Duncan Reid – And It’s Goodbye From Him – Interview

This past weekend Duncan Reid & the Big Heads will have played their final gigs at Rebellion, with their final hurrah following on the 7th October in The Lexington, to mark the release of the glorious final album And It’s Goodbye From Him. I caught up with Duncan recently when we started off chatting about the 17 year old “Kid” Reid joining The Boys, all the way through to the new, and many would say best, Duncan Reid and the Big Heads album.

Kid Reid & The Boys

The Ginger Quiff: Before we start talking about the new album (And Its Goodbye From Him), we’ll take a look back to when it all first began, tell me about the first time you picked up a bass guitar and what was it like being involved as a 17-year-old, joining ex members of London SS and Hollywood Brats at the early days of the punk scene?

Duncan Reid: I started playing because I found an old Hoffner bass. It was beautiful. It wasn’t the violin Paul McCartney job that I’ve got now. It was this big B.B. King looking thing. I found it in my dad’s cupboard. I was like, “Oh, what’s this?” He said, “Oh, yeah, I used to play the bass”.  He didn’t really want me to have a go at it, but that was it. The Pandora’s box was opened. I was about 13.

I was already well into music, and just started playing it, and playing it, as you do. And before too long, you can actually play it, and that’s how I started. At school I met Jack who was a drummer, so he and I became a teenage rhythm section who fell by accident into this crowd that used to gather at 47a Warrington Crescent in a basement flat where Matt Dangerfield of The Boys lived with Barry Jones (later of the London Cowboys). They had this little four track studio. I think they had the electricity wired up illegally to a lamp in the street because it was a bit of a squat directly over the Bakerloo Line. It would rumble every time an underground train went underneath. And before anybody was anybody, on a Sunday afternoon the usual people would go round there and jam. But everybody was bloody useless. I mean really, really hopeless. By jamming I mean that we used to play the opening intro to Slow Death by the Flamin’ Groovies, but never get onto the verse because nobody was good enough to get past the intro.

So, we played the intro for hours until we all got bored. Obviously, Matt and John from The Boys were there and Casino Steel before we were actually The Boys, with other people like Steve Jones, Tony James from Generation X, Mick Jones from The Clash, Brian James etc. But nobody was in a band, and everybody had long hair and was sort of looking, you know, a bit like New York Dolls rejects.

It’s not a very well-known fact, but many bands coalesced out of that basement and The Boys were one of them. In the early days we tried to be a sort of 60s beat group. Sort of The Kinks, Beatles, Stones, The Who, Small Faces. But being in around everybody else and also loving the first Ramones record we sped up and became The Boys of the first album.

The one thing that The Boys had a bit of an edge at was we still had those 60s harmonies and pop sensibility from what we were trying to do before. So that’s why The Boys became what they were, a mixture of the 60s influences of Matt and Cass, together with what rubbed off from being in that nascent Punk scene.

GQ: What are your highlights of your time with The Boys. If I’m right at one point you were the only punk band with a record deal?

DR: Unfortunately, we were. Yeah, we signed up too early because a record company (NEMS) came along and we said, “Oh yes, we’ll sign”. But three weeks later, we were desperately trying to get out of it because Polydor came along and wanted to sign us. But we just couldn’t get out of the deal, they wouldn’t let us go. So, Polydor went off and signed The Jam and look what happened to them! And we were left with a company that, they did their best, but they weren’t really up to it. They didn’t have the clout of a major label and major labels were very important then, which is why the Sex Pistols, The Clash, etcetera, signed to major labels. God knows what was going on with us because our albums seemed to be released two weeks after every promotional tour. We’d do a huge tour in the UK and then the album would come out afterwards, which wasn’t really getting it right.

But yeah, the highlights of being with The Boys. I mean, the early days were very exciting because, like every young band, we really felt like we were going to conquer the world and were on this upward progression. In those days the weekly music papers were very important. You appear in them, you get more and more people at your gigs, and everything seems like it’s going great. So that period of being on the up was very exciting.

The problem now is that it was a long time ago and I’m really bloody old, so trying to remember a lot of it is a problem. So a lot of the best memories I have are from when The Boys got back together in about 2000. Of course, we hadn’t existed for 17/18 years, possibly 20 years and in that time, I’d had nothing to do with music. I was doing things like running Nottingham Forest, working for Andrew Lloyd Webber and all of that sort of stuff, which was exciting as well in its own way. But I’d paid no attention to music and then came back to discover that The Boys had become this iconic band who were known throughout the world. So off we went to play gigs in Japan, South America, North America and all over Europe. I felt that being so revered was justification for everything we’d done in the 70s and the 80s when we weren’t really that big and well known. I think it’s testament to the songs and the records we made that in that interim period when we were doing nothing, the likes of Green Day, in Germany, Die Toten Hosen and all sorts of other bands looked back and we were one of the stand out items from that era they referenced. That gave us the profile that encouraged us to get back together and have a great time playing again.

Nottingham Forest and Andrew Lloyd Webber

GQ: You mentioned your hiatus there. Was that a conscious decision to be away from music during that time or was it just the way things landed?

