merely celebrating and enjoying the decaying fantasies of blood, thunder, magic and lust... but actively propping up their crumbling surrealism.

Why bother with the ambition of truth when, for an hour on stage each night, you can live out a pantomime of nightmare proportions, dreaming with tunnel vision and a narrow mind?

Rock bands, rock musicians, rock journalists - they all glory in this extravagant conspiracy of delusion, chortling with delight at its golden greatness. Anything to escape the tarnished reality of everyday life for a few fleeting moments. And so, URIAH HEEP ARE GUILTY - but their plunderous innocence betrays not a sense of cynical ruthlessness in exploitation, but rather a childish indulgence in pursuit of fun-seeking hedonism to the full.

The rock industry feeds the bands, managers, journalists and hangers-on - and it expects cowed loyalty in return. You never bite the hand that feeds. This is why people with big mouths and strong hearts are often encouraged to keep quiet about the injustices they see. There is a lot of money in the rock industry and money talks a lot louder than social conscience.

URIAH HEEP ARE GUILTY - they take rock journalists abroad as a soft-option attempt at covert bribery. Their record company, Bronze, pay all my expenses to go to Tel Aviv with the implicit understanding that I will repay this investment with kind words about their product. This ain't Tel Aviv, this is Dallas!

And make no mistake, this is all about "investment". To start with, it's cheaper to pay for a journalist to go abroad than it is to buy a full-page advert in Sounds - and often much more effective!

Uriah Heep’s guitarist and founder member Mick Box will be thirty-six years old soon, and he's no stranger to this game. He knows exactly what's going on, and he loves every moment! I read him a quote from last year's interview with Geoff Barton who suggested that the only way the band could get into the papers when they started was by flying journalists all over the world, and Box had agreed "yeah, that was the way most of our early publicity used to come about!" So, come on Mick - here we are in sunny Tel Aviv... what's it all about?

"Yeah, that did happen a lot, I can't deny it, it's fact! But this time round, the purpose of you being here is coming out to see us on unknown territory, we're not playing safe by taking you to a stadium concert in America, you're seeing us in a country we've never played before... we just thought it would be nice for you to come to Tel Aviv - and it's an interesting thing to write about, there's a lot more to write about than the gig."

And Mick Box is right - it was nice for me to go to Tel Aviv, I had a really great time and the Heep (as we rock writers call them) are a bunch of funny, friendly blokes. But let's get this straight... I was there to do an interview, not sun-bathe, and I asked to write about Uriah Heep (after last year's Donnington festival - and long before I knew it might mean a trip abroad), simply because I thought their infectious sense of fun would be tempered by a rare articulacy. I'm fascinated by this phenomenon of HM and wanted to know why someone like Box could devote his life to it.

"Well, we've always steered away from heavy metal," he's quick to assert, "we're more hard rock."

Yeah, but I remember when I was at school, you were the archetypal heavy rock band - along with Black Sabbath and Deep Purple - and so I avoided you like the plague! However, having listened to 'Very 'Eavy, Very 'Umble last week for the very first time in my life, I was really surprised at the subtle use of melodies and harmonies - it sounded like an early Queen album!

"Absolutely, yeah," agrees Box, "and Heep have always had that - but why we got labelled as heavy metal was cos we always took the heavier side on stage with us, never the lighter side - we only did that on record."

Is that cos you were frightened to risk it?

"No, cos there was one stage where we actually did a tour where we played an acoustic set, had an intermission, then came back and did all the hard rock stuff ... just to show people there was another side to Uriah Heep - and it used to go down a riot!"

So what is Uriah Heep’s problem? Is it that the music itself is too narrowly defined for commercial success, or are heavy metal fans too narrow-minded? I mention to him that ex-vocalist Ken Hensley had said, ‘It reached a point where we did a couple of albums which consisted more or less of the same songs with different words and Heep had narrowed its appeal to such a degree that the only people who knew about the band were the hardened fans.’ I would say that was down to the music - Kenny himself was narrow-minded about it all! Before he left to do his solo thing, he wanted total control over the song-writing, but the songs he was bringing in just weren't good songs and he wouldn't own up to that fact.

"So the songs he had that would have become 'Abominog' then became 'Free Spirit' (Hensley's solo LP) - and it just died a death! That was cos the material wasn't up to scratch."

OK, but what the hell was Mick Box doing all this time because according to the credits on the labels, you sure as hell weren't writing any songs!

"I was basically just playing guitar - I mean, I was still writing, but there were better songs around, which was OK and it made me fight harder to get my own songs accepted. But then around the time of 'Firefly', it was all falling apart and we were becoming less of a band."

MICK BOX IS GUILTY! He's an old rock'n'roller who doesn't know when to give up. "It's something that's born in you, I think, and I could never see myself doing anything else ... I'll probably end up playing in a club somewhere to just 30 or 40 people - as long as I keep playing, I don't mind!"

