Norman Rodger - Interview

  by John Clarkson

published: 29 / 10 / 2024

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Article

Norman Rodger is one of Edinburgh's most established post-punk musicians. A vocalist and a guitarist, he is best known for his work with the anthemic TV21, who recorded two fine albums 28 years apart, the Ian Brodie-produced 'A Thin Red Line' (Deram, 1981) and 'Forever 22' (Powbeat, 2009), as well as several classic singles including 'Playing With Fire', Ambition'. 'On the Run' and 'Snakes and Ladders'. He is currently the frontman with the Normans, who have accumulated a mass of material online and promise an album eventually. They will be playing an acoustic set in support of Autumn 1904 at a Pennyblackmusic promoted gig on November 1st at The Wee Red Bar in Edinburgh. We spoke to Norman Rodger about his musical career. PB: TV21 attracted a small but intense following. Why do you think you attracted such an ardent fanbase? NORMAN RODGER: I don’t know. We never had a big following locally in Edinburgh. Most of the people who picked up on us were people who had bought the records when they came out by mail order or who saw us touring. Our biggest following was probably around London. It wasn’t until we had done the ‘A Thin Red Line’ album that people came out to see us in any sort of numbers in Edinburgh. People did tend to stick with us. It was quite surprising but long after the band split we would still get messages from people saying how much they had liked us, and then eventually we got a lot more people coming to see us second time around when we reformed in 2005. PB: TV21 were frequently described as a cross between The Jam and The Teardrop Explodes. Does that sit with you? NR: Certainly our earlier stuff was more in line with the early Jam singles and The Buzzcocks, but we were also into a lot of pre--punk stuff as well. Only one person ever clocked that 'Playing With Fire', our first single was my attempt to write a Springsteen song. He was a big influence, as were The Beatles, The Kinks and The Who. We also later on got into T. Rex, especially after Ian Broudie came on board. PB: What are your memories of working with the young Broudie? NR: He was just starting out. He had done stuff with Echo & The Bunnymen. He was slightly younger than us but had been in bands for a long time. He really knew his stuff musically. He would sit and play us all these really obscure Elvis bootlegs. At that point no one was really listening to Elvis Presley and he would play us these incredible live shows of his from the 1950s. He was a really nice guy, full of energy and full of ideas. With hindsight some of them maybe didn’t work (Laughs), but I really liked working with Ian. PB: You have said that ‘Ambition’ is your favourite of the six singles that you did first time around. Why do you say that? NR:: It is not just ‘Ambition’. It is the whole of that EP. I think that it captured us getting good almost. 'Playing With Fire' was pretty raw. ‘I thought with ‘Ambition’. which was our second release, we had moved on a step with our ability to play and understanding of song structure. The other songs, ‘Ticking Away’ and ‘This is Zero’, took us in a different direction, and overall I was more satisfied with tt. I think that there are better songs. I think that ‘On The Run’ is probably the strongest TV21 song, but we never seemed to nail it. We did a great version for John Peel, but every time we tried to nail it we never got it quite right. PB: What do you make of ‘A Thin Red Line’ now? Forty years on it still seems to stand up. NR: People seem to really like it. I find it hard to listen to. The production which just weights it far too much to that period Also by the time we did the ‘Snakes and Ladders’ compilation, which had the whole of ‘A Thin Red Line’ on it and all the singles, the master tapes were long gone. No one had them, so I had to go through countless records and find one with the least crackles and scratches on and try and remaster them from them. I had to listen to them God knows how many times during the winter of 2010. I can’t listen to it (Laughs). I listened to it too many times. PB: One of the most remarkable things TV21 did was tour Poland. I think that you were on of the first acts to do so in a long, long ti in the early 1980s. How did that come about? NR: We were playing at a festival and this guy approached us. He said he was from Poland and might be interested in getting us over, and we said, “Yeah! Sure.” We thought no more about it, and then a few months later we did a residency at the Marquee in London, and the same guy approached us and said, “Remember how we spoke a few months back about doing some gigs in Poland. Would you still be interested because we are now in a position to put you on?” He was effectively working for the government, and they were trying to open things up there. There was a lot of unrest at the time, and they were trying, for want of a better phrase, to do things to keep the kids quiet (Laughs). So we went across for about ten days in October 1981. It was a very strange experience at all sorts of levels. PB: What was odd about it? NR: We arrived and it was right at the start of Solidarity. You would go to one town where everyone was on strike, so there was no food. You would see these huge queues for bread or people queueing for 24 hours for petrol. You would arrive at a hotel where they would be very apologetic, saying, “We don’t have any alcohol in the bar” or “We don’t have any food.” One day we got egg soup, which was water with a boiled egg in it, and the next day you would go somewhere else and it would be more favoured towards Solidarity and you could get whatever you wanted. We were put in this 1960’s coach with two other bands, and we just