DR: No, it was a conscious decision. I mean I started when I was really young. I think it was 17 when The Boys started and I was 22, possibly 23. when it all came to an end.  I’d seen a lot of musicians who had tried to carry on after their career had gone up and then down, as it had for us, and become 30 and they were a pretty sad sight really. They desperately wanted to play music, but not earning any money. So, I thought, nah. I think I’m going to stop and have another career so that I can have a life. I went to university and did an engineering degree which actually I really enjoyed because I’d been a musician and hadn’t really engaged in any sort of intellectual exercise for years. Having been lucky enough to go to a school where they beat the living daylights out of you if you didn’t work, I’d managed to get A levels. So, I went to University and really enjoyed it because it was just totally different to what I had been doing. It made me believe that there are a lot of youngsters who should be banned from going to university until they are about 23 because it’s an expensive place to go and get drunk and grow up. You know, you can do that stacking shelves or bumming around the world or something. But all of us old wrinklies who were 22 or 23 at Imperial College in that year, I think it was about four or five of us in all, ended up with a first-class honours’ degrees. And it wasn’t because we were brighter than everybody else. It’s just that we’d been drunk before and had a bit of lived experience.

But although I’d enjoyed the degree, at the end of it, I didn’t want to go and work in a steel factory or anything like that. I was lucky enough to fall by accident back into the entertainment business, which is why I ended up working for Andrew Lloyd Webber, spending a lot of time travelling the world, and for my sins, saturating the world with Andrew Lloyd Webber. But, at the same time, worked in film and TV and had a great further education in the entertainment business, which is what I’ve worked in since, including football.

The Boys – The Second Time

GQ: Going back to The Boys, the second time around, obviously it was the lure of Japan that was one of your decisions to return. But what made you decide to leave the band the second time round? Because at that point you hadn’t planned on recording a solo album.

DR: No, it was not in my mind at all. Bands are funny things. I don’t want to talk in detail about it, because it’s always sad when you see these programmes about bands who’ve fallen out with everybody saying, oh, he did this, and he did that. It comes over as pathetic, you know, really pathetic. I love The Damned, but that film is quite depressing when they slag each other off, isn’t it?

But the long and the short of it was a bloody great fight between me and Matt Dangerfield, which brought us to a point where it couldn’t go on. We had just done a tour of South America when in typical Boys fashion, and very amusingly, we made fun of it by calling the tour the “We All Love Each Other” tour. Which is so brilliant and typically The Boys. I’d just say that, with hindsight, I can see it takes two to tango, and it ended up with a bloody great fight backstage between us two and one of us had to go.

At the time, I was devastated. I loved being in The Boys. Who wouldn’t? You know, you get an offer, you get on a plane, you go to Japan or somewhere else exotic, they treat you like emperors and then give you a stack of money. As a load of 50-year-olds, you pretend you’re still 17, and prove that you aren’t but still have a good time doing it. I mean, why would you not love that? Yeah, it was very, very painful.

There are a couple of songs I’ve written about it. One is “All Fall Down” on the “Little Big Head” album and the other one is “Not The Kind of Guy Girls Hug” on the second album. That song is kind of written to Casino Steel saying: “why can’t I just be like you?” He’s one of those guys for whom everything is water off a duck’s back. Whereas me, if someone has a go at me, I’ll get my defence in first. And actually, you know, there’s a reason for that which we can come on to later. I think you can hear in those songs, if you know what they’re about, the pain that I went through.

But having said that, despite the pain, it was actually the best thing that ever happened to me because I would not have had this solo career, I would not have written and recorded these five albums that I’m so proud of and I would not have played all of those live gigs with absolutely brilliant younger musicians. Yes, I had a hand up from being an ex-member of The Boys at the beginning, but being an ex-bass player in The Boys isn’t worth that much, and creating this second following all around the world, well, Yeah, I wouldn’t have done any of that and I’m so grateful in hindsight that it happened.

Little Big Head

GQ: Looking at Little Big Head then, obviously although you didn’t know it, the album title hinted at your future band, name as yet not thought off. But what was it like going from that safety in numbers I suppose you have in a band, to recording and playing all the instruments, doing everything yourself. What was that like? And did you have an idea of what you wanted to sound like, or did that develop because you were doing everything yourself?

DR: It was called Little Big Head because I think that describes me very well. A – I’m little and, B – I’m a big head. So Little Big Head it was. I mean, I’m a real late developer. I don’t know why it is, but in the 70s and the 80s, although I wrote a few songs, I couldn’t really write. It was a funny thing. I’d sit down at the kitchen table with a guitar determined to write something and nothing would come out. Way later on in The Boys, I had started to write songs and make demos of them at my little home recording studio which people said were good, especially Vom Ritchie, the drummer in Die Toten Hosen. I’d send them over to him to play in his bar and get excited messages back saying: “oh, that’s brilliant.”

