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DR: Welcome to the humble Dr.Rock Show PA: Thank you very much. Hi. DR: A great pleasure to have you. And we’re enjoying your music immensely. PA: Even after all these years. DR: Well it still stands up. Obviously the collaboration with that great
articulate critic and author of our times who seemed to tap into the vein
of modern culture with great experience, wisdom and satire - he helped out
a bit did he ? PA: Well it was a very collaborative kind of relationship. He wrote the
words and I wrote the music for the most part - although I did write the
words and the music for that last one. I can’t stand to listen to it these
days because I’m always worried I’m going to forget the words. He wrote
nearly all the words for the things that we did. It was....working together
with someone like that you think of things you would never come up with if
you were working on your own. DR: How did you encounter the great man ? PA: We met at university - boring old story. I was singing some songs I had
written myself. He heard the songs and decided I needed someone else to
write the words for me. DR: What was he like in those days ? Had he that barbed wire wit at that
stage ? PA: He was and remains an extremely funny person. He was a bit older than
the rest of us. He was doing a postgraduate degree and he’d just been
bumming around for a few years - as he recounts in his autobiography. He
got back on the tracks by taking a postgraduate degree. He knew a lot more
than a lot of us did about a lot of things. DR: I did have the pleasure of meeting the great man at a book launch in
London. I found him very very pleasant and very amusing. What about your
good self ? You like the old Dobros and steel guitars and the bluesmen. PA: Like everybody I just grew up with the pop music in the sixties. I just
wanted to be part of that to some extent. There was never any point in
doing what everybody else was doing. One of the things that Clive and I had
in common was the thought that songs could in the wake of Dylan and the
Beatles could be about anything you wanted them to be about. They didn’t
have to be about moon and June stuff. We really enjoyed writing songs about
different kinds of things, telling different kinds of stories. DR: Was that the period when Clive was appearing as a film critic on TV ? PA: It overlapped with that and also overlapped with the time that he was
writing his TV column for The Observer. DR: Brilliant column. Now we’ve got an afficionado of yours here, Barry
Holley,
not to be confused with Buddy Holly - although Barry has had his photograph
taken recently with the Crickets. He is a man of substance. PA: Does he wear the glasses ? DR: He does and he’s a man of great perception. And he would like to have a
little word with you. PA: Sure. BH: Hi Pete. Thanks very much for coming on the show. The new CD on See for
Miles - we’ve played several tracks and I think it’s a wonderful
compilation. I just hope they go ahead and release all the others on CD. PA: That would be great.. It’s great to have it on CD I must say. I’ll just
be pleased if it does well enough for them to put the others out as well. BH: I understand that when you did some gigs with Clive James Clive would
let his hair down - if that’s the appropriate expression at the end and
actually do an Elvis number. Is that right ? PA: Indeed. We did six albums together in the seventies and the last one
was an album of jokey things and parodies and what have you. Clive and I
went on tour together - mainly round universities and theatres and we wrote
some special songs to do together. Because Clive doesn’t really sing. His
range is ever so slightly narrower than Ringo Starr’s..... If the show went
well he could occasionally be persuaded as a second or third encore to give
the audience the benefit of his version of ‘That’s alright Mama’. He had
them rolling in the aisles and crawling to the exits. DR: Can I ask you about your work with Julie Covington ? I just adore her
voice and I thought her version of ‘Don’t Cry for me Argentina’ was the
best one of all. PA: She has an absolutely amazingly thrilling voice. Her voice is difficult
to record - good as it sounds on record. I think if you ever get the chance
to hear her live - people’s jaws drop - she just sounds amazing. DR: She should have gone on to greater things. She is one singer I would
like to see up there among the rest of the so called divas. PA: She around at university at the same time as Clive and me. Because she
was a wonderful singer even then that was an incentive to write some girls’
songs... and she recorded several of them on her first Columbia LP which
came out before mine did. DR: Well I can see that doesn’t remain with the turkeys - you soar with the
eagles even when you were at Cambridge University. Thank you so much for
coming on Pete and we will be played another track from your CD. Thanks for
your excellence in your music. PA: You’re a man of fine discrimination and taste. Thank you very much. DR: My humility prevents me from any further comments. BH: Can I just quickly add Pete that if you’re coming to the north of
England and gigging we’d love to see you. PA: Well I’m performing a lot more these days than I have for a long time
and I’d love to come back to York. I have very good memories of gigs in York. DR: You’ll be welcome on the Dr Rock Show any time - thanks a million. PA: Thanks a lot.
The tracks featured on the show were Beware of the Beautiful Stranger, The Master of the Revels and The Original Original Honky Tonk Night Train Blues
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