Inspiral Carpets Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

Beyond the Fringe:

Clint Boon on the Return of

Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

“... the Inspirals is the biggest thing that I’ve ever done in my life and the idea of revisiting that, the time felt right ...”

Moooooo! “The cream of Oldham”, legendary Baggy (and maybe even Britpop) pioneers Inspiral Carpets are back and they are still “Cool as fuck!” Need proof? Well, look no further than the man behind the band’s instantly recognisable organ sound, Clint Boon, whom we recently had the pleasure of catching up with via Zoom to celebrate the announcement of their upcoming thirteen-date UK tour, which kicks off at Roadmender in Northampton on the 23rd March next year.

Now 63, Boon has long been shorn of the equally distinctive bowl haircut which he sported throughout Inspiral Carpets’ glory years when, between 1989 and 1995, the band achieved no less than seventeen charting singles, as well as four top twenty albums (‘Life’, 1990, UK#2; ‘The Beast Inside’, 1991, UK#5; ‘Revenge of the Goldfish’, 1992, UK#17 and ‘Devil Hopping’, 1994, UK#10), now favouring an altogether more Mod affair, which in recent years has become nearly as iconic. Over the last two decades, in addition to recording and touring with the Inspirals again between 2003 and 2016, when the band abruptly ended once more following the sad passing of drummer Craig Gill, he has established himself as a true radio broadcasting great with his weekday drivetime show and Saturday evening ‘The Boon Army Party Show’ on XS Manchester and regular DJ gigs up and down the country.

Gill’s death may have been the most difficult challenge that Inspiral Carpets have ever had to face, but it is far from the only obstacle that they have had to overcome during their fascinating thirty-nine year history. However, this band are true survivors and previously, even the

Clint Boon

departure of their vocalist throughout their most commercially successful early to mid-’90s period, Tom Hingley in 2011 did little to dampen their incredible 21st Century rebirth. They quickly reunited with original vocalist Stephen Holt (who had left the band back in 1989, half way through the recording of their debut album) and went on to release an eponymous 2014 record (UK#63) which easily stands up to the quality of any of its four predecessors. Now, with the addition of new drummer, Kev Clark and a new bassist, former Cupids and The Gramotones member Jake Fletcher taking over touring duties from Martyn Walsh, who, whilst still very much a member of the band has declined to go out on the road with the band, what can we expect from the Inspiral Carpets of 2023? Let’s all hear you shout “Boon Army!”, because here is the man with all the answers, the one and only Mr. Clint Boon!

Firstly, hello Clint and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you and welcome back to Inspiral Carpets, because after six years apart, following the sad passing of drummer Craig Gill in 2016, you are back together and next March and April, you will be back out on the road for a thirteen-date UK tour. How did the decision to put Inspiral Carpets back together come about and how has the experience of playing together again after six years been so far?

Well, the decision came after we started getting offers back in July. For the first time in years, we started to get emails; a couple of emails regarding possible work in 2023, like tours and support slots. And for me, it was like, we’ve not wanted to gig since Craig [Gill] died at the end of 2016. Craig, our drummer passed away in November 2016, so we just had no desire whatsoever to do anything in terms of live music or recording ... you know, recording new music. You know, there’s always business to do when you’ve got a band like the Inspirals.

Stephen Holt, with Martyn Walsh in background

There’s always the business of, you know, back catalogue reissues, or licensing deals where people want to put your record on ‘This is Dad Rock Volume Six’ or whatever [laughs]. There’s always stuff to do and, you know, for pretty much on a weekly basis over the last six years, people have been in touch about various things, but never any of us have said, ‘Let’s do some gigs’, because we just ... I wasn’t ready for it and the others weren’t and then we got this one particular offer in July that came through on an email on a Saturday morning and it didn’t even mention any fees, it was just ‘Do you fancy going out with this band in Summer of ‘23’, etc. And I just read it and I thought ‘do you know what? I’m ready! I could do that!’ Partly because it’s so way ahead, it’s a year away, so it gives me time to, you know, get the keyboards plugged back in and make sure everything’s working and it gives me time to learn how to play again and remember the songs, because I’ve not played them for ages. I mean, the last time I played proper was the end of 2015 when we toured with Shed 7. So, yeah, this email came and it really got me excited and, you know, feeling positive and I think I personally needed something like that in my schedule of what’s happening over the next few years, because I was getting into this ... well, I am, I’m a DJ, I do a lot of DJ-ing at various events/ You know, I’ve just done four DJ gigs in the last three nights. So, I do that and I’m on the radio six days a week [Boon presents the drivetime show on weekdays, 4-7pm and ‘The Boon Army Party Show’ every Saturday, 7-10pm, on XS Manchester] and that’s all I’m doing. The public see me doing the DJ-ing and the radio and in the background, I’m always working on other little projects as well, but the idea that we could have something else in place that’s a massive part of my career, you know, and my life ... the Inspirals is the biggest thing that I’ve ever done in my life and the idea of revisiting that, the time felt right and it did for the other guys as well. So, Graham [Lambert] and Steve [Holt], the guitarist and singer were, you know, well up for it;

The much missed Craig Gill

Martyn [Walsh], the bass player told us he doesn’t feel ready to do it yet, so he’s opted out. He’s not leaving the band, he’s still the bass player and still our business partner, but he’s not going to do this round of gigs with us, so we’ve got a guy called Jake Fletcher, who’s another Oldham lad. He was [frontman] in a band called Cupids and one called The Gramotones and he’s now a really well-established session man. He’s playing with Paul Weller these days. So, we’re getting Jake. Jake’s going to do the bass and we’ve got a guy called Kev Clark, who’s stepping in on the drums and the rehearsals that we’ve had so far have just felt amazing! I mean, night one was emotional. You know, walking into the room and there being someone else sat in Craig’s position was emotional for all of us, but, you know, as soon as we started playing, to say we’ve not played for six and a half years or something at that point, it was like, ‘This is going to sound alright this! It’s going to sound great!’ And the feeling in the room, I think because we are all ... you know, the two new

Clint (far left) with Inspiral Carpets, c.1986

lads are from the Oldham and Ashton area, the North of Manchester, it feels to me like it felt in the ‘80s when we started! I mean, me, Graham and Steve were in the original line-up of the band, you know, from 1986 onwards, so you’ve got us three and then you’ve got two other local lads in with us and because we’ve got this common background, all being from the same part of the world and, you know, we’re all pretty much from working class families there’s similar humour and an intense passion for music, as most bands have, yeah, we just hit the ground running! And in terms of the chemistry in the new line-up, the chemistry feels brilliant, the songs sound great and I’m not in any doubt that this tour is going to be one of the most exciting tours that we’ve ever done, at the same time as being very emotional because Craig won’t be with us ... physically anyway; he’ll be there sonically as far as I’m concerned, but I’ll be hearing his beats, but played by someone else, you know. But yeah, it’s dead exciting, I’m buzzing and it’s just ... I think the others would say the

same, it’s what I needed in my life. You know, for the next couple of years, I needed something like this to be focusing on as well as all the other stuff that I do.

