PASCAL's KEVIN COYNE HOME PAGE

Kevin Coyne: Coyne, The Unfrozen Currency   

Chris Salewicz, NME, 27 March 1976
  
KEVIN COYNE kicks and stamps his feet outside the Atlantic Hotel in Aarhus, Western Denmark, as we waits for a taxi to take us to the night's gig. With his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of a battered three-piece brown chalk-stripe suit he hops from foot to foot like some beat-up weary Latin master waiting for the cross-country runners to return.
  
It's not surprising that Coyne should be jumping and blowing freezing breath into his cupped hands. The temperature is 10 below. Ten Centigrade below, that is.
  
Still, this Danish climate is positively equatorial compared with Finland where the Coyne Band's European tour started a month ago. Thirty-five Centigrade below. The worst weather for ten years - and the hardest tour this bunch of musical old lags has ever worked.
  
"The Finns are great, you know," Kevin tells me, gazing vacantly across the road at the wood-fronted Porno Hus. "I'm knocked out with the reception we got. Mind you, I did expect it to be good - but not as good as it was.
  
"You've probably heard people talk about the gig in the igloo. It was amazing. It looked like an igloo but I think it was like a Buckminster Fuller dome covered up with about fifty feet of snow. Full of drunken kids. It was like Beatlemania.
  
"I was up there on stage and they were all pressed - like those pictures of the Beatles' fans - pressed against the stage and hanging on.
  
"It was a good exercise in communication. I think it's been the longest, most intense tour any British band's ever done there."
  
He puts his left hand to his throat and feels the wind that's coming off the harbour. "Excuse me. I must go inside. I'm gonna lose me voice if I'm not careful."
  
LAST NIGHT'S gig, however, was not too hot. In a kind of "Golden Homes" version of Dingwalls, not too far from the Tivoli Gardens in down-town Copenhagen, the Coyne Band encountered what was quite probably the original frigid audience. They would only clap - or for that matter respond at all - when viciously harangued by Coyne. And so it was necessary for them to be harangued.
  
C-L-U-M-P. A chair thrown by Coyne lands at the feet of a table-full of hyper-garrulous Copenhagen liggers. "You're all so wonderful and so rich," he bellows, a la Lenny Bruce.
  
The liggers titter nervously and stare with a certain uptight awe. "Is this a soup kitchen?" This time it's an approximation of the Laurence Olivier Richard III voice. "Do you have a lot of money?"
  
The audience isn't used to being heckled - and, worse still, actively abused, by an Englishman who is supposed to get up on those rock'n'roll boards and behave vaguely like a cross between Van Morrison and Joe Cocker.
  
Parts of the audience look positively scared. Several of them leave. Parts of the audience look brought down that Kevin Coyne isn't a rarified Morrison/Cocker. Some of them leave too.
  
A large part of the audience, though, are in love with Kevin Coyne. Letters are handed to him out of the audience. "We love you, Kevin," reads one from a married couple down in a front table. "You're part of our lives although we only know you through your records."
  
Kevin Coyne, you see, really is big in Europe - much more so than in his home country. He's a veteran of countless treks through Europe, both solo and with a band.
  
"It's saved me a few times," he tells me later. "I think it's getting very, very strong here. I haven't played in Britain for such a long time, you know. The last couple of gigs were great but that was a long time ago. I don't want to question British audiences' ability to listen too heavily, because I've got a lot of good friends who do listen...who are very concerned, you know."
  
ALTHOUGH THE band are not overkeen on getting their Saturday night playing rocks off at this Copenhagen gig, they still play very well indeed. Real pros these boys.
  
The Rhythm section of Peter Woolf (drums) and Steve Thompson (bass) - is anonymously powerful and tight. On keyboards there's George "Zoot" Money, who wears a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and a perpetual 18-year-old's smile even though everyone in this band is over 30.
  
George says he wants to help Kevin spot potential rip-off situations. George has been around just a little bit, what with the Big Roll Soul Band and Dantalion's Chariot and Eric Burdon and The Animals and Grimms and... and appears to have a deep, cynical understanding of the music business. He is bombed by the beginning of the soundcheck, five hours before the gig is due to start. By playing-time he's almost suspiciously together and his harmony underpinning with Kevin's vocals on 'Sunday Morning Sunset', together with his floating keyboards, is delicious.
  
Andy Summers - who was also an Eric Burdon Animal and who claims to have been a featured star in Jenny Fabian's Groupie - is a bitch of a guitar player with the makings of a fine punk star about him.
  
And he is also pretty in a Ray Davies-esque sort of way. Without him the band wouldn't be too fanciable to the totty at all. With him they suddenly all possess a distorted "gracefulness" through association.
  
