The Mighty Lemon Drops Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

Zest We Forget The Mighty Lemon Drops

Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

“... it was kind of all natural and organic ... it was four mates come together.”

“Morning! Alright, how you doing? Doing good! Alright! I’ve been up for about an hour and a half, so somewhat awake, not doing too bad! I’m in Burbank [California] and it’s about five past seven [AM]. Today, I haven’t really done a lot, but I walked to Starbucks! [Laughs]. It’s a bit overcast today, but it’s not too bad, it’s kind of nice really!”, former guitarist and co-songwriter with Wolverhampton’s The Mighty Lemon Drops, David Newton tells us in a surprisingly chipper manner considering the earliness of our Zoom call.

Maybe the sheer happiness and infectious levels of positivity that Newton exudes over the course of our following interview could simply be put down to natural Black Country charm and charisma, or maybe it is the fact that for the last twenty-seven years, following the split of The Mighty Lemon Drops in 1992, a brief stint in The Blue Aeroplanes and an even briefer stint in a new London-based band called Starfish, he and his wife have resided in the Golden State, from where he has produced acts such as The Little Ones and The Blood Arm; become the third member of Art Brut’s Eddie Argos and The Blood Arm’s Dyan Valdés’ Everybody Was in the French Resistance... Now!; provided music for television shows such as ‘Gilmore Girls’ (The WB / The CW); ‘The Osbournes’ (MTV); ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ (The WB / UPN) and ‘The Bill’ (ITV) and released a string of albums and singles with his outfit David Newton and Thee Mighty Angels. But, no doubt adding to Newton’s jubilation is the fact that here in the final throes of 2022, in conjunction with Cherry Red Records, his latest accomplishment in a career that has so far spanned thirty-seven years is to have compiled arguably the finest reissue of the year in the form of ‘Inside Out: 1985-1990’.

However, despite the fact that this exquisite boxset includes all of The Mighty Lemon Drops’ recorded output for the first five years of a seven year run which saw them achieve critical and commercial success in both the UK and the US, including their first three albums (‘Happy Head, 1986; ‘World Without End’, 1988 and ‘Laughter’, 1989), non-album singles, B-sides and bonus tracks, to consider ‘Inside Out: 19851990’ as just a reissue, would be to do it a great injustice, for also included in this incredible five-disc, 97-track treasure trove are a host of radio sessions, some of which until recently even the band members themselves had forgotten about, previously unreleased demos and US radio mixes. And with all of this having been brought together with the same level of attention to detail which marks out all of Newton’s work, complete with extensive liner-notes and a host of photographs, many of which have previously never been seen, it is simply one of 2022’s most essential releases. Before discussing everything Mighty Lemon Drops and Newton’s career since the band’s farewell gig in Chicago in late-1992, attention turns to his plans for the festive period and what brings him back to the UK these days. As to be expected, other than friends and family, it is more often than not music-related, with the winsome Wulfrunian telling us: “I used to go to Blackpool [the home of Eighth Day] a lot when I was in England [laughs]. I think I was last there about ... I went to a Punk thing there, is it Rebellion [Festival]? God, that was about twenty years ago, mind! I try and get back once a year if I can and I went to a London one and it was in December. It might not have even been a Rebellion, it might have been something else, but it was in December and it was at what used to be the Forum. Yeah, whatever that one was called, but yeah, it was really good! It had The Damned on. I try to get back once a year if I can, because I’ve still got a lot of friends and family over there and all that, but I’m planning to be there in

December. Because of the pandemic, obviously, the last time I went before that was 2019. But I did go for like six days in February, which was nice.”

Firstly, hello Dave and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you. Let’s start at the here and now because the 25th of November saw the release of ‘Inside Out: 1985-1990’, a five-disc boxset mainly covering the period that The Mighty Lemon Drops were signed to Chrysalis Records imprint Blue Guitar. The box-set features a massive 97 tracks and includes your first three albums (‘Happy Head, 1986; ‘World Without End’, 1988 and ‘Laughter’, 1989) plus non-album singles, B-sides, bonus tracks, US radio mixes, previously unreleased demos and rare recordings from a variety of radio sessions. You compiled this expansive collection yourself and provided the extensive sleevenotes, so how did this boxset come about and how did you find the experience of looking back over those first five years of the band’s career?

Well, good question! Cherry Red Records, we’d done a couple of things with them before. Thy put an album out of ours, oh god, it was nearly ten years ago now, of just the really early stuff, it was called ‘The Early Years’ [‘Uptight: The Early Recordings 19851986’, 2014] and since then, they’ve included us on a few different compilations and there was another one that just came out actually, which is ‘C85’ [on 21st of October, which includes The Mighty Lemon Drops’ 1985 debut single, ‘Like an Angel’] and it was really surprising actually when I saw the line-up of that. It was like a three CD boxset and there was a lot that was going on, because like ‘C86’, which was a thing in [May] 1986 [a 22-track NME cassette compilation] that we were part of. That was kind of a bit of a turning point, because there didn’t really appear to be a lot really going on in kind of up and coming like Post-Punk, guitar-based bands at that time. In the early-’80s, you had the