So, it has come at the right time then?

Perfect timing, yeah, absolutely! I wouldn’t have thought it. If you’d have asked me, you know, at the beginning of this year ‘Will the Inspirals do anything?’, I’d probably say, ‘Maybe one day, but no rush, I’m happy doing this, that and that’, but yeah, when that email came through in July ... I was the one that thought when the offers came through, I might be the one opting out and, you know, I might be the one that says, ‘I’m too busy with radio and I’m happy doing this’, but yeah, I got the email and I showed it to my wife, Charlie, and just said, ‘Look, read that. I’m ready for it’ and she’s like, ‘Go for it!’ So, yeah, we’re going for it big time! Because we’ve got the UK tour, obviously, in spring, which is selling brilliantly and some of the gigs have sold out already! Yeah, I think two sold out on the first day tickets went on sale and then I think Sheffield [Leadmill on the 14th of April] has sold out since then. Yeah, so, we’ve got the tour in spring and then we’ve already committed to like some festivals through the summer and then we’re also looking at another offer that’s come in to do some work in the spring of ‘24, so it’s certainly going to be the next eighteen months, maybe two years of Inspirals and whether that’ll lead on to new music, I’ve got a feeling that it probably will because that’s what happens when bands get back together! So, we’ll see, but for now, we’re just taking care of the touring, celebrating the back catalogue and then we’ll see what comes next!

Yes, it has been a full eight years since the last Inspiral Carpets album, 2014’s ‘Inspiral Carpets’ (UK#63), so can we take it from what you have just said that making new music and releasing a new album is something you would like to do?

I’m not in a rush to do it, because I think sometimes, if you rush it, it can sometimes backfire. I think, you know, I’d rather wait until the inspiration is there to write songs and until we’ve got enough songs to make a good album. You know, the time will come, I’m sure. I think, in the past, we’ve been guilty of ... you know, we made a couple of albums back in the day where we just wrote twelve or fifteen songs and made an album, whereas some artists, they’ll have ... you know, someone like Paul Weller, he’ll have like forty or fifty songs and he’ll pick the twelve most amazing ones and put an album out, whereas I think we’d be like scraping round, going ‘Come on, we need two or three extra tracks here, [laughs] we’re in a rush!’ So, yeah, I think if we’re doing it the right way, the time will come and we’ll know when it’s time to start jamming and writing and then, you know, that’ll lead on to the next part. I mean, the album that we put out in 2014, we called it ‘Inspiral Carpets’, it was the eponymous album, it was as good as anything we’d done, I think, because we waited until the time was right and it was an album that really does represent that band, that line-up ... because it wasn’t with Tom [Hingley, vocalist, 1989-1995 / 2003-2011], it was with Steve [Holt, vocalist, 19831989 / 2011-2016 / present] and it’s just the best document of what that band could do and what that band did. And so, yeah, I think that album was as good as anything that we’ve ever done. I mean, another album that’s potentially going to happen is that when Craig died, we were actually working on new music, so we had some recordings that weren’t finished and I think we all like the idea of, at some point, finishing that as an album. It would be nice, yeah. Some of it, from what I remember, was Craig ... we were like jamming these ideas out in the studio in Stockport and Craig had like an electronic drum-pad and he had it on his lap, so he was drumming out the beats with his hands, so I love the idea that that could be finished and then we get to hear Craig doing the percussion.

Wow, that would be a really nice

tribute. So, how far did you actually get into the creation of what I’m guessing would have eventually become your sixth album?

From what I remember, without revisiting the recordings, I’d say we had probably seven or eight ideas on the go; you know, seven or eight ideas for tracks. So, that’s not definitely going to happen, but it’s a nice project to think about for at some point, you know, finishing that off. You know, we’re really respectful of Craig’s memory, obviously, because he was with us for thirty years. Thirty years, because was fourteen when he joined the band, so it’s a long time to know somebody that. Yeah, he was there most of my adult life ... I was twenty-five when he joined the band and he was fourteen, but for all his adult life, he was in a band with us. Yeah, we’ll always feel his presence, I’m sure we will at every gig and every time we get on the tour bus. Because, you know, the tour bus for bands, it sleeps thirteen or fourteen people and it’s got various lounges in it and a kitchen and that becomes the band’s inner-sactum during a tour and the idea that he won’t be there in that space with us, that’s as profound to think of as him not being on stage with us; the fact that when we get on that bus at night to travel to the next city, he won’t be there entertaining us on the back lounge all night and, you know, he won’t be the one saying, ‘Check this DVD out, it’s brilliant!’ He was the one that introduced me to, do you know the film ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ [2012]? It’s a really amazing film, ‘Searching for Sugar Man’, and it’s a real life documentary about a real life musician [Sixto Rodriguez] and he just, one night, said, ‘Do you want to watch this? It’s brilliant!’ and we put it on and it’s not life-changing, but it’s genre-defining as a movie and it’s one of my favourite films ever, so I remember the moment that Craig said on the back of the bus after the gig, ‘Let’s watch this’. So, what I’m saying, he wasn’t just the drummer, he was an essential part, an intrinsic part of our soul for thirty years, you know. But we’ll do our best to celebrate his

Inspiral Carpets with Tom Hingley (second from right), 1990

work and he’ll be up there and he’ll be smiling on us when we play, yeah.

As we talked about earlier, with Gill’s passing and bassist Martyn Walsh, although he is still an official member of the band, having elected not to join you on tour, there have been a few changes to the Inspiral Carpets line-up this time around with the addition of bassist Jake Fletcher and drummer Kev Clark. How did Fletcher and Clark actually come to join the band?