Coyne is close to remarkable. It's as if his haranguing of the audience and the general uprightness has unleashed a million tension knots and permitted them to run amok over his body. He doesn't remind me of Joe Cocker - the fave comparison - at all. All baggy in the sagging shapelessness of his clothes, with that out-of-control marijuana patch of a head, Kevin Coyne lumbering about on stage is my mind's very image of a Yeti running.
  
It's certainly not a Great Gig, but there's still so much there - particularly in the band, whom I'd thoroughly underestimated, having concentrated all my beliefs in Coyne and the knowledge that his stage-show ability is a fine craft.
  
"IT WAS mainly because of the art training, you know." says Kevin Coyne, as he explains why he became a social worker after leaving Art School."
  
"I didn't want to just teach art. I wanted to do it in a more varied kind of way, starting off by doing a kind of art therapy and then generalising more and becoming more involved with individuals, you know.
  
"It was a great wave of experience for me. Served me very well. Kept my head above water and the music business bit anyway. Since I signed with Virgin."
  
Keeps you sane, does it?
  
"Oh yeah. Having seen the depths and having been closer to the depths myself, you can go on a tour like this and survive.
  
"The schedule is so heavy and the territory so uncharted in so many areas.
  
"I mean, some areas it has definite shades of Bootle and Accrington."
  
The university here at Aarhus, however, is not a shade of Bootle or Accrington. Brighton, Norwich, Keele perhaps. Yes, you could be in any of the British New universities and not know the difference, except that at Keele there aren't so many Danes who try and be hip with us foreigners by cracking esoteric Danish jokes in their "Woodentops" English and then laughing uproariously.
  
Backstage in the dressing-room of the campus concert hall - polished pine everywhere - the band's manager is a little apprehensive.
  
Last time the band toured Denmark this was the proverbial ace gig with a sell-out and a near-riot. What more could a manager ask for? Well, tonight, there's only 30 minutes till the doors open and things are very, very quiet.
  
THE BAND drink coffee and nibble exotic Danish sandwiches as Kevin and I hide away in the corner by the toilet door. He's talking about his decision to knock social work on the head.
  
"I was rather glad to at the time because I was pretty exhausted. I'd worked very hard. A lot of my - what shall I say? - principles, my beliefs in humanity had been somewhat shattered, so I needed to do something else.
  
"I mean, I had a good taste of the music business before anyway, with Dandelion, and I met a few typical examples of of what the music business can do to people. So I was very much aware of the dangers but...the money's better, so that was a very practical reason, being a family man as well.
  
"And it's worked out pretty well. Been a bit slow in parts but it's getting better all the time...I've always considered myself to be artistically very natural. It's a thing I've needed to do, you know. A relief-giver.
  
A therapeutic process?
"For me, yeah."
  
Yes, I must say that The Therapeutic Process seems to osmose from everything you connect yourself with. Not just the stage work but the practising and the writing of the numbers, and even the boozing to enable you to write the numbers.
  
"Yeah. Well, hopefully it's a form of communication which I'm good at and which works for me and which enables me - in, I suppose, an idealistic sense - to talk to more people, whether I'm writing a book or whatever.
  
"But at the moment I'm probably enjoying it more than I've ever enjoyed it - because there are signs of rewards." He laughs, "The messages are reaching people. Maybe not so much in Britain but...there is a following there."
  
Well, you seem to evoke a certain loyalty...
  
"A very intense loyalty, mate. Great stuff. There was some of that last night.... Some geezer handed me a letter and it was quite embarrassing. It was very sincere about everything I'd ever done. And he'd had the usual problems: Not being able to obtain Case History which is an album I did for Dandelion. Wanted to know about......I liked it last night," he free-associates, "I was ready for it, having played in Copenhagen before, and I'm pretty sure I know what goes on in their heads. It wasn't the best gig I've done but it certainly wasn't bad.
  
"This band seems to be able to survive any kind of situation and come through it - maybe it's because it's just a little older in the tooth than most bands. In terms of experience.
  
"You know, I think Zoot's a great player. A great artist. They all are. And with the addition of Steve Thomas [Thompson]- a very strong player - the band's really become complete in a way that it wasn't this time last year.
  
"That was an interesting band...Incredible variety of people in it, and must have worked more gigs than most. We did all of Europe several times.
  
"It almost wore us all out. Then when it was time to make an album, something fell apart. It was like a moment of truth and...Matching Head And Feet," he shrugs, "Looking for, something else."
  
Do you actually want to make it on a large level?
  
"Oh yeah. And if I carry on doing it I will. I thought I'd be a cult figure and all that, but there's so many things I want to do."
  