Suddenly I could write, and I think a lot of that is to do with passing years. I had things to write about that I think were interesting and somehow, I could just do it. I think I was very important for The Boys, I mean Cas used to call me “our frontman” and I think that was my job, to be the live focus and interaction with the crowd. That was important to The Boys. I think both me and Jack bought an energy which Vom Ritchie carried when he played with The Boys. But what we brought to The Boys in terms of songwriting wasn’t that important. So, for my first solo effort, I wanted to make an album that was “me” and at the same time I wanted to make something different to the, great as it is, typical punk sound, as brilliantly embodied by Honest John playing a Les Paul through a Marshall amp. I wanted to do something different to that with different sounds.

And then I had this huge slice of luck. A friend of mine in Argentina, Mariano Asch, said: “Why don’t you speak to Tony Barber”, who was ex of the Buzzcocks, Chelsea and Nirvana for 15 minutes and had a studio out in Essex, in the middle of bloody nowhere, in a house that Knox’s granddad owned, and which was subsequently lived in by Crass. In fact, the drummer from Crass, Penny, still lives there. Anyway, he had a studio in the garden and Tony was up for it. Without him, I don’t think I would ever have had a solo career because Tony made it possible for me to make an album on my own with him. And of course, recording had changed totally in the 20 or so years since I’d previously made an album. Instead of having tapes that go round and round, it was all digital on a computer and was a totally different game. With the things you can do, it’s actually possible if you’re a pretty second rate guitarist like me to do stuff and make it sound really good. Tony taught me so much about production, so I was able with him to make, not just the first album, but the second album as well before he emigrated to the States, and it became a bit impractical to work with him.

But yeah, it was a conscious decision on the first one that I really wanted to make it my album. The only other people who play on it are Vom Ritchie who played the drums because I really cannot play the drums, and there’s a few guest appearances from the likes of James Stevenson of Generation X and about 400 million other bands, The Cult and everybody, and a fellow called Nigel, who played some slide guitar on it. But otherwise it’s all me and it would have been a totally different album otherwise because I’m not the greatest guitarist in the world. I can play the guitar but I’m not the best. But because of that, I think it’s got a charm to it when you listen back. All of my albums have changed as we’ve gone along and become heavier and heavier if you like, which has been deliberate as well. But that first one was much lighter in sound, without heavy guitars, which is why I think it has a charm. Even though there are better musicians who could have played on it.

GQ: Looking back on it now, there’s still classic songs on there that are still live staples: Montevideo, Kelly’s Gone Insane, Thinking –  just fantastic songs and the songwriting, you said it came late to you, but obviously it’s something that’s been there waiting to come out, because your songwriting, the stories that you tell in your songs, is something that that really attracts me to your music.

DR: 100% right, Neil, of course 😉

The Band…

GQ: While you wrote that album, as you said with, some guest musicians, it was mainly a solo effort. When you came to start playing that live, how did that transition from being a personal solo album to being a being a band playing these songs?

DR: Live well, there was a bit of a problem, wasn’t there? By making an album where you play everything, when you come to play live, well, who’s the drummer then? I deliberately set out to find musicians who were half my age because I wanted, again, to do something different. You know, I could have put together a band of great musicians who were the same age as me and they would have brought that ‘77 punk sound to it, but I wanted to be different. Another expression of that was deciding I was going to wear purple because everybody else wore black.

You know, I wanted to be different, and I wanted younger musicians to bring a different sound, which they do. They play things in a different way. They have different influences.

But I’m also interested in the visual side of playing live and wanted a band who would be good at that. I can’t remember how I met Alex Gold, but he put on a little gig at the smallest pub in London (the Betsy Trottwood) where I did my first solo acoustic gig with him. Anna was a Polish girl who had moved from Dusseldorf to England. A very striking blonde lady who could play the guitar, so I got her in there too. It’s changed over the years. But it was a deliberate attempt to put together a younger band through the very few young people that I knew.

GQ: I listen back to these songs, and they bring back memories of great live concerts, but obviously a lot of these songs are very personal to you, as you mentioned earlier. When you perform them live, does it bring back memories of the source, the inspiration these songs came from?

DR: Yes. I mentioned All Fall Down. There’s a great live video of it on YouTube and it became a great live song. It really really did. We haven’t done it for a number of years now, but it really was a good live song and, of course, when you sing it, although I’d never explained what it was about, I knew. Yeah. Every time would bring back that fateful evening in Spain, the culmination of years of trouble.

GQ: Is there a feeling of catharsis when you write a song like that then? Is it like releasing internal pressures?

DR: That’s a good question. The honest answer is I don’t really know. I suspect it does. Until recently, music hasn’t been a choice for me. It hasn’t been something that I chose to do. It’s something that I had to do, and I think, one of the reasons for writing songs is your feelings come out and it is a way of getting them out. I don’t know if it was a catharsis, but it was a process that had to happen.

The Difficult Second Album

GQ: You’ve mentioned getting a younger band together and writing, the ironically titled The Difficult Second Album. I say that because the sleeve notes say it’s like some of the best years of your career when you were writing it, and obviously that was when Sophie first made an appearance, the start of putting together the current band.

Tell me about how the recording of that album differed from Little Big Head. Obviously, you had a band with you now, so it was a different experience and I said, you did say in the sleeve notes that it was a fantastic time. So, tell us more about the recording of it.