Well, in the case of ... the main one was Kev. We’re not just looking at getting extra members in, it’s not just a case of finding a few session men. In the case of the drums, this was something that was going to be as emotional for him, whoever gets that gig, as it is for us and Craig’s family seeing somebody else in their dad’s place. And the way we found Kev was, Steve, our singer, has also got a band called The Rainkings [formed in 1989 by former members of Inspiral Carpets and The Bodines] that he works with and so, every few years, he’ll [Holt] will go out and do some gigs with them and in recent years, the last time Rainkings toured, Kev was drumming with them and he’s also in a band called Dub Sex, who you are probably aware of. So, it was Steve who suggested, you know, ‘Let’s try Kev out’ and we tried him. He was the first person that we tried and it was just immediate, it was like, ‘Yeah, he’s the one!’ Because he was a friend of Craig’s, he knew Craig and he was a massive fan of the Inspirals music and he also reads and writes drum notation, so he’s able to not only listen to Craig’s music, but he can write it out and document it, so when he’s playing, if he’s in any doubt about what’s coming next, he can read the music. You know, he’s actually transcribed Craig’s drum music on to paper and that in itself is pretty special, I think. So, yeah, Kev got the drum gig and Jake was just somebody else we knew from around the Oldham area. He was on the music scene, very much on the music scene, really good looking lad, really good to get on with and we just said to him, ‘Do you want to do the tour with us?’

and he was like, ‘Yep, I’m in!’ So, yeah, but with the first night we rehearsed, back in, I guess it would have been late-September maybe, we just did ten songs, because I’d been rehearsing at home on my own with just ten songs I picked out of the set to start learning. So, we were just rehearsing these ten songs and we sent them to the new guys and said, ‘These are the ten songs that we’re going to do on Wednesday night’, or whatever it was, and we rehearsed all ten songs on that night and we could have literally gone out the next night and done a gig! It was that good, it was that bang on! And it was quite a nice feeling that, in some ways, this is going to be quite an easy gig, do you know what I mean? In some ways really hard, obviously, but ... In some ways, it feels a bit like the hard work’s already done. All those records we made all those years ago and all those fans that we attracted over the decades are still there and they’re now bringing their kids! So, it feels like all the hard work’s done and all we’ve got to do is turn up at these gigs and look cool and play the right notes!

Going right back to the beginning, you joined Inspiral Carpets in 1986, by which point the band had been together in some form or another for three years, having initially been formed as a Garage Rock and Punk-inspired outfit by guitarist Graham Lambert and vocalist Stephen Holt. What musical activities had you been pursuing up until that point and how did you come to join the band?

I started recording them, because I started producing the music for them in 1986, so I actually recorded like two demos before I joined the band. So, three or four songs we’d do over a weekend and I recorded them and the more and more time I spent with them and listened to their music, the more I loved what they were doing and they didn’t have keyboards at this point, they were just a four-piece band and it was pretty much a Punk band ... to me, it was a Punk band; very Garage but without the keys and I had the Farfisa organ in my collection already and I just suggested to Graham one night

about bringing this in, because I thought ‘this organ with the Inspirals, it might really sound right’, you know. And it did, we tried it and you know that phrase, ‘a marriage made in heaven’? It was perfect, you know. It was the perfect sound to bring into that band’s sonic spectrum and it gave me an amazing vehicle to, you know, go into the next chapter of my life, do you know what I mean, with that band and everything that came with it.

Of course, and you bringing the organ in gave the band a very unique sound as well, didn’t it?

Yeah, and that’s still what it’s like, it’s just so easy to identify us when we come on the radio. Even if we put out a new record now, you’d know it was us just by that organ sound! And I’ve stuck to it! I mean, there’s some songs we’ve done over the years that don’t scream ‘Farfisa organ’ ... I mean, ‘I Want You’ [‘Devil Hopping’, 1994], the track we did with Mark E. Smith [Smith appears on the single version of ‘I Want You’, UK#18, but not on the album version], I don’t think there’s any Farfisa on that, but most of the other stuff we do, at some point, even really mellow stuff like ‘Sleep Well Tonight’ and ‘Beast Inside’ [both from ‘The Beast Inside’, 1991], you know, some of those really epic ballads, they’ve still got the sound of the organ in there somewhere that you can hear and you go, ‘Alright, there you go, that’s Clint’s organ, that must be the Inspirals!’ And I’m happy about that and I’m sticking with that sound, you know, I just love the sound. It’s still the most exciting sound that I know, especially when you put some reverb on it and echo and a bit of distortion and it’s like, ‘Wow, man!’ Yeah, I’m still using it!

So, how did you actually come to choose the organ as your instrument in the first place?

Well, like a lot of things in my life, it was accident really, because I think after Punk music touched me in 1976 ... you know, I really fell in live with Punk music and the whole ethos of it that

even people like me, who wasn’t a musician, could still be in a band and I started collecting lots of instruments and recording equipment. I left college, because I was studying art at the time and I was about to go off to university and I just dropped out, it was just immediate. I saw the Sex Pistols in December 1976 at the Electric Circus in Manchester with The Clash, they were on the same bill as the Buzzcocks and that was it, within a few weeks, I was out of college! Yeah, and I got a day job so I could get some money to buy equipment and I started collecting anything to do with music. Even though I couldn’t play anything, I started collecting guitars and tape recorders and effects units and keyboards. So, by the time I met the Inspirals in ‘86-ish, I’d already accumulated quite a lot of really cool music junk, including this 1966 Farfisa organ. So, I just happened to have that in my collection and I just knew in my head that that was the sound that would fit in well with that band. I had another organ, another classic ‘60s organ at the time called a Vox Continental with a much softer sound. It was still definitive ‘60s, but not as shrill and as piercing as the Farfisa and I could have brought that into the Inspirals, but I knew that the Farfisa would be better because it needed to cut through Graham’s rhythm guitar sounds. You know, Graham’s guitar sound is really beautiful and distorted, but I needed something that could cut through that and that’s why I chose the Farfisa [laughs]. But the first single we ever did, the first recording we ever released was ‘Keep the Circle Around’ [1988, UK Indie Chart #13], from the ‘Plane Crash’ EP [debut EP, 1988] and if you listen to that, I couldn’t decide which organ to play on it, so I played them both! And I didn’t realise until after, the organs are slightly out of tune with each other. When you listen to it, you can hear it and there’s a technical reason behind it, which I didn’t realise at the time, but I’ll tell you now what it is and can use this if you want ... the Vox organ is a British instrument and I think the British instruments at time, A was tuned to 440hertz, but Italian instruments of the same age [like the