travelled around. It was like an old 1960’s revue. Basically the first band got on stage and did their set, and then the next band went on and did the same. There were no gaps. We were promised that we would get equivalent gear to what we had at home and when we got there it was total junk and dangerous. We were playing in a school gym and the PA was rocking. It was just stacked on school desks. Then we played big gigs. We played at the Warsaw Palace of Culture which was this huge Stalinist building in the centre of Warsaw, and beside it here was this big hall like the Royal Albert Hall and we did two shows in there. They were tremendous. At the end of it we got paid cash every night. I think that we were getting something like four times the average wage every night in cash, but there was nothing to buy and you weren’t allowed to take the money out of the country. I had to do an interview with Kid Jensen on Radio 1 while we were doing a gig in Gdansk. At that time there were like eleven phone lines out of the country, and we had to pre book an international call. So, I had to go to this office in a this police gymnasium where we were playing and try to speak to Kid Jensen while another band was playing downstairs where their fans started a riot, and the police returned it with tear gas (Laughs). It wasn’t the most successful interview ever. PB: You broke up in June 1982 after playing a short Scottish tour with The Rolling Stones. For many bands that would be the pathway to something better. Why did you decide to break up? NR: We had had a pretty bad few months up until that. We were on our uppers really. Our record label wasn’t going to renew our contract. We had parted company with our management somewhat acrimoniously. We weren’t getting a lot of gigs, and the gigs that we were being offered were pretty rubbish, so the period building up to those gigs was not a particularly positive period, and I think by the time we got the Stones gigs we felt that this was our last chance to do something. There was this thought that, as we were going to be supporting The Stones in small theatres rather than large stadiums, we were bound to get A&R people and journalists coming up to review the shows or check us out, but nobody turned up, not one person. We offered free tickets to journalists and A&R people all over the place, and no one bit. We were awfully disheartened, and we just felt that we weren’t going anywhere. What we should have done in hindsight is just taken a holiday, just taken a break, regrouped and rethought things. No one ever considered holidays as an option really (Laughs). It was probably too drastic a decision to take at the time. I think if we had given it a couple of months we would have probably got things going again. PB: And yet you got back in the ring first of all with The Collector. Was that named after the John Fowles book? NR: Yeah. I can’t remember if it was just before or just after the end of TV21 but our publisher had got one of the first Portastudios and I wrote a couple of songs on it, and one of them was a track called ‘Swimming’ that I recorded subsequently with both Ally Palmer (guitars) and Neil Baldwin (bass) from TV21. We had various offers to put it out as TV21, and we thought, “No. TV21 is finished. We have got to come up with something different,” and Ally and I had both been reading ‘The Collector’ at the time. We named the band after the book, but then felt that given the nature of the title character it wasn’t the best name in the world (Laughs), so we changed it to Shame., which wasn’t much better really (Laughs). PB: Shame spent a lot of time in Canada. Why did you go across there? NR: Right at the beginning of TV21 we were put in touch with this guy called Iain Walker, who lived in Ottawa. He was a massive fan of The Rezillos, and was buying anything that had a Rezillos connection post split, and because he had seen that Troy Tate had produced our records, and Troy was the guitarist in Shake, one of the Rezillos’ offshoots, he had bought our record and really liked it, He wrote us a couple of letters, and we thought,”Wow! Someone form Canada likes us.” His family was from Scotland, and he came across to visit the following year and said, “Can I come and hang out with you for a couple of days?” and he came across and stayed at our house. He was nice guy and he said, “My plan is to go back to Canada and open up a record store, and if that is successful I am going to do a label, and if I do the label would you like to put a record out?” and we thought, “It is never going to happen,” but it did. Three years later he got back in touch and said, “Remember that label I was talking about. I have got it off the ground. Would you like to d something?” So, we put out an EP on his label Shake Records. which was released in Canada and the UK, On the back of that we attracted more interest over there, and were offered a contract with an independent label in Toronto, and did an album called 'Symi' with them and subsequently some gigs, and that ended up going horribly wrong, Overall, however, it was a good experience and we managed to do a coast-to-coast tour of Canada which was great, really great. PB: Did Shame play many gigs in Scotland and Britain? NR: We played a few around about 1990/1991, but everything went tits up with the deal in Canada. The company that we were signed to went bust, and one of the guys there became seriously ill. It was a whole catalogue of disasters. We limped home broke again and did as many gigs as we could. At one point Tennent’s Live offered us a mini-tour of the Highlands. We were all set to go, and one of the guys in the band said, “I cant afford to do this. I need to get paid properly.” They weren’t offering any money upfront. They were just offering us the gigs