Formed in London back in 1973, Starry Eyed And Laughing’s early gigs brought them to the attention of the music press and particularly Melody Maker, who were well impressed by the band’s live shows. Extensive gigging in colleges and pubs across the U.K. followed, leading to sessions on the legendary John Peel Show on BBC Radio and an appearance at The Roundhouse in London, alongside Michael Nesmith and John Stewart, for Zigzag’s 5th Birthday Party. A record deal with CBS soon followed, and they released their self-titled album in 1974, followed by THOUGHT TALK the following year. Their harmonies plus hook filled and note perfect West Coast-influenced songs, prompted an invitation to tour The States as part of Columbia Record’s ‘New Faces of 1975’. What was to be a ground-breaking experience was dogged by misfortune from day one with a hundred planned dates being reduced to just thirty. When they returned home, their management company collapsed, which essentially resulted in the band’s demise. Original members Tony Poole and Iain Whitmore have remained close friends and they started to write material back in 2013 for the third Starry Eyed And Laughing album – now 46 years since their last recording BELLS OF LIGHTNING has finally arrived. Their wondrous harmonies, alongside Poole’s trademark Rickenbacker playing, embrace musical arrangements that recall their passion for the West Coast sound of the late 1960s. It’s a triumphant return to recording and another chapter in the Starry Eyed And Laughing story that is most likely not over quite yet, as Poole explained when we chatted recently.
How are things at the Starry Eyed And Laughing HQ these days?
The last couple of weeks have been pretty intense. Having put out the word about this record, the pre-orders have been in the hundreds. I’m operating a one-man mail room here because Iain (Whitmore) is living in Devon. I’m a little anxious this week because the Royal Mail are saying that European deliveries are about four to five days, but I’ve only had two people confirm that they have received it. I also got a couple of messages from people in America saying that they received it. Having said that I didn’t ask people to confirm that they received it. Also, in Europe they are starting to charge import duty.
Iain and yourself are the two remaining members of the original Starry Eyed And Laughing four piece. Did you stay in contact with the others after you disbanded back in 1976?
Sadly, Michael Wackford, the band’s drummer, passed away in 2016, and he wasn’t old by today’s standards, only sixty. I had not seen him since around 2000 when we were putting together a retrospective of the two Starry Eyed And Laughing albums. I lost touch with him after that. I sometimes felt guilty that we had not continued with the band from the early days. After we broke up Michael went to Spain and joined a band that played U.S. bases there. I did keep in touch with Iain because we lived quite close. I don’t know what happened to Ross (McGeeney), I did see him at Michael’s funeral and strangely he did show up at a Bennett, Wilson, Poole gig. I don’t know if he is playing music anymore.
Did the band consider regrouping in the ‘80s or early ‘90s when alt-country became popular and bands such as The Jayhawks, The Long Ryders emerged, with a sound similar to your own?
No, strangely not. At that time, I was doing engineering and production work. I ran into the guys from the band, The Men They Couldn’t Hang, when I was playing in a wine bar in Shepherds Bush. Stefan Cush from that band actually died earlier this year. I ended up producing them and also managing them. A journalist from Melody Maker called Will Smith was a big fan of that band and used to come to the gigs and he introduced me to R.E.M. who reminded me of our early sound. The former band members weren’t in touch, this was before internet, so the band just seemed like history. I was also doing solo gigs and Iain came to one of the shows and we started doing duo gigs after that. We played in pubs around London. I remember making a sign that read ‘Tony Poole and Iain Whitmore ex-Starry Eyed And Laughing’. We were playing some of the band’s original material but also new songs because we were both writing quite a lot of songs at the time. We just carried on playing. We had a band called The Sun and we made a record. We recorded an album with another band we formed called The Falcons, which was a country record. All of that was done for pleasure, none of it bought us a swimming pool (laughs).
What was your intention when you started writing the songs that ended up on the new record back in 2013? Were the songs specifically for a Starry Eyed And Laughing album at that time?
Yes, it was something that Iain and I had talked about for many years. We started it in 2013, I then got polymyalgia, which knocked me about for three and a half years. Soon after that this wonderful thing called Bennett Wilson Poole happened, which took care of another couple of years. Iain was working on the songs here with me in 2013 and then in both 2017 and 2018, we did quite a lot of work then. We had part recorded about twenty songs by then. Then the lockdown came about. That actually helped to get the album finished, but it meant working on the songs remotely over the internet. More so than putting closure on Starry Eyed And Laughing, it was about the beginning of finishing what we started. When we broke up in 1976 there was a lot of unfinished stuff, though I wonder how you can wait nearly fifty years to finish something.
By the sound of things, the reaction among your followers has been very positive.
Indeed. I’ve been selling CDs of various albums for twenty years now and I keep a data base of around two thousand names of buyers. All I did with this album was put it on Facebook and Twitter and we’ve already sold hundreds of copies. It was mentioned to me that had I registered with Americana UK, we would certainly be in the charts. I’m certain of this based on Bennett Wilson Poole getting into the top five with their sales. With all the mailouts I’ve been doing, I still have about sixteen hundred people in my data base who are not on social media and have yet to hear about it. Hopefully, that might mean that I’ll continue to be a mail boy for the next while. I have done a number of archive releases over the past number of years, mostly demos of the band to keep things going and I’ve sold up to five hundred of those, so it feels like a nice little family of people that support us.
Will you be kicking down the doors of the popular music press to have the album reviewed?
I actually feel that the connection with people like yourselves is actually more important. Shindig magazine have also been good to us, they did a three or four-page feature on us a few years back. I often feel that getting a review in the larger music magazines can be vanity. What’s more important is people like yourselves who are dedicated, so I’m more inclined to contact people that I feel are genuinely interested in what we do. This is not a money-making exercise for us at this stage.