DR: Well, yes. I mean it was a bit of a transition. Alex Gold is on the record a lot as guitarist and there was a transition between Tom, the drummer at the time to Chiara, who Sophie brought in as drummer. They played different tracks on the album and both of them are great, great drummers. It was made at the same studio in in the wilds of Essex with Tony Barber, but it was quite funny because we’d largely recorded the album with just bits and pieces to finish off. Tony, who was spending his time between New York, where his girlfriend was, and the UK said: “Oh, we’re going to have to put a bit of a halt on it because I’m going to New York for a month and so we’ll pick it up when I get back” The next thing I know, I get a call from him: “we’ve got a bit of a problem”, he said. They had got married so I said: “Oh, that’s brilliant, really, really good”. He said, “yeah, but I went to see my immigration lawyer and he says if I ever leave the states, I’ll never get in again because I got married without permission and so it’ll make getting a visa really hard. I can’t leave here until I get my green card”. It added to the cost of doing it a little bit, but added to the fun. I went over to New York and Tony, and I finished it off and mixed it basically in his bedroom. Once you get the drums done it’s the magic of modern recording. So long as your computers OK and you’ve got a few basics you can do that. So, it was recorded, most of it here and then finished off in in New York, but with more musicians this time.

GQ: I’m going to probably touch back on what you said in terms of you feeling you have to write these songs, because a lot of the songs on your albums are very personal. There are songs on the second album about parenting, about relationships with school friends, et cetera. Obviously, people write about what they know and you’re not revealing your deepest, darkest secrets, but is that where you get your inspiration for writing? Obviously, it’s very personal to you, but it comes across well on your songs, making them relatable to many.

DR: Yeah, I think the first two or three albums are largely about my thoughts and life. I’ve mentioned “Not the Kind of Guy Girls Hug” and that’s pretty revealing, actually. It sprung out of me seeing a couple of the girls in the office where I worked with another guy. They were interacting, all sort of hugging each other and I was thinking, “people don’t do that to me. I wonder why”. It’s because I can apparently be quite frightening, I’m told. And then I related it back to the pain I was still feeling from not being in The Boys and thinking: “Why can’t I be like Casino Steel, who’s easy going and doesn’t let thing things get him down” When you know what it’s about its pretty revealing.  Although the more revealing they are, the more I hide it, or used to anyway.

And then some songs come from things that just happen. Like “Kelly’s Gone Insane”. I’ve mentioned the story a few times about being amused by this girl I didn’t know on Facebook writing about all the things she’d like to do to the customers in her record shop, (GQ – I’m sure Mainy could relate) and then I turned it into something slightly black in humour.

On the 4th and 5th albums you can see me getting increasingly annoyed with politicians and writing some rude songs about them.

And on the final album, there’s a good deal about my experiences during lockdown. It was a pretty dramatic time for everybody, wasn’t it? Something like that gives you fresh feelings and is the easiest thing to write about. Stuff that happens to you. But I’m also really proud of songs like “It’s Going So Well” on the final album. A totally made up, funny story. I like doing that as well.

Bombs Away

GQ: But now we’ve come on to album #3. Bombs Away comes along. Now you’ve got Karen Jones on board as well with Mauro Venegas. Every song is winner on the album and by then I think you’d cemented your status as “best live band on the planet”.

DR: We really were bloody shit hot by that time. From then onwards. Knowing when going on stage how good you are! What a feeling. One of the things that I’ve always really enjoyed is that I can, it’s a strange thing to describe, but I can feel an audience. It’s a funny old thing. I do like it and I can feel when it’s going badly and feel when it’s going well.

We got it up to a level of being so good that you can feel it coming back, which is so energising. The other thing is being on stage with people who love showing off as much as I do and feeding off them. You know, it’s brilliant.

GQ: I mean, this is probably a stupid question then, if you were to compare playing live to recording your albums, what do you prefer to do?

DR: Yeah, they’re both totally different. I love most of recording an album but there is also a little bit of drudgery, to be honest. I love writing and developing the songs in my little studio at home. When you’re sort of playing around and a song, I don’t know where it comes from, but it sort of grows of its own accord out of nowhere.

But a large part of the early part of recording, when you’re putting down the drums, you’re putting down the bass, and so on, is work. The bit of recording I really love is actually just when you’re at the end of the final mixes and you’re just nearly getting to completion. You can listen to it back and go: “Fuck. That’s good”. It’s more satisfying than fun, to be honest.

Whereas playing live is a double-edged sword. There’s an awful amount of stress. Hmm, especially when you have to organise everything like I do in this DIY world. But the actual getting on stage and interacting with that audience, playing some brilliant stuff with a brilliant band. That’s a sugar rush.

GQ: Yeah, absolutely. So, in terms of around about that time, you’re saying you’ve really got shit hot. Have you got any memorable gigs that stand out from then?