Farfisa], A was tuned to 442hertz, so when I got them in the ‘80s, the instruments were both tuned as the manufacturers had left them when they were built. So, that’s why, when you listen to ‘Keep the Circle Around’, the weird droning noise between the two organs is because the soundwaves are fighting against each other. I realised about a week after we’d recorded it, when it’s too late, and I was just horrified when I realised what I’d done! But now, I love it, because it just sounds like ... you know, we were finding our way and I was finding my way as a sound engineer, if you want to call it that, as well as a musician, but that record really captures the ramshackleness of what we were at that point in time. And it was Dave Fielding [guitarist] out of The Chameleons, he produced that track for us. We spent a week in Suite 16 Studios in Rochdale, a little studio there, with Dave Fielding, who at the time was an icon to us because he was in The Chameleons and he produced it. I think we gave him sixty quid and a bag of weed! [Laughs].

The band show off a T-shirt featuring Clint’s cow logo on the BBC’s ‘8.15 from Manchester’ in 1990

One of your notable additions to the Inspiral Carpets image was the famous cow logo which has adorned all of the band’s records since your second demo, (following 1987’s ‘Waiting for Ours’) the ‘Cow’ cassette in 1987. That logo, of course, went on to give the band’s own label, Cow Records, its name in March 1989, with the first release on the label being that year’s ‘Trainsurfing’ EP. Is there a story about how the cow logo came about?

Yeah, it started before I joined the Inspirals, way before I even knew them. I was living in a house that backed on to a farmer’s field and it was full of cows, these beautiful dairy cows, and I was a keen amateur photographer and I just used to photograph these cows. A lot of days, I’d just sit in the garden with a cup of tea just photographing cows! And they were really close up obviously, looking right in the camera. And a lot of the film I was using back then was actually slide transparency film which I’d acquired. I got a load of slide film; I think it was

knock-off stuff that somebody sold me very cheap. So, by the time I joined the Inspirals, I had a lot of slide photographs that I’d taken and I also had some projectors that I’d collected, slide projectors, so one of the first things I did when I joined the band was starting to help develop our visuals for live shows. So, we got, obviously, smoke machines and bubble machines that blew bubbles out and these slide projectors and we had about four or five. I mean, by the time we toured in 1990, we had a dozen, you know, really industrial Kodak projectors, but that started off in the pubs in Oldham in the late-’80s and it was just me plugging in all these projectors with pictures on and a lot of the pictures that would pop up obviously, randomly, were these cows! So, eventually, it got to the stage where we were doing a gig and when the cows came up, people would start moo-ing during a song! Do you know what I mean? It was very spontaneous and accidental, that, but that carried on to the point where we did our first ever TV show and it was Tony Wilson’s ‘The Other Side of Midnight’ [on the 30th of January 1989] and I made myself a cow shirt, because we didn’t have any cow T-shirts, we’d not made them yet, and I made one, like just drew the cow on the front of it, wore it for the programme that night and then people started asking me where we can get a cow shirt from. So, that’s when we started manufacturing them and we handed them out to our friends and then soon after that, we decided to set up our own record label and that became Cow Records and then when we had to think of a catalogue number, you know, like ‘FAC1’ [Factory Records], that’s where ‘DUNG’ came from; DUNG4 [‘Dung 4’ demo cassette, 1989], etc. So. the cow thing was one of those really happy accidents and there’s been a lot of them in my life, personally, I’ve had a lot of happy accidents and that was one of them and it’s still here, you know, thirty-five years or whatever after I designed it; it’s still here every day! I actually do them now and I sell them as art. I’ve got to go and do some cow art after this chat! It’s not haunting me as such, but I’m stuck with it! It’s just pop art really, innit?

Well, it has become absolutely iconic, hasn’t it?

Yeah! Absolutely, yeah! But I think that’s what art is, it’s best not to premeditate. It’s like the stuff on the radio now, I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m having to turn the radio off, because some of the new Pop music that I’m hearing ... well, I love Pop music. Pop music’s a great thing, you know, and I love Sia, I love stuff like that, but then you hear something that’s so formulaic and somebody trying to write a Sia song or trying to write a Katy Perry song ... there’s one on the radio now and I can’t remember who it’s by ... I’ve not even had the radio on long enough to listen to who it’s by, because I’m having to turn it off because it’s doing my head in when I hear it! It’s like so uninspired, like someone’s sat down and thought ‘right, we need to write a version of Katy Perry’s whatever it’s called, ‘X’ track, and that’s not the way to do it. I’ve never done it anyway.

Well, exactly! Well, it is just forcing it, isn’t it? And you can tell it has been forced, whereas with artists like yourselves and all the other bands around at that time, the songwriting was just natural, wasn’t it?

I like to think so. I said to someone the other day, when we started the band, none of us were great musicians really. I always thought Craig was the best musician, but even he was fourteen when he joined the band, so it was even early in his musicianship. So, we weren’t great musicians, we were very Garage in our approach and we weren’t great songwriters, but what we wrote was what we felt and then we played it and recorded it to the best of our abilities, as in ‘Keep the Circle Around’. And with that song, that was written by Graham, I think, and it’s got its imperfections, whether it’s in the organs being out of tune, or whatever imperfections are in there, but it’s a unique track.

Well, that is one of the things that makes a song great, and also unique, isn’t it? The artist might see

From left to right: Clint, Lee Mavers of The La’s and Noel Gallagher

certain parts as imperfections, but those parts are things that no other artist could have got because they weren’t there at particular point in time when the song was being written and recorded. Those, should we say, ‘happy accidents’ are what makes a song what it is.