But when Uriah Heep virtually disbanded two years ago, you were left all alone with just the name and nothing else - and you hadn't made a good album for several years, so why didn't you just do everyone - including yourself - a favour and just give up?

"Well, up to that point I'd dedicated ten years of my life to Uriah Heep... I formed the band in 1969 and we've had a bumpy career since then and I've been in it all the way - but my agent said I could go out as The Mick Box Band and do my guitar hero bit instead... and that was quite flattering, but such was the response from letters and phone calls into the record company, that I was swayed into keeping Heep going - a lot of that was from abroad, but some of it in England too."

Does the success you enjoy abroad compensate for meaning almost nothing back home?

"It still hurts really - but I think a lot of it's been our own doing because we haven't spent a lot of time playing in England. If there's a trouble with this band, it's the best trouble you can have, and that's we're in a worldwide situation - there's not a country we've visited where it hasn't opened up and gone really well for us. So we've neglected Britain a bit, but hopefully we'll be able to put that right soon... when or where or how, I don't know yet."

When you're away from England, what do you miss most?

"O dearie me!" he exclaims. "Just England, all of it! I like going down the pub for a nice pint of beer and I find the English are the warmest, most honest people in the world... like in America, where we do a lot of touring, you never know if you've got a true friend of not."

URIAH HEEP ARE GUILTY. As a "traditional" rock band, they conform to so many stereotypes it's almost amusing, if it weren't also slightly dangerous. For a start, their attitude towards women is - to say the least - patronising, if not downright sexist.

Remember standing in Tel Aviv's Penguin Club with a dispirited member of Uriah Heep who, glass in hand, lump in throat, mumbled through a tired, drunken haze and confided to me:

"Christ Johnny, look at all these women - how come I never score? I've gotta get a woman tonight!" When I suggested that I drive him back to the hotel to get some sleep - it was 4 am by now - he insisted on going to a local bar with a couple of the band's road crew, still bemoaning his lack of success in sexual adventures.

This prompted me to remind Mick that, in a previous Sounds interview, he'd admitted that he'd formed his first band, The Stalkers, "because we wanted the women". Thirteen years and over a thousand gigs later, how many women have you had?

"Well, it's all part of the rock'n'roll syndrome," he laughs. "I've had my fair share! Enough ... I've quieted down a bit now."

You seem to drink a bottle of vodka at each gig - have you had more women than you've had bottles of vodka?

"Christ, you said you were gonna ask some difficult questions, but ... well, I've shared a lot of vodka with a lot of women!"

Why do rock bands in general - and Heep are as guilty as any in this - insist on writing cliches about 'Red Lights' and 'Hot Night In A Cold Town'?

"Well, 'Red Lights' is just basically an experience all of us have," he justifies. "You know, we all end up in the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, don't we?"

Speak for yourself - I never have!

"It's just that raunchy thing, cos hookers and things like that tend to be associated with rock'n'roll bands, " he continues.

"Maybe it is a bit cliched - you can take it too far sometimes, that's why we try to avoid 'on the road' songs!"

How do you think girls relate to those sort of lyrics?

"I don't know ... I've never looked at it that closely, never actually thought about it in those terms - admittedly, I do see it all as 'the lads on the road' sort of thing."

What about women you've known, girlfriends etc. - have any of them ever said "Box, you sexist pig!" and hit you with a copy of Spare Rib?

"No (laughs) - I've never had any problems like that! See, it's one thing writing it, but quite another thing actually doing it!"

And so we come back to the myths of the rock culture - the most enduring being the strutting, macho lady-killer guitarist (with his instrument as a huge electric phallic symbol!) as the ultimate hero for schoolboys and girls alike.

To get a female point of view, I asked Annie, wife of drummer Lee Kerslake, and she reckoned most of the girls who went to Heep gigs really enjoyed the music but also had a degree of sexual craving for the band, a sort of lusty hero-worship. This was confirmed by Libby, the extraordinary singer with the local support band Libby And The Flash.

Like an incredible cross between Suzi Quatro and Millie Jackson, she agreed that for a girl, music like Uriah Heep is all about sex - that's what turns the girls on, and why not?"

As I said before, Mick Box knows exactly what's going on and he loves every moment!

BUT URIAH HEEP ARE STILL GUILTY! I have to explain to Mick exactly why this is so - the facts are undeniable - Box's Heep are old, rich, comfortable, old-fashioned, sexist, traditional, long-haired establishment figures. I remind him that in 1977 Heep were about as much out of touch with reality as you can possibly get without being dead - while the Pistols were singing about anarchy and the Clash were having a white riot, Uriah Heep released pathetic records like 'Firefly' with hopelessly hallucinogenic sub-Roger Dean cover paintings of fairies and wizards!

"That's right," he admits ruefully, "and there was so much lethargy in the band as well, cos Kenny was trying to lead it into the lighter side and we're all going 'hold on, we're a rock'n'roll band!' But this new line-up is only two years young and it took the original Heep four or five years to reach a peak, so we don't mind taking our time."