DR: There were a lot at that time, you know, because we really were busy. I think that the most stand out things, I mean the thing that stood out all along is that, whether it’s with Mauro or when Nick joined, we just got on so well and had so much fun, especially after gigs. There’s this blur of good times hanging out with Sophie and Karen and Mauro and Nick and, later on, Heidi as well. The things that really stand out for me, more when Nick was in the band, were the big overseas tours we did. Japan and Korea, the East Coast and the times we went to Argentina and Uruguay were just superb. For Karen, Sophie and Nick, the idea of going to play in Japan was a far-off pipe dream, so to be able to do it and seeing how much fun they were having and how much they were enjoying it, was almost more fun for me than the fun I was having.

GQ: I think one of the things that makes me really enjoy your live shows is the fact that the four of you on stage just look as if you’re having the time of your life. And I think that reflects on the audience, I think we feed off that when we’re watching a gig like that as well, it’s very apparent that you got on so well together.

DR: Yeah. And it is because we are having a good time. I think the others enjoy being good as well. When you are good, you know it and it’s very enjoyable.

Don’t Blame Yourself

GQ: We get to Don’t Blame Yourself. Again, another album packed with instant classics – To Live or Live Not, Your Future Ex-Wife, Welcome to My World. Incidentally, the last time I interviewed you when I was still writing for Louder Than War. The album came out smack bang in the middle of COVID How did it feel unleashing an album to the world in that weird period?

DR: Yeah, it was really frustrating. I mean, there were good and bad aspects to it. The bad, of course, was that that we couldn’t do any gigs at all to back it up or sell copies. For a band like us, you sell a lot of what you do at gigs and to have none of that was frustrating not to be able to put the album into more people’s pockets and make some money.

But it did give me the time to do other things. The way of the modern world is that there are a million and one little Internet radio stations and blogs around the world and if you can speak to a lot of them, you can speak to a lot of people. But it takes a lot of work. Of course, I’d bugger all else to do so it was no problem. Day after day doing radio interviews or whatever and I managed to do a lot that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do.

And then that was it. It coincided with that period at the beginning of lockdown when all the gigs were cancelled, including the album launch gig. I seemed to spend ages rescheduling those gigs thinking, oh well, this can’t go on for more than a couple of months, can it?

So, you reschedule the gigs for a couple of months later and then get there, and then they’d have to be rescheduled again until eventually I gave up and just got into the flow and for the first part of lockdown had a really good time. Which had a very long-lasting effect, which perhaps we’ll come on to. So having relaxed into it, if you remember in the first lockdown the weather was very nice. It certainly was down here in London. It was probably raining in Scotland. There were no cars on the road, the air was clean. Life became very stress free. And then when we were allowed to travel, I put the whole family, including dogs, in a car. And we went down to the South of France. Just stayed there because we could. Zoom and Teams had become a thing. You could work wherever you had an Internet connection, so we didn’t have to come home. It was brilliant and just felt magnificently stress free. Yeah, I didn’t have to think about gigs or music. I suddenly realised that I hadn’t written a song for a long time, and it didn’t bother me.

All of that changed because my daughter fell pregnant, and we had to come back to London. And then a winter lockdown followed, which was a very different kettle of fish. A very miserable time.

But I did a few interesting things and I made one of the most watched things I have done on YouTube. A daily diary about writing the song “Can I Go Out Now Please?” (On the new album “And Its Goodbye From Him”). Based on the idea “Can I please go out and have a drink? Can I please go to the pub?” I think the lyrics caught people’s imagination. It caught the time and what was normal for me seemed to be fascinating to other people, to actually see a song being written day by day and how it came about.

I did a few interviews with friends like Vom Ritchie and Paul Ronney Angel from the Urban Voodoo Machines. We put them out on YouTube with me interviewing people about their careers. Peter Anthony, the DJ as well. That was good fun.

But eventually I just got to a stage of being very happy doing nothing, especially when I was sitting on the beach in the Mediterranean, popping back in every now and then if I had a meeting.

GQ: I know you’ve posted about Brexit and the impact it’s had on bands touring outwith the UK, so reflecting back on that period now, COVID, Brexit etc, did that change things for you in terms of your music, your writing, your playing, your thought process and approach to it?

DR: Brexit hasn’t had an effect on the music itself, and it’s not the main reason I’m stopping, but it’s quite a big reason. I mean obviously we used to play in in Europe all the time so there are two effects of Brexit. We’ve just done a tour of Sweden, where we’ve basically had to sneak in like, you know, the old illegal Romanian fruit pickers who used to have to sneak into the UK to work. We had to do that in Sweden.

I want to continue spending a large part of my year in France going forward because I enjoy it so much, and if I was to be caught playing in Sweden then there’s every chance it would be very difficult for me to go and spend large parts of the year in France because I would be banned. So, there’s that effect where it’s just not worth the risk. The Czech Republic is another one country where it’s just illegal. You can’t do it. There are some, the major countries like France, Germany and Spain, where you can play up to 90 days. What you can’t do, which we used to when doing a tour of, say, Spain is send a bloody great box of LPs and CDs over. The paperwork and export duties are now too expensive and difficult. You can imagine, if we have four or five gigs in Spain and over those four or five gigs, we sell 50 to 100 LP’s at €30 a time, that €3000 makes all the difference between making money and losing money and you can’t do it now.