Yeah! You know when I talked about that first rehearsal back in September? That [‘Keep the Circle Around’] was one of the songs that was on the list of ten. It’s one of the songs that I picked to rehearse at home. When I got that email back in July, I think I was probably setting my keyboards up by the end of that weekend because I was that excited! So, I’ve been playing every day pretty much and I’m sat here now with a keyboard that I’ve been doing a bit of work on, all Inspiralsrelated! So, we did this rehearsal on the first night and ‘Keep the Circle Around’ was one of the tracks and it’s probably not the greatest thing we’ve ever written and not the most well-known thing, but I was there in the moment! I had proper goosebumps, because it’s a great song to play and sing the backing vocals on, but it just transported me back to day one of the Inspirals pretty much. It is was like ‘the world is good, everything’s alright’, do you know what I mean? Yeah, but going back to the songwriting, it wasn’t contrived in any way. I think, generally, with the sound of the band back then, we wanted to sound a bit like The Seeds or The 13th Floor Elevators, but ‘Keep the Circle Around’, I can’t think where that came from. I know The 13th Floor Elevators had a song called ‘Keep the Circle Unbroken’ [‘May the Circle Remain Unbroken’, ‘Bull of the Woods’, 1969] or something, so I think Graham was inspired by that title, but it’s just a dead simple Garage song with a wonky organ sound and a lot of energy. Yeah, it’s a great track that. I’ve got a list here of like twenty-two or twenty-three songs that we’re rehearsing. These are songs that we’re rehearsing; not in any order at the moment, it’s just a list of tracks, but these are the ones that we’re going to pick our set from. So, all the classics

are on there, all the big singles, a lot of early, high energy stuff, ‘Butterfly’ [‘Dung 4’] is in there and our cover of ‘96 Tears’ [originally recorded by ? and the Mysterians as their debut single in 1966 and included on the album of the same name from the same year. It was covered by Inspiral Carpets for the ‘Plane Crash’ EP], we’ll probably be doing that on the tour. It’s just like every day at some point, I sit down and play some of these, or most of these and it’s exciting and my fingers are remembering what to do, which is good! My mind doesn’t remember what to do, but my fingers do! Because I don’t read music and I don’t say like this is a G and that’s a D and now I need to go to Am, I play by sight, you know. I know what it looks like and I play by sight. And then, sometimes, when I need to explain to the band what the chords are, then I need to work it out, like this is a Dm, or whatever. Yeah, what I’m saying is, with my memory, I can’t remember the chords, my fingers seem to know where to go and some of these tracks I’ve not played for ten or fifteen years!

Just something that I picked up there, you were saying earlier about not being classically-trained and I think that is something that perhaps allows you to be more creative and less rigid in your approach to music and songwriting, isn’t it?

It’s funny, because I’ve always kept my keyboard playing dead simple and if anything, it’s quite rhythmic. I do a lot of rhythmic chords, do you know what I mean? Rather than ... I can’t do scales. I couldn’t even sit here and play you a single scale in whatever key you ask me to, but I’ve got my own style. It’s a very simplistic style, but it’s worked wonders for the songs. Like, ‘This Is How It Feels’ (UK#14, ‘Life’, 1990] is a three-finger riff and now, I suppose if I had been a classically-trained musician, I might have over-embellished that with lots of scales and flourishes and it might just have been another shit record from the ‘80s, do you know what I mean? I think my style suits the kind of band that we are and we have been over the years and the kind of songs that we

write. When I need to play a fast riff, I’ll do it, but generally, I’ll just play what the song needs and if it’s a song like ‘This Is How It Feels’, which is quite an emotional and poignant song really, there’s the little oboe riff on it and that’s how it felt; that’s what I felt I needed to put in there, because I thought ‘it needs to be a bit sombre and a little bit weepy in parts’, you know what I mean? So, that’s why I’ve always played like that, rather than over-doing it. I got offered a job in The Stranglers once. Dave Greenfield [Stranglers keyboardist] was still alive, but back in the ‘90s, he was out of action for a few months. I think he was in hospital for a while and their manager phoned me up and said, ‘We’ve got a tour of Europe and Dave has suggested we call you’. Now, I’d never met Dave Greenfield, but all through the Inspirals’ success, he would have heard me talking about The Stranglers being a massive influence, which they are, obviously and he put my name forward, so that in itself was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard, that Dave Greenfield, out of one of my favourite bands ever, had recommended me to take his place. So, I got this call from their manager and I had to turn it down. I said, ‘Look, I can’t do what Dave does. I can probably sit there and make it look like I’m doing what he does, but I can’t play scales, I’m not a classical musician, I can’t play a complicated, you know, part with my right hand while drinking a pint of Guinness with the other hand’. But, that is a trick that I picked up off him and I did emulate it. I do do that sometimes! If I’m playing a simpler part, I can’t remember if it’s ‘Joe’ [the band’s second single, released in 1989, UK Indie Chart #5. A re-recorded version with Hingley on vocals was released as the band’s final single before splitting in 1995 to accompany ‘The Singles’ compilation, reaching number 37 on the UK chart], there’s one of the tracks where I do it and I play a chord sequence with my right hand and have a Red Stripe, you know, with my left and that’s my Dave Greenfield moment! That’s the only way that I’m similar to him really, I can do that! But, yeah, going back to it, my

keyboard style is still very Punk, it’s still a Punk Rock approach, you know what I mean? ‘What’s the least I can get away with playing on this record?!’ That’s what I’ve made a living out of really!

Well, less is often more, isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s like Pop and Pop culture, it’s like pop art. Andy Warhol’s art was very simple, wasn’t it? It wasn’t complicated. I mean, this little fella here, this little cow thing that we keep talking about, it took me seconds to draw the original version of it and it’s opened a lot of doors and made us money! It’s sold us a lot of merchandise, obviously, and made people happy. Even if you don’t know what it is, if you see someone walking down the street with that on their shirt, you’re going to smile, aren’t you? And then there’s the one with the ‘F’ word on, as well, ‘Cool as F’, I think we’ll be selling them again when we get out on tour. I think we’ll be putting them back on the merchandise stand.

Aaw, I bet you are so excited, aren’t you?