What?
Coyne speaks through a mouthful of selected Smorgesbord: "I want to get much more into theatrical aspects. That's what I'm trying to do this year - really broaden it out, provide much more of an entertainment than I'm able to do at the moment and use a lot more of my ideas...and verbal sort of ideas.
  
"I wouldn't mind being a comedian really," he laughs.
  
You like comedians?
The Derby accent becomes very thick: "Yea-aahhh, I admire them very much.
  
"There ain't so many now. The heyday of the stand-up comic seems to have faded because of television and the need to pump out jokes endlessly but, no, I like the musical tradition really.
  
"I like the Northern kind of comic. Freddie Frinton kind of humour. Les Dawson. People like that. Although I think he's become just a little bit of a product of the media of late. But he's a great stand-up comic generally. 'And I LOVE THE WAY THEY ALWAYS BREAK INTO SONG'."
  
He shakes his head. "There's so much I'd like to do. This is a great lever for moving into areas where I couldn't go otherwise, you know. And success would certainly produce a greater freedom. Or it might not - it's backfired on a lot of people.
  
"But at this level it's great. In the centre. You can work and you can fill halls. And yet you do want more. I suppose to a certain extent it's based on ego as well."
  
Surely ego's a central factor of being a rock 'n' roller?
  
"I'm afraid it is."
  
What about the ego of the stage persona? Does it ever misfire when you insult your audiences?
  
"It's misfired occasionally in England. Yes."
  
So why do you do it?
"Well, maybe because they insult me. That's all. Sometimes a bit of a shock isn't a bad thing. It's because I feel insulted sometimes by the attitudes of certain....because I can see them all, I can see every face that's bad, you know.
  
"On a good night the eyesight fixes on certain individuals. You can't hear what they're saying - they might be saying the most pleasant things, but the old paranoia creeps on. And the need to shout at something comes on.
  
"I mean, paranoia's very much part of what I do anyway. You present yourself as an unwilling yet willing victim at the same time."
  
Have you been very much a victim of paranoia?
"If you listen to the songs you'll see that...(laughs). There is fair evidence, I think, 'Marjory Razorblade' and 'Case History' are just one long tirade against it in various ways...."
  
We're interrupted by Kevin's being called onstage for a last-minute sound check.
  
WHEN HE returns, the subject is music. I tell Kevin my normal reaction to his music: that I like it but find it almost impossible to actually enjoy it as such. Is that, I wonder, a typical reaction?
  
"Well, I don't necessarily like it too much either, and that's partly because of the exorcising process... It's not really meant to be music for pleasure so much as - in some cases - an 'O' Level course in insight." He laughs. "But I've been trying to make it more enjoyable lately. I've been doing the latest album and I've tried to keep it more varied.
  
"You could say some elements that have disappeared like 'The Good Boys' and the 'Marjory Razorblade' element. But not for good. I'm still recording things like that with the hope of...."
  
Obviously you want a hit album. Have you had to compromise to try and get one?
  
"There's an element of compromise. Yeah, I have to admit that - in the sense that I've nearly had to stop being too direct and temper it with a little more musical skill. But it's not too much of a compromise because it's enjoyable for me and I'm learning a lot at the same time.
  
"But I don't want to lose the qualities that were there and I don't think I have. I think that on a lot of the stuff I've been doing lately on my own it's stronger than ever in that direction. And that will see the light of day soon."
  
You know what? There seem to be an awful lot of references to mother fixations in your music?
  
"Of late there is," Coyne nods. "It's been coming on very strong. Maybe that's because I'm missing her a bit.
  
"Well, that whole process has always intrigued me ˆ the mother smother, the e-ter-nal bond" - he draws the syllables out. "In fact, I've just done a song about it called 'All The Battered Babies'. It's a bit strong really (laughs). That's my final statement, for a while anyway.
  
"Do you have a bottle opener? Anybody?"
  
"MY FAVOURITE Dane is Kierkegaard," Coyne tells the audience - who have managed, in the end, to be a sellout. He points at Andy Summers: "'E likes fucking. 'E's the top fucker." Summers retaliates with some truly blistering guitar runs.
  
The set is drawn mainly from his three Virgin albums, beginning with a handful of numbers - including "Marjory Razorblade" - from a solo and acoustic Coyne. It ends, after many, many encores, with Coyne backed by just Summers on acoustic.
  
In the middle there's some very, very good rock music.
  
I had, to be honest, inclined towards the view that Kevin Coyne was predestined to be a Classic Loser. There have been, after all, so many band member changes, and Kevin has always been regarded as just a little too controversially uncompromising. But that phase seems to have gone now.
  
In its place is a pumping, hard-ass - almost slick in its timing - very mature rock 'n' roll outfit. It's the Kevin Coyne Band, make no bones about it.
  
  
  
  
  
© Chris Salewicz, 1976