Were we to play in Europe now, it would be us subsidising it all and paying to play, and that takes a lot of the fun out of it. So, you’re left with the UK, which of all the countries in Europe Is the hardest to play in because of the economic situation here. In Spain, where we played last year, people were going out again and had the money to do it, which is very much not the case here. So, it’s had a big effect.

We had a festival in Middlesbrough just before last Christmas which the promoter cancelled in the July before. He had just put somebody on the week before and it had gone badly. He just got scared. I think that’s the way it’s developed. It’s part of two trends. One is that I think people are looking for value for money, so you know, things like Rebellion, which is great value for money, you can understand why people go. They go because they can just see a lot for a relatively small amount of money, a couple of 100 pounds if they buy early bird tickets. And then as well, there’s more of a move towards nostalgia and less away from new music. You’ve got the old bands who still play, even though there might hardly be any of the original members in there. But just having the name sells. And then there are tribute bands. It’s extraordinary to play festivals now because half the bill might be tribute bands because that’s what people want. If they’re going to spend money going out, they want to be sure that they’re going to like it. The audience willing to risk a few quid on a club night with a new band are fewer, which was accelerated by lockdown because people have got into the habit of not going out.

After all, an evening at home with a bottle of wine and something on Netflix is a perfectly good night’s entertainment, especially if you invite a few friends around.

And It’s Goodbye From Him

GQ: Indeed, but I’d much rather be one of those in little clubs discovering new music to be honest. So, coming round to the new album, And It’s Goodbye From Him.

It’s the beginning of the end of Duncan and The Big Heads. Before we delve any deeper into it, how would you describe this album as a whole?

DR: Again, it’s a very, very personal album. I think the production by Dave Draper is just extraordinarily good. It’s the first album where I didn’t want to take a credit as a co-producer, although I’d done everything that I’ve done before in terms of the arrangements. I’m just so happy with the sound of it that I wanted Dave to take all the credit as he’s done such an incredible job. I think it’s the biggest sounding album we’ve had. It’s very varied and it’s an album that I’m extremely proud to go out with because it’s so bloody good. It’s verging on being the best album that’s ever been made by anybody 😉

GQ: By the best live band that’s ever been?

DR: There you go, and the best looking as well, so we’ve got the lot.

GQ: As usual with your album you’ve included copious sleeve notes to accompany the songs giving a bit of background. I listened to the songs a couple of times before I read the sleave notes intentionally. But when you read them, it’s interesting because the songs seem to bring your whole career together.

You’ve written songs about being a parent, this time it’s being a grandparent in “Oh, My My”. Then you’ve got links back to your time in Argentina, “It’s Going So Well”. There’s “Funaggedon Time”, linking to your love of glam rock.

It’s also very much a Duncan Reid the Big Heads album, with a few twists musically, an obvious example of this being the German cabaret style of “Would I Lie to You?”

Talk to me about some of your favourite songs on the album from a personal perspective.

DR: “Would I Lie to You”, I think is really interesting. As you say it’s completely different to anything I’ve ever done and deliberately so. There’s a certain style to my songs and I’d just written one and thought: “That’s good, but I’m going to push myself to write something that is completely unlike anything I’ve ever done or anything anybody would associate with me”. I mentioned on the sleeve notes I had been listening to 1930s German cabaret music. There’s some great stuff there, like Mack the Knife and all that stuff, Bertolt Brecht songs and what have you, and I thought: “I’m going to write a waltz” because rock is usually in four, four time not three, four. Actually, after the event, listening to a few Stranglers tracks, I can hear that I’m not the first to do it. They’ve done a few but very few other people have. So, it started there.

I built it up in the studio and it’s different because it’s not really verse, chorus, verse, chorus it goes all over the place with the backing vocals building up. Then it really got topped by this guy that I’ve still never met, which is a great shame, a genius called Alex Musatov, a Russian violinist who lives in in Buenos Aires. I knew he’d do a great job, so I sent it to him. It came back with both him and a friend of his who plays a sort of Argentinian squeeze box called a bandoneon or something together with his genius violins, which worked so well. Then finally, the icing on the cake was a pedal steel guitar that Maurice Hipkiss, a friend of Dave Draper’s put on. Brilliant. Maurice is not young. He told me stories about playing with Frank Ifield in 1960! What a genius. I love the pedal steel guitar. The way it pulls at your heart. Just the sound of it. He is brilliant at it, which you can hear. I’m incredibly proud of that track because it’s real craft. It proves to me that if someone gave me a brief, if you like to write for a film or something, I could do it and that’s a heck of a long way to come from the 18-year-old who used to sit at his kitchen table and be unable to write a punk song.

GQ: Certainly, one of my favourite songs on the album is probably one of the most personal ones to you. “Everybody Knows it’s True”. As I said before, I listened to the album before I read any of the sleeve notes, but on reading the sleeve notes, I became even more immersed and involved in the song’s story, because it’s obviously a very personal story.

How did that realisation that you may be autistic, and the diagnosis come about? How did that change your approach to life, or did it change your approach at all?

DR: Fundamentally. It was huge, – huge. I suspect it’s a large part of why I’m stopping now. I mean, we’ve talked before about how during lockdown I discovered this stress-free life. When we started playing music again, playing festivals and gigs, the playing bit was still great. That bit was still fun, but not the stressful admin, made worse by Brexit. I found myself thinking “I don’t like this”.