I am! Do you know what? I’m the busiest person in Rock ‘n’ Roll anyway, me. People know that. When I’m out DJ-ing and on the radio and everything, people are always saying to me, ‘I don’t know how you do it, you must have four of you!’ [Laughs]. Do you know what I mean? So, the idea of bringing the Inspirals back into the equation, I mean, it is exciting, but it’s going to be a busy year and I’m probably going to have to turn down some of the other work at some point. I’ll have to take a bit of a sabbatical out of the radio maybe, do you know what I mean, just to create a bit of space for me to do this properly. But, yeah, at the moment, I think it’s the most excited I’ve been for years really in terms of when I wake up in the morning. And usually, when I wake up in the morning, I’ve got this massive list in my head of things that need doing and the list in my diary, obviously of things I need to be doing, but now, rather than it being waking up

and getting that sense of dread, like ‘I’ve got to do this for the taxman, I’ve got to do ... we’ve got some damp we need to get sorted out’, I’m now thinking, ‘Right, I’ve got to learn how to use this new keyboard I’ve bought, I need to freshen up on the middle eight of ‘Saturn 5’ [UK#20, ‘Devil Hopping, 1994] ...’ and it’s all like really positive stuff! So, I’m waking up in a much better place now, which is really exciting, yeah!

Having taken that time out from Inspiral Carpets for that few years, did you miss it?

You know what? I think I’m fortunate because my day job, or my other jobs, all revolved around being in front of an audience, playing records and shouting ‘Boon Army!’ down the mic! When I’m DJ-ing, I do play some of the Inspirals hits, when I’m in a club, or whatever, so I’m still connecting with the audience and I’m still on the radio everyday and we do still play Inspirals tunes, so I think I’m lucky in that when the Inspirals stopped touring, it wasn’t like I was just going working in an accountant’s office for the next few years, I was with Rock ‘n’ Roll all the time. And, you know, because of my job, I get to meet bands like The Sherlocks and The Slow Readers Club and Paul Weller and I’m in contact with them and I interview them and we know each other, so I still feel very much immersed in the music world even when the Inspirals aren’t working. So, in that respect, I don’t miss it, but I think to be more specific, yeah, I mean, the idea of playing those songs to our fans is ... yeah, I probably have missed that more than I realise. Do you know what I mean? I’ve just done four DJ gigs in the last three nights and even though they were all brilliant in their own way, none of them were a room full of people who collected every record that we ever made. Do you know what I mean? And a lot of the older people in the room [at an Inspiral Carpets gig], their first gig would have been seeing us in the ‘80s and early-’90s. So, it’s going to be nice getting out and yeah, it’ll feel really like the Inspirals coming home I think.

When we get out and play those rooms to our audience, we’ll feel like we’re back and yeah, it’s a new chapter, it’s a different chapter than the last one with two new members, but to me, it’s the same. It’s going to be as exciting and as relevant as any chapter of the band that’s gone before it. And we’re dead fortunate, because how many bands can you name where the original singer [Stephen Holt] features on a few singles that John Peel loves; John Peel loving us got us a record deal [with Mute Records]; Tom [Hingley] joined us; Tom left in 2011 and the original singer rejoined and we carried on! Yeah, it’s really unusual that a band can do that and I think a lot of people see my name and think ‘oh yeah, he’s the lead singer of the Inspirals’, which I’m not! Everything about the band and our ability to metamorphosise with everything that’s happened, it sets us apart, I think. I know you’ve got bands like The Charlatans who’ve gone through similar things with losing members [keyboardist Rob Collins died in 1996 and drummer Jon Brookes died in 2013] and that, but with us, to change singers and then flip-flop back [laughs], it’s ... I’m still in touch with Tom. Tom is still very much a part of certain conversations that we have with the band to do with, you know, putting records out and reissuing records. So, Tom is still very much part of some of the email chats that go on. So, we’re still in touch with him and you never know, we might do some more work with him again in the future. But, at the moment, it’s still very much Steve who is our lead singer and he has been for the last eleven years and he will be going onwards until we see what happens next, you know. I do like the fact that the Inspirals, as an entity, it’s something that is up there and it will carry on and, you know, even if I’m not around, I’m sure they’ll get someone else that can pretend to be Dave Greenfield and Ray Manzarek [The Doors] rolled into one! [Laughs].

You were saying there about working with Holt and Hingley as vocalists over the years. In February 2011, it was announced that Hingley had parted company with the band and

you went on to reunite with original vocalist, Holt, with 2014’s aforementioned self-titled album being the first album to feature his vocals. How would you consider working with Holt to compare to working with Hingley?

Well, let me put it another way, I’d say they’re different singers, different styles of singers, so some of the songs that Tom did, we’re not even trying them with Steve on this tour, because it’s a completely different vocal approach. And vice-versa, there’s some stuff that Steve did that Tom might not be able to do justice to. So, the set that we’re doing these days is very much tailored to Steve as a frontman and a singer, like how can we make him shine? And these are the songs we picked. But, I feel privileged that I’ve been able to work with both singers. It’s like, they are both incredible singers in their own way and they’re both brilliant people. I mean, they’re different as people and even Tom will tell you, Tom’s personality, he’s a different beast completely to Steve. Tom is a deep thinker and probably the most well-educated member of the Inspirals of all time, do you know what I mean? I mean, Tom is as special as Steve, they are both very special, and I like to think that one day, in some context, we’ll work with Tom again. Do you know what I mean? Because he has got something very special with that voice. He’s a good lad. We’ve had him round here. He came round to our house about six months ago and we were signing copies of the reissue [30th Anniversary Edition] of ‘Revenge of the Goldfish’ [1992, UK#17]. We’re in touch, obviously, and we invited him and his wife to my 60th a couple of years ago [2019]. So, we’re in touch, we are still friends and yeah, he came round six months ago, roughly, to sign these albums and he was here for a couple of hours and it was really nice spending time with him again. And he’s doing alright, he’s doing a lot of work and he’s in a good place, obviously. He’s a grafter with his music and he does solo work, he does The Karpets and he’s got The Lovers as well. He’s very industrious, you know!

As you have just been talking about, a significant change came half way through the recording of your debut album, 1990’s ‘Life’ (UK#2) when Holt left the band to be replaced by Hingley, formally of the band Too Much Texas, who would be the band’s vocalist throughout Inspiral Carpets’ most commercially successful period, going on to appear on 1991’s ‘The Beast Inside’ (UK#5); 1992’s ‘Revenge of the Goldfish’ (UK#17) and 1994’s ‘Devil Hopping’ (UK#10). But, one unsuccessful auditionee for the role of new Inspiral Carpets vocalist was one Noel Gallagher, who would instead become the band’s drum technician between 1989 and 1991 ... and we all know the rest of the story!