Yeah, but it's those cliches that worry me! Whereas some bands are attempting to recreate the drama and pathos of true emotions, to really touch and inspire people, you seem content to merely retread all the old rock ideas that have been around since Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley!

"Yeah, I know what you mean - but we don't set out to do that, it just happens! It's all part of the fun really - it's almost like a parody of ourselves!"

But the emotion, Mick, where's the emotion?

"Well, on 'Lonely Nights', Peter's really trying to sing with all the emotion he can muster."

Yeah, I know that - but he's restricted by that standard rock format and that standard idea of what a good rock vocal should sound like... if he was really devastated by loneliness the last thing he'd be worried about would be singing in tune!

"It's almost too polished in approach you mean? Yeah, well, we've always been very tuneful in our approach, our emphasis is on doing really good, melodic songs, cos those are the ones that stand the test of time.

"And Peter was a fan of the band before he joined us, and the old stuff that we do, they're great songs to sing, so they still come over as being fresh. Sometimes I hear him sing 'July Morning' and I think 'yeah, that's the business, that tops even the original' . . . cos he's really into it."

But all the rock cliches - you just love them really, don't you? All those guitar solos while Pete twirls the mike-stand like Rod Stewart or someone - you can't resist all that rock band imagery that goes with the life-style.

"Oh yeah, definitely - we love all that," he laughs.

And so, compared with say the Clash, you've no desire to subvert the rock biz and bring down the rock establishment?

"Absolutely not! Because we were part of building it up in the first place!"

And you must have made a load of money from this business - where's it all gone?

"That's what I keep asking myself," he jokes. "I'm not rich, if that's what you men - I couldn't afford not to work.

"I've had a lot of tax problems - and still have - and at one point we were living a fantasy with limousines, champagne, first class hotels and flights wherever we went - the old dream-machine game... not realising we were paying for the whole lot!

"We used to have a banquet laid on at each gig - but it was all coming out of our own pockets, every last morsel. Then when you get home at the end of the year, you suddenly wonder why you haven't got any dough left!

"Nobody was advising us correctly - but the best move I ever made was buying a house, which I sold to buy another one and now I've got a house in New Mexico and an apartment in London. But the only car I've got is an 'H' reg Morris Midwife ... it's an old Morris Minor which gets me from A to B, but I call it the Midwife, cos they've all got them, haven't they?"

Mick box laughs again - he loves every minute!

And that's worth remembering, because apart from Heep's flair for harmonies and melodies (their new LP 'Head First' features three great tunes, which isn't as many as New Order but is three more than Tank, Saxon and Anvil can muster between them!), their greatest strength is their sense of fund and their sense of humour.

And so, although URIAH HEEP ARE GUILTY, they should not be condemned. As I flew back from Tel Aviv and smiled at the beautiful girl sitting next to me, I thought of Heep and Box loving every moment. I remembered the long talks I had with bassist Trevor Bolder about running, the joy of discovering that Box was almost a professional footballer, the outrageous clothes sense of keyboardist John Sinclair (nick-named 'Marilyn' by the rest of the band), the open charm and honesty of Pete Goalby and his wonderfully ironic Midlands accent, and the genuine friendliness of drummer Lee and his wife. The gigs? Well, I remember them and they were, er, interesting, but hardly to be cherished!

But it's all a laugh, isn't it? At least to Box it is. "I really love Tommy Cooper - we often have band Tommy Cooper nights where we get drunk and tell Tommy Cooper jokes ... here, try this, 'Doctor, doctor, I feel like a pair of curtains - Pull yourself together!' or how about 'Doctor, doctor, I feel like a bar of soap - Ah, that's the life, boy!' And we all love The Life Of Brian on our last American tour, we used to travel for hours in the bus and we'd always end up watching the video, it would be that and Arthur, cos Dudley Moore was brilliant as a drunk in that.

"We could all relate to that, cos we all have a few drinks at times! I really like the bit where his hat falls off and he says 'I fucking hate it when that happens!' - brilliant!"

Is that what makes rock'n'roll brilliant as well - those little moments?

"Mmm, yeah," reflects the Box. "There are moments in our songs that I really get off on, like on 'July Morning', I just love hitting that end riff, that's the business!"

Look, this is ludicrous, Mr. Box, you're much too nice a guy to have such a naff image - you're nowhere near as threatening or degenerate as Motorhead or Iron Maiden, so why don't you just get your hair cut and settle down ... I mean, what the hell does your mother make of it all?

"Well, I've always had my hair long, even at school I was always getting bollocked for it - it was quite rebellious then. But my mum loves all this, she loves it, absolutely loves it - this'll be in the scrap-book as soon as it's printed. But I don't regret anything... there's no point in looking back. I'm very emotional and I stand by what I do - if it's a mistake, well at least it's an honest one!"

And if you weren't called Uriah Heep, what would you be called?

"Oh - Sketchleys... cos we've all been taken to the cleaners so often!"

URIAH HEEP ARE GUILTY.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.