Then, as you mentioned I became a granddad. Like a lot of men, I’d largely missed the childhood of my daughter because I was busy forging a career, paying off the mortgage and ironically providing for the family. I missed it. So, now the two grandsons have come along and, boy, it’s fun. Real, real fun and great to be a part of it. So there’s been that and the discovery that I made about myself. I talk about it in the song “Lost Again”. I’ve spent my life thinking: ”well, everybody else is just bloody bonkers. They don’t make any sense at all. Don’t make any sense to me. They’re all mad so I’m just going to ignore them”. But that’s quite stressful. Also, other things like, if there’s a loose end, something that’s not done yet it would really stress me out: “Oh God I haven’t done that I’ve got to do that”.

And you can’t always just ignore people. When people are idiots or you perceive them to be unfair, it makes you very angry. You go into attack mode. Going back to The Boys my 50% of the two that it takes to tango was reacting badly to things I perceived to be unfair, as opposed to being able to brush it off.

I was on Facebook one day when I was having a bit of a blank about things to write about and put it out there: “Anybody got any good ideas for a song?” Actually, Mainy came up with some great ones. Most people came up with some great ideas as well, none of which I used.

Ironically. the guy who provoked the song was this complete and utter C U next Tuesday. I’d had dealings with him on Facebook before: “why don’t you write a song about how great Brexit is” he said, which was like red flag to a bull. The exchange inspired the song about fools and how you can never change their opinions.

But it also had this chorus, which I didn’t really understand myself even, but was there. “Everybody knows it’s true, a happy song will see you through, but some days you’re singing the same words they do, but to a different tune.” What does that mean?

I happen to have a good friend who is a therapist, and I played her the demo which I often do in that moment of being super excited about my handywork. Listening to it, she said “that’s an interesting chorus. What does it mean?” I didn’t really answer but I said: “people are odd, aren’t they? They don’t make any sense. So, I just ignore them, you know? And that’s what the song is about”. But she said: “your chorus isn’t about that, really, is it? Have you ever thought about whether you’re autistic”, to which I immediately said: “don’t be stupid, I’m the only sane person in the world, everybody else is mad”.

Yeah, to cut a long story short, because of her I applied to the NHS to get a test which took a long time, so I also applied privately and by sheer coincidence both of the tests happened at the same time, and both of the people said: “you are definitely autistic”. So I read up about it and, suddenly, everything made sense. As soon as you know what’s going on, life becomes infinitely easier. For example, you know, if someone says something daft making me feel anxious and exasperated, I can say to myself: “hang on a minute, it’s me”. Everything becomes easier because you don’t have to shut people out to avoid getting wound up.

I promptly wrote the song “Lost Again” with the line “Now I know, it’s me” and have not written a single song since, or even felt the need to, which is interesting, isn’t it? In my amateur psychiatrist mode, I wonder whether music was a process of both of escaping from this incomprehensible world, but at the same time writing about it and making sense of it. Having discovered this about myself I don’t now need to do that. I think in terms of my life, if I’m right, it’s not just about growing old, being a granddad and wanting to sit in my rocking chair with my pipe and slippers. I talked before about how I needed to do it, but I don’t need to do it anymore, and once you don’t need to do it, you don’t need to do It. And that’s alright.

Since I’ve announced it to the world, I’ve played every gig since to puzzled people saying please don’t stop. I almost just want to say, “I’m happy, so that’s that”. And that’s the main thing, absolutely. It’s a bit selfish of me because a lot of people are feeling a big loss. But there it is. Everyone is allowed to retire.

GQ: I’m going to pick up that subject of now taking that step back from music, the last song on the album, which I think you alluded the last time I did an interview with you about Nick taking some bits of what you’d done and writing a song about, I think you said being a weekend dad or something at the time, that sort of thing. When I listen to that song, it’s so emotional and the last three lines when it’s talking about the sunset, it feels like it’s a perfect song to say goodbye on. Tell me more about how that song came about.

DR: Yeah, I’m very, very proud of those lyrics because that is not a personal song at all. A song about weekend Dads. It was great that Nick picked it up. In the video blog about writing a song I explained about how tunes come into my head out of nowhere and if I don’t get them recorded somewhere, it might be on my phone, it might be on a Dictaphone, then they’re gone. I’ll never remember them again. And conversely, when I come back to the Dictaphone, I can listen to those little snippets thinking bloody hell that’s good, but only knowing it’s me because, it’s my voice, but not remembering the tune at all.