He was the first one [to audition]! Well, what happened was, towards the end of ‘88, Steve decided he was leaving the band and it wasn’t acrimonious, as I remember it, it was more to do with ... he was about to get married and get a mortgage and we were still struggling to pay for petrol to get to a gig in London, do you know what I mean? I think that’s the main reason he went. Noel, at that point, was a fan of the band, you know, like a local lad who followed us around. He was a big fan of the band and we got to know him a bit and he was the first one, through Craig, because he was close to Craig, and he said, ‘That lad, Noel. You know him from the Gas board?’, because he worked for the Gas board, ‘He wants to audition to be our singer’. And we were all like, ‘Give over! Noel thingy? Give over!’ Anyway, he came to us and we knew that he was writing songs at the time. He had a little four-track portastudio and he was recording songs, like playing guitar and singing, so we knew he was doing these demo tapes. So, we said, ‘Yeah, come and sing. Come and try doing the lead vocals’, which he did, he auditioned with us in early December ‘88 and he could sing, he could sing as well as a lot of the guys out there who were singing, but he just didn’t have the kind of voice that we were looking for. Because Steve had such a big voice, quite ... not shouty in a bad way, but it

was a loud voice that cut through and we needed something like that, which, subsequently, when we found Tom, it was like absolutely perfect; loud, operatic when he needed to be, a big voice. But Noel, we all liked him that much, we just took him on as a full-time employee from that day. You know, we started giving him a wage and he’d be helping us out in the office every day, he’d be in the rehearsal room with us, he might go and get us our chips or something for dinner. You know, he was just our right-hand man from day one and, you know, when we went out on the road obviously, he was our main roadie and he was with us for a few years and he still very kindly says, you know, publicly, that that was the happiest time of his working life. Because we paid him well, he saw the world, he had some amazing experiences, didn’t have any pressure on his shoulders, whereas when he joined Oasis, or when he started Oasis, suddenly, everybody was expecting him to run the operation. Johnny Marr had the same thing in The Smiths, you know, he was like twenty-one or

The Clint Boon Experience

something and suddenly he was managing this massive music machine. But, yeah, Noel’s always been really kind about, you know, the part we played in his journey and Liam [Gallagher] as well, Liam gives us a lot of credit, you know, for inspiring him; you know, being able to come along to Inspirals gigs at G-MEX in Manchester and sit in the dressing room with us because his brother was our roadie. So, Liam is always really, really kind about us as well, which is nice. In fact, when Craig died, Liam was one of the first people to put anything on social media about him, which was massive, because Liam doesn’t need to do stuff like that, but the way he put ‘Craig Gill RIP’ ... and he came to his funeral as well, which was lovely. There’s still a lot of, I feel, mutual love and respect between the Inspirals and the Oasis lads. And, you know, Noel, he learnt a lot, the time he spent with us. It taught him a lot about the music industry and again, he still gives us credit for that, which is really nice.

Following Inspiral Carpets’ initial

break-up in 1995, following the release of ‘The Singles’ (UK#17) compilation, you went on to form The Clint Boon Experience, releasing two albums, ‘The Compact Guide to Pop Music and Space Travel’ (1999) and ‘Life in Transition’ (2000) on the independent record label Artful Records. Guest vocalists for The Clint Boon Experience included Travis’ Fran Healy; Sara Cluderay, who regularly toured and recorded with the band, and the now world famous Opera singer, Alfie Boe, who appeared on both albums, credited as “Opera dude”. Eighth Day is based in the area in which Boe grew up, so how did his involvement with the band come about?

Yeah, so, I mean, spring of ‘95 was when the Inspirals split and it was very amicable, it was just like we didn’t have a record deal, we didn’t have management and we’d all got a bit jaded. You know, at that point, we’d had the two or three big years from ‘90 through to ‘93 / ‘94 and by ‘95, you know, like I say, we didn’t have a record deal, because our record deal with Mute had finished and I think we all just felt like a break. I did, I felt like getting on to another chapter. So, we took a break from the spring of ‘95 and I immediately carried on writing new songs, but if anything, writing in a style of music that I couldn’t have done with the Inspirals, which is why the music that became The Clint Boon Experience is ... it’s quite wild some of it! Some of it was almost like cabaret in terms of the colourfulness of it, do you know what I mean? So, I started writing these songs and recording them and building myself a nice little studio in Rochdale, where I lived at the time, but I started looking at collaborating with people as well. So, I started putting the word out that I was up for doing collaborations and we had one guy came round, I can’t remember his name now, but he came and put a load of tabla and like Asian percussion down. I was just doing stuff like that and a girl came round one night and played like loads of flute parts for another track I was working on. And I got a call from somebody who I knew

in the music industry, she was called Caroline Ellery and she was in the publishing side of the industry. She was my publisher at the time and she said, ‘Do you know last week, you were saying you were interested in doing unusual collaborations?’ She said, ‘My husband has just bumped into a young lad that’s studying Opera and your name came up and this lad said ‘I’d love to meet him! I’d love to work with him!’’ So, Caroline gave me Alfie’s details and I got in touch with Alfie and within days, he was on the train from Fleetwood [Boe’s hometown] to Rochdale. I picked him up at Rochdale station, took him to my house and we just recorded Alfie singing along to loads of tracks that I’d written. And they were pretty much the first recordings that Alfie Boe ever made. It was first time his voice had been recorded. So, I put out two Clint Boon Experience records [‘The Compact Guide to Pop Music and Space Travel’, 1999 and ‘Life in Transition’, 2000] and Alfie’s voice is spread out, you know, across both of them. And he was lovely, we got on brilliant. Again, just a lovely, warm person. You know, working class roots, very down to Earth, brilliant sense of humour and so funny to be with and you see him now on telly and he’s still the same, isn’t he? Now, that’s not put on, that’s how it was back when I met him in ‘95 / ‘96, he’s just an incredible person. And soon after I met him, he signed up for the Opera school in London and he was going through all that and he was getting these amazing gigs. He was working with me when he got the job of ... The Three Tenors were doing a gig at the Royal Albert Hall ... actually, it might have been Wembley ... it was one of the big Three Tenors events and because the Three Tenors don’t turn up at teatime to do the soundcheck, they get someone else who’s got a similar voice, so Alfie would go in because he had the closest voice to The Three Tenors. So, he went and soundchecked for these iconic Opera singers! [Laughs]. That’s the kind of gig that he was getting and he was saying all the time, ‘I’d rather just be doing Rock music’. Yeah, honestly, he was so focused on his Opera career,