With a lifetime in the industry, I’ve no doubt that you have a very good idea how it operates.
Back in the day, we always felt we were lumped in with pub rock, whereas we were more outsiders. The agents, managers and the labels make a lot of money and you read so many stories of people who were extremely successful but never got any royalties for their music. The wonderful thing nowadays, with the internet, is that I have a direct connection with our fan base, friends really and that means so much more. Back in the early days our manager contacted us to tell us that a particular radio station was looking for payment from us to play us on their station. We didn’t pay and didn’t get played.
You are credited with all the instrumentation on the album, with the exception of bass and acoustic guitar, which Iain contributed.
Yes, you could probably call it megalomania. Over the years I had compiled a long list of guests who might play on the album, but the logistics of actually doing that seemed crazy. When Danny Wilson and Robyn Bennett approached me about working with them, I worked on all the tracks on that album, adding their guitars, vocals and harmonies and I played the rest of the instruments. I did something similar with this album, it can actually make the process easier. Having produced records for so long, I know what I want to hear and how to get that sound. There are some non-guitar, bass and drums instruments on the album, not many, they are just things I played on keyboards. Iain and myself did all the vocals and harmonies, he sang the songs that he had written and I sing my songs. There is a song we co-wrote, Love Still Speaks Your Name, where we sang a verse each.
Does Harry Arthur, who was credited as drummer on Bennett Wilson Poole, not get a mention this time around?
On the Bennett, Wilson, Poole album, I was credited with playing the bass, keyboards and lead guitars. I didn’t want it to sound like it was a one-man show and credited Harry Arthur (my middle names), as playing drums on that album. When Fin Kenny was playing drums at our gigs with Bennett, Wilson, Poole, he was getting fed up with people coming up to him after gigs and saying ‘you were great Harry’ so he put him to bed. He designed a tee shirt that read ‘I shot Harry Arthur.’ This album is anything but a one-man show. Iain and I really worked out all the arrangements together and it’s as much Iain as it is myself.
Do you think it will generate interest from people previously unfamiliar with the band?
It already has. I’ve had sales of our previous albums already on the strength of this album. The extent will depend on what sort of spread the album gets. At the moment that spread is essentially everyone who already knows the band. We also did not want to use the word closure about the album, because, although it is a case of finishing what we started, Iain and I have great ideas about a next stage for Starry Eyed And Laughing. I’m not sure we will do what Danny Wilson has done with his latest album, introducing funny bleeps and noises: we definitely won’t be doing metal machine music.
Though you incorporated both sounds on your earlier albums, I get a sense that the album is somewhat less power poppy and more West Coast.
You’re absolutely right, it was certainly a conscious decision to stay tuned to the original West Coast sound. We wanted the album to have a very uniform sound. We started recording about twenty songs but half of them seemed somehow to fit another genre. In my mind, and Iain and I had discussed this, we wanted it to sound as if The Byrds had not gone on to record SWEETHEARTS OF THE RODEO.
You reminisce of former days and your tour of The States on three consecutive songs on the album. Three Days Runningrecalls being stranded in Boston for three days.
We were on tour in the States for three months and there was a time when we were stuck in Boston and couldn’t get to New York because of flooding. Iain actually wrote the song in that period and we did sing it once at a gig. It was done for a radio station in Long Island called My Fathers Place – I actually have a recording of it. We were singing it without playing any instruments because we hadn’t properly learned the song. That one and two other songs on the album are about that U.S. tour. I wrote the first of lines from Dreamyard Angels back in 1975, the rest of the song is like a journey of some of the episodes from the tour. I got electrocuted in Atlanta on the very first date. Something was wrong with the wiring. I picked up the microphone and just saw this blue flash and I was hospitalised for a night, so that episode is included in the song. Iain wrote the song Faith, Hope and Charity back in 1976 and it was about the disastrous situations that we landed in. Those three songs are like a little trilogy of things that happened to us. On the record, I put a little snippet of the intro to Simon and Garfunkel song America, to introduce that trilogy of songs relating to the tour of The States. It’s probably a bit self-referential.
Is it true that The Flying Burrito Brothers arrived on stage with you during the tour?
Yes, Gene Parsons, Joel Scott Hill and Gib Guilbeau joined us on stage one night. Another night Dr. Hook and The Medicine Show were on the same bill and I remember they got busted for having dope in the dressing room.
You were mixing with some big boys then; did you think you had it made?
Yes, we thought we’d have our own jet. We supported Dave Mason, who was very big in The States at that time. We also supported the J. Geils Band and a little-known singer at that time called Jimmy Buffett, who is now a millionaire. Originally the tour was to be about a hundred dates but it had not been organised very well and we ended up doing around thirty dates over a three-month period. The illusions of limousines vanished quite quickly.
I understand that your management company vanished just as quickly?
Yes, they were actually lovely guys, but had too much faith and too little knowledge about the business.
Do you have plans to play the music from the album in a live setting?
Iain and I have talked about it. We’ll bring in some other musician friends to fill the band and do a proper album launch when things do settle down some more, Covid-wise.
And hopefully some shows in Ireland might happen?
I would come over and sing on a street corner in Kilkenny. The weekend I spent in Kilkenny playing the Roots Festival with Bennett, Wilson, Poole is such a memory, I long to get back there. We played our first of four shows there on the Friday night and the next morning I was rooting around looking for somewhere for breakfast and someone I didn’t know from across the street called out: ’Hey, Tony, how are you?’. You become a Kilkenny legend after one night.
Interview by Declan Culliton