So they’re the most recent projects I’ve been working on, and then prior to that I had three very busy years working on the Black Rider, which was this wonderful, huge project, which Tom Waits, William Burroughs and Robert Wilson collaborated on, I suppose ten years ago originally in Germany. And they did a production of it in German, which they toured. William Burroughs obviously died in the interim, but Robert Wilson and Tom had always wanted to do an English language version of it, so they put together and English-American cast of actors and we toured in large chunks of time in four different places, we opened it at the Barbican in 2004, then went to San Francisco, went to Sydney in 2005 and Los Angeles in 2006. Long, long runs, 10 to 16 weeks in each place. Marianne Faithful played this central character called Pegleg who’s effectively a Faustian-devil-Mephistopheles character. So it was fun to work with her, for the most part!
And working with Bob Wilson is a real experience because he’s a true innovator and stylist and a total theatrical visionary. Not everyone’s cup of tea it must be said, but wonderfully, instantly recognizable influential style with light, movement, delivery, concept, set design, use of actors, use of music, all that sort of stuff. It was wonderful, we were playing with a live eight-piece band every night, with David Coulter, Kate St John and Terry Edwards, they were all people that I’d played with before. And Thomas Bloch, who’s a French… plays these strange instruments, like an Onde Martinu, a glass harmonica, a cymbellon, things like that. Rory MacFalarlane was playing bass, Jack Pinter was playing trumpets and saxophones, Caroline Hall was playing trombone, and Bent Klausen I think his name was, was playing keyboards and percussion. So it was a lovely band, we got very close, because you stay together you get a really good rapport with those people.
So I was getting time off in San Francisco and Los Angeles I would do solo shows as well in clubs and I had this wonderful pool of musicians to avail myself of, coerce and cajole and bribe to do some stuff with me. So it was lovely, you had enough time to work some stuff out in the hotel room before the show. It was not like the classic rock’n’roll tour where you had somewhere every night different and you barely had time to unpack your suitcase. David Coulter and myself and Kate rented a house in Hollywood and we were there for 15 weeks, so you could relax a bit and enjoy the experience of being there rather than think ‘Oh god, it’s hardly worth unpacking the suitcase’.
The other nice thing with a show like that, A, you get big audiences, because Bob Wilson and Tom Waits have a huge international following and it was a thrill to rehearse in San Francisco with Tom, Tom came down and it was like two or three days rehearsal in the theatre with him… if you’re a music fan, to work with someone like Tom Waits is a real sort of… you realise that’s why you do church halls in the Edinburgh festival, losing money and sleeping on the floor with 17 people you don’t like! That’s what that was all about 30 years ago! That’s why I was doing that, because eventually, you stay alive long enough, you learn enough and you do it well enough, then you get these real treats. All live theatre gets a little bit repetitive after a while, a lot of the fun of it is in the rehearsal process, putting the show together rather than doing it. It’s great to do the opening night and the first four or five shows, but thereafter, it’s a little bit like a job, you get the adrenaline sometimes, you find something new to do to keep you amused, a new way of delivering a line or a song.
The funny thing with that was a lot of the fun was just seeing who was in the audience, there’s Neil Young, or Keith Richards… those people and Marianne have such a history between them! Every sort of international reprobate has touched their lives in some way or another! And they all come along and pay their respects at that show, so you meet some very interesting and iconic sort of figures in that counter culture or whatever it was at the time. Also we were invited to do a William Burroughs tribute evening in San Francisco which was a great thrill for me. San Francisco was always a sort of imagined paradise, growing up in the sixties, I didn’t go to America till 1980 I suppose, somehow SF was so exotic, growing up in south London in the sixties with the whole psychedelic music, the byrds, Jeffereson Airplane, the whole California thing was just so seductive and attractive and iconic somehow.