but there was always this underlying ‘I’d rather be doing Rock ‘n’ Roll!’, which is why I think he loved being in a band with us, you know. And obviously, he became more and more unobtainable as he got more and more successful and then we got a girl called Sara Cluderay and she became Alfie’s replacement. I mean, a completely different style of Opera singing, but when Alfie was in the band, we called him ‘Opera dude’ and when Sara joined us, Sara was ‘Opera chick’! [Laughs]. She used to put a full ballgown on and sing Opera! That’s kind of how mad that band was! It was like ‘all the things that I could never do with the Inspirals, I’m going to do it now with this band!’ And we did really well, you know, to say we didn’t have a big record deal or anything. We ended up on ‘TFI Friday’ [in 1999, performing ‘White, No Sugar’ from ‘The Compact Guide to Pop Music and Space Travel’]! And soon after that, we had a serious motorway accident with the band and that was so traumatic that that’s pretty much how it ended. We were unable to travel much after that, because certain members of the band couldn’t even get in a tour bus because they were so traumatised by it. so, that sort of slowed us down a bit and I started getting offers of more and more very lucrative DJ work and radio work and that, whether it was a good thing or a band thing, took me away from the band. I sort of really value that I’ve made my career in radio, it’s been nearly twenty years full-time now. It’s been the first time in my adult life that I’ve had any stability in my income. Even in the Inspirals, you were thinking ‘this could be over in a couple of years’ ... and it was actually! But with radio, it’s always given me a real sense of structure and, yeah, a solid income. So, I really value that, but a lot of times I think ‘if we’d carried on with The Clint Boon Experience, we could have been a world-beating band’, do you know what I mean? Because it was that good and it was that different and that unusual. You know, nobody was doing anything like that back then. I think at some point, I like the idea of revisiting that ... maybe not with that line up but, you know, some solo music

The band in 2014

is definitely on my agenda. But whether the two [Inspiral Carpets and The Clint Boon Experience] could work alongside each other, I don’t think they could at the moment, I’ve got to throw myself into the Inspirals. But, yeah, maybe the year after or the year after that, I can get the other band moving again.

I hope so because The Clint Boon Experience only lasted quite a short amount of time, didn’t it?

Yeah, it was only a couple of years really. We probably started gigging in ‘98 and I think we finished in 2000, maybe. I mean, before that, it was two or three years of me writing the material and recording it at home and I put the band together around it and where I’d been using a drum machine on certain tracks, we’d record Tony’s [Tony Thompson] live drum parts and Stubbsy [Richard Stubbs, bassist] was a really vital part of my development through that period, because Stubbsy was just this amazing musician, he could play anything and when we went out live, he was the bass player, but when I was putting the tapes together, he was playing trumpet, bass, guitar, backing vocals. He was like my right-hand man making those Clint Boon Experience recordings, in my little attic in Rochdale at the time. Yeah, it was a great band and I’m very proud of it and they were all brilliant musicians in their own right. You know, it was awesome to be with them. But I’m really excited to be getting back to the Inspirals and everything that embodies, so it’s all good!

This interview is about to be featured in our Christmas issue, so do you have a Christmas message for our readers and your fans?

I’m not going to be cheesy, I’ll just say ... I could say, you know, Inspiral Carpets tickets are a great Christmas present! There you go, I’ve said it, but I’m not going to say that! [Laughs]. No, it’s just, the world will get better. It’s been in a bit of mess for the last few years, hasn’t it? And sometimes it doesn’t seem like there’s any light at

the end of the tunnel, but I saw when we announced our reunion, that was a lot of light for a lot of people and I think the week after we announced getting back together, Pulp did and Peter Kay ... the Peter Kay [tour] announcement is monumental and phenomenal, isn’t it? So, I think there’s little signs that the world is going to get better. I was at an event last night in Bury that was all, you know, in aid of the Enough is Enough campaign about the cost of living crisis and this weird stuff that’s been going on and what I’m saying, it was quite a celebratory event, a lot of positivity in the room and I think that things will get better soon if we all just stick together and, you know, think good thoughts and look after each other. Make your bit of the world a bit better, that’s what I would say; make your corner of the world a bit better and if everybody does that, the world will get better, won’t it? So, that’s my Christmas message! [Laughs]. And buy Inspiral Carpets tickets, they’re a great Christmas present! [Laughs].

Finally, if the Clint Boon of 2022 could offer any advice to the Clint Boon of 1986 who had just joined Inspiral Carpets, what would it be?

I think I would have two. One would be take more photographs. I used to take loads anyway, I’ve got some beauts, but take more of those photographs, because the ones you’re getting are magical, but get more of them! And then the other one would be, learn to play the piano properly! I think what I’m saying is, I like the idea of going out and doing like the likes of Elton John, sitting at a piano and being able to do a beautiful song, you know. Because I’m good at chords. I can do the chords and the little three fingered riffs with my right hand and that, but I think part of me wishes I had learnt piano over the years. I’d still play in the same simplistic style that I do, but I just like the idea of being able to jump on a plane and do a solo tour of Japan! All the bars and that, loads of money, with a bottle of whiskey and just going ‘This is how it feels to be lonely’! [Laughs]. But, to answer your question

in a different way, I don’t really have any regrets. I wouldn’t change a lot of it really. I mean, it would just be little things like take more photographs, maybe put a little bit more money away for a rainy day rather than buying that stupid TVR car!

Thank you for a wonderful interview, it has been such a pleasure talking to you. Merry Christmas, we wish you all the best with the Inspiral Carpets reunion and all the upcoming tour dates and for the future.

It’s been great chatting to you and you have a great day and hopefully we can get together sometime! Keep up the great work Alice and I’ll see you again soon, yeah?

For all of Inspiral Carpets’ upcoming tour dates and other news, visit the links below.

www.inspiralcarpets.com

www.facebook.com/ OfficialInspirals