and some accommodation, and that was about it, so we had to pull the plug on that one, and by that time I thought I probably needed to eat and get a real job Laughs). PB: You were also in a band after that called Sugarland. Who were they? NR: Sugarland was effectively Shame under a different name. I don’t think we ever gigged as Sugarland, maybe once, but we had recorded some demos with Shame in 1991, and over the next five or six years whenever I could get the money together we would go into the studio when everyone was available and we recorded an album, 'Waiting for Lazarus'. I can’t remember the name of the record label. It was one of the first internet labels, and we gave them a couple of hundred quid and they put it out. They didn’t do much in the way of marketing, so I have no idea how many copies of that album sold in total. I think it is one of the best albums that I have done, but it never saw the light of day properly. PB: You reformed TV21 in 2005. How did that happen? NR: I am a big Hearts FC fan, and I was introduced when I was at Tynecastle one day to this guy Brian Chalmers , who used to run the Citrus Club in Edinburgh, and we became pals. One day we were at a match, and he said that he had been approached by the BBC to put on one of the many gigs to mark the anniversary of John Peel’s death and asked if TV 21 were interested in reforming for it. We said that we would. It was a good laugh and a great buzz to be back playing again, and we just thought, “Let’s do another gig,” and it went from there. We ended up playing fairly regularly. We were getting quite a lot of gigs at that point, and were playing in Edinburgh every three or four weeks support to bands like the Fall and The Undertones and From The Jam, as well as our own gigs at places like The Citrus Club. As well as that, we started writing songs again, and thought that maybe we should have another go at doing an album. PB: Was the title of that album’Forever 22’ meant ironically as a lot of the songs on that are about middle-aged angst? MR: Yes, I suppose it was meant ironically (Laughs). It reflected where we were at the time. We weren’t the same kids that we had been in 1981. It is a collection of songs reflecting our lives at that point as well as revisiting a few old songs and dusting off a few things which hadn’t ever been seen before. ‘One Day in Summertime’ was a song from ‘Symi’ that we had never recorded, and ‘It’s Me’ actually pre-dated TV21,. PB: TV21 second time around just seemed to fade away. Was that what took place? NR: Yeah, there was never a big decision to call it a day. Ally’s son took seriously ill and hie attention was focused on making sure his boy was okay. He wasn’t well at all and I think Ally lost heart a bit. Neil was doing stuff with The Cathode Ray as well, I think that he felt that his time was being split, and he opted to go with them. Simon McGlynn, our drummer, and I kept hoping that things would kick back in, and we hung around for a year. We would go up to our rehearsal room and hope that the others would turn up, and they never did, so we thought that it was time to close up the room and see what happens next. PB: You are now with The Normans. Is that you and whoever feels like playing? NR: It started like that. Initially Brian Chalmers offered me a gig at The Citrus Club, so I got a few friends together and we did a couple of gigs, and for the first couple of years the line-up constantly changed, and then it became much more settled. There are now five of that play fairly regularly. PB: Who are they? NR Allan Boyd and I are the two songwriters. Alan is an old friend of mine from school days, We lost touch for a while and got back together, and around about the time that TV21 were reforming we did a few gigs together, just the two of us. We drafted in Al Gray on bass. Al had played with The Collector and played on a couple of tracks on the Shame album, and then he played in another band called the Whole Shebang, which also featured his friend Doug Govan who came in to play lead guitar. Initially Simon from TV21 played drums with us and then he got a regular gig with Dirty Harry, the Blondie tribute band, and we needed another drummer, so Alan brought in his friend Jim McGeachin It is difficult because we are all pretty far flung. Alan lives in Glasgow, Al lives in Ladybank in Fife, Doug lives up North and Jim lives in Houston, which is west of Glasgow. We have been recording and writing tons of stuff. PB: There is an absolute treasure trove of stuff on Soundcloud. What do you hope to do with that? NR: I am not sure. We probably need to stop at some point and look at it and decide which ones we are going to record, because I think tat there is the making of a very good album in all that stuff. We have got to get it down to a maximum of ten or twelve songs. There is even more stuff than there is on Soundcloud. We keep planning to have a band meeting but and to decide what we ae going to do with this stuff, and unfortunately we tend to do it in the pub and never get there (Laughs). PB: Final question. What can we expect from you at the gig on the 1st November? NR: We normally use the whole backline but we are doing it acoustically. So,it will be a little bit different. We are going to play several of our own songs, and then maybe conclude with a couple of TV21 songs. PB; Thank you. The Normans will be playing Te Wee Red Bar at the Edinburgh College of Art on the 1st November. Tickets are available in advance at £12.50 from https://wegottickets.com/event/630582 and on the door (cash only) at £15.

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Picture Gallery:-

Line-up from left to right- Al Gray (bass), Doug Govan (lead gitar), Jim McGeachin (drums), Allan Boyd (vocals/guitar), Norman Rodger (vocals/guitar).