In the blog I played a few snippets into the video before I chose another one, which became “Can I Go Out Now Please”. But Nick, watching the blog, heard this snippet which became the verse of the song “Singing with the Beach Boys”. He musically finished the song off and then played it to me. I said, “that’s really, really good, I’m going to write some lyrics to that” and I did. I thought of this fun idea of writing a song about a dad who only sees his son every now and then because he’s divorced, wishing he could see him more, but nevertheless grabbing onto those weekends when he can have him and bonding over the fact that they both love belting out Beach Boys songs at full volume to a CD in the car. What was great fun about writing the lyrics was bringing bits of Beach Boys lyrics into the lyrics of the song. It’s quite a gimmicky little thing to do. But I think it works really, really well in the song. And at the end there’s this…. it’s funny, I’ve written quite a few songs about seizing the day. C’est La Vie is one of them and that is really not me at all. I’m very bad at living in the moment, so I write quite a lot about living in the moment and that’s where “Singing with the Beach Boys” ends up. Use that time you’ve got together, which, as I said before, is something that I’m determined to do with my family now.

GQ: Yeah. It’s like the ideal swansong for the last song on that last album.

DR: The one that I did want to finish with was actually Would I Lie to You, because at the end of that there are these violins that sort of fade off into eternity. I emailed Alex Musatov and said: “can you imagine you know a man who’s ultimately failed in life and regretting that failure, think of the melancholy that he feels and put that into the final note”.  

He sent it back and said: “I’m Russian, if you want it any more melancholic, you’ll have to send vodka”. I did want the album to end with that, but the order of songs on an album is very important and I didn’t have enough slow songs. It would have been too Bam, Alam Alam, all the way through without putting “Would I Lie to You” where it comes now. It’s important for the flow of the record.

But I agree with you, it’s a good song, “Singing with The Beach Boys” is a great song, and it works well as the last thing we’ll ever do.

GQ: In terms of what you just alluded to there, that was one of my questions. When you were starting to pull the songs together, how much time does it take to decide what order they come in? Obviously, this is your last album, so it’s your last goodbye, you’ve said it yourself. It’s important, the running order of the tracks so did you have it in your mind when you first did this that this was going to be your last album and the order of the songs was really important in that perspective?

DR: Not during the writing, because most of the songs were written during that second lockdown. When I got back from France in that winter I demoed them. I had the demos and put an order together.

But I didn’t decide to call it a day until we’d started gigging again and I realised I didn’t need to do it.

But you can never really decide the order of an album until you’ve got the final, finished tracks, because you don’t really know what’s going to work out and what won’t. I’m just about to publish some notes in a blog to go with the demos that lots of people like to buy and I make the point that when you listen to the demo for “Oh My My” it really drags. But the final version on the album is one of the best things I’ve ever done. The difference is primarily down to the fact that now, with AI, you can speed a track up without making the vocals sound like they’re Mickey Mouse. The final version is just a bit faster than the demo and goes from something that was a candidate to be left off the album and may be stuck on a single B side, to being one of the best, one of my top songs. So, it’s only when you finally get the actual thing that that you can then put the songs together, shove them all onto iTunes and play around with the order to hear how it goes.

For vinyl, because so many people buy vinyl, and still CD’s as well, as all my fans are so old thank goodness, it’s still important, that running order. It makes all the difference.

Farewell gigs…

GQ: Absolutely. And just it’s a fantastic album to bow out on. It’s just like the songs that you mentioned earlier with the pedal steel guitar, it just adds that layer to some of the songs. That’s so emotional, that really comes out as well.

You just mentioned you only really decided to give up when you started playing live again. The last couple of questions are about your final live outings.

You’ve got Rebellion coming up next week (note: by the time this is published, Duncan will have played these gigs) and then your last hurrah is in the Lexington in in October. What can people expect from these gigs?

DR: We’re playing an acoustic set at Rebellion which will be different to The Opera House. Heidi is playing with us, so I’ll be the best-looking bloke in the band, and it’ll be, you know, the usual, absolutely brilliant live set. And then we’re finishing off with a club set at the Tache. It was quite funny because we’ve played there before. I think it takes about 100 people and I’ve since met about 600 people who claimed they were there. It was a good night. It was a very, very good night and we’re playing there again. Originally, they said we’ve got a 1:30 in the morning slot. “No”, I said, “what about 12:30?” They said we can play for 45 minutes at 12:30. I said, “did you know this is the last ever gig that we’ll play in the North of England?” Then they were like, “oh. Play as long as you like then”. It may or may not be a long set, but it’ll be the full set for sure.

GQ: Your final hurrah is at The Lexington in October. Why that particular choice of venue?

DR: We could have undoubtedly played somewhere a lot bigger; you know. Nick said to me: “For goodness sake. Why don’t you play the Underworld or another 500-capacity venue”. I said: No. I really like the Lexington it’s a great venue”. So yeah, tough luck if you don’t get a ticket, because I like it. And it’s the final gig, the final night and I like Delia, who runs it. It’s just the place to do it for me. I’m hoping to get Mauro back for a few songs. Chiara, on the drums. We’ll have a mixture of Heidi and Nick. You know, just a few old faces mixing it up. Party to the end.

I’m just working out how I can organise it so that I can stay and get completely shitfaced.

GQ: Sounds good to me. I’m still trying to work out my work schedule to work around and see if I can make it down so fingers crossed.

It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

A huge thanks to Duncan for his time, his openness and honesty for what was, for me certainly, a thoroughly enjoyable and revealing interview.

An album review will follow shortly from the Ginger Quiff…

Pre-order the album here

Get your Lexington tickets here