Post-Punk thing, but then you also had the kind of more glamorous New Romantic thing and the era after that happening, so that’s what made the ‘C86’ thing exciting, but it was funny looking at the ‘C85’ line-up because there was actually a lot more going on than I remember. So, it was good to do the Cherry Red boxset. It basically covers us from 1985 to 1990. It’s got all the stuff we did at the beginning, like the really, really early stuff ... Cherry Red just wanted to do it, they wanted to include the first three albums [‘Happy Head, 1986; ‘World Without End’, 1988 and ‘Laughter’, 1989] and they asked me because, you know, I was kind of like the archivist for the band in some ways and I held on to all the demo tapes and the radio sessions and there’s the BBC sessions, some of those are included on there, but there’s one from Piccadilly Radio in Manchester [in 1987] that we’d all kind of forgotten about! I was going through my stuff and I found a cassette of that, you know, and the quality was really good so I had it kind of digitally transferred. So, there’s a lot of really interesting stuff, a lot of B-sides, a lot of unreleased stuff like demos and radio sessions. There’s five CDs altogether, so it’s a really nice set. There’s a lot of stuff, so it’s going to take a lot of listening to get through! [Laughs]. But, given the opportunity, it was nice to put that together and we all helped out with the liner-notes and dug out a load of old pictures and stuff like that. So, it was great, it was really nice!

Going back to very beginning of The Mighty Lemon Drops’ career, we believe that yourself and the other four members of the band (vocalist and rhythm guitarist Paul Marsh; bassist Tony Linehan (replaced during sessions for 1989’s ‘Laughter’ by Marcus Williams) and drummer Martin Gilks (later to join The Wonder Stuff and replaced in the same year by Keith Rowley)) had shortly before been in various other Black Country bands, including Active Restraint and The Wild Flowers. So, how did the five of you come together to form The Mighty Lemon Drops, initially under the

The Wild Flowers, 1984

name The Sherbet Monsters?

Well, we were quite young, but even though we were young, we’d all been in bands before. You know, like in secondary school, I was in Punk bands and stuff like that and myself and Paul [Marsh], the singer, because we went to school together had a band called Active Restraint [formed in 1980] and we put out one single [‘Terror in My House’ / ‘Turns Out Roses’, 1982]. And then I was in a band called The Wild Flowers and we did okay, we had an independent record deal and we put out an album [‘The Joy of It All’, 1984] and a couple of singles and played a lot of shows. I was still only eighteen / nineteen years old and I think when the Drops formed, I was twenty years old at the time, but I’d known Tony [Linehan], the bass player and the co-songwriter and Keith [Rowley], the drummer. Even though I didn’t been to school with them, I’d known them and they were also in another band before that, like a Post-Punk, kind of Power Pop, kind of Mod kind of band ... they were really good and there was a great music club, kind of hang-out, in Dudley, near Wolverhampton, called JB’s and every band, you name it, played there. We saw loads of like up-coming bands there, like everybody from The Pretenders to early-on U2 and The Teardrop Explodes, they all played at JB’s. Even later on, one of Blur’s first gigs outside London was at JB’s, which I saw! And it was great, because they used to have a Tuesday night, which was free for local bands to play and The Lemon Drops played the local band night at JB’s and The Wonder Stuff, Pop Will Eat Itself ... but they all played this Tuesday night at JB’s. Spacemen 3 did it and they weren’t even that local, they were from Rugby, which was a bit further away. So, that was our kind of window into, you know ... when we were really young, we were really lucky to have that place, you know and we also had the college, Wolverhampton Polytechnic which had a lot of bands on and stuff, so we’d go and see stuff there. The Civic Hall was where we’d see like bigger bands, like I saw The Clash there ... showing my age now ... in ‘78 and all the Punk bands,

like The Damned and The Undertones and The Ruts and the Skids; it was brilliant, it was great! So, we were kind of lucky really, even though we felt like we were outsiders and we didn’t get as many things in Wolverhampton, we were only like half an hour drive away from Birmingham, so we’d go to Birmingham to see things as well. That’s how the band came about, we all kind of kind of knew each other really. We were all fans of music and we were just all into the same kind of stuff, so it was kind of all natural and organic. You know, we didn’t like put ads in the music press looking for musicians, it was just natural; it was four mates come together.

On the subject of the band’s name, how did you come to settle on The Mighty Lemon Drops?

I think that was Tony’s idea. He was the bass player and, you know, he just thought it was a really good ... you know, it’s weird, because the name that I had at the time was ... we were nearly called The Railway Children and it’s funny that we weren’t, because about six months later, there was another band came out called The Railway Children! [Laughs]. But, The Mighty Lemon Drops, that was Tony’s name. I don’t know, he just kind of came up with it. It was going to be The Lemon Drops, but he added the ‘Mighty’ to make it a bit less kind of twee and all that. Sherbet Monsters was another one, blame Tony again for that! [Laughs]. We were never called that, but when we’d got a little bit more popular and all that, when we’d do like a low-key thing, we’d use that name, but we were never actually called that! [Laughs].

Your first independent single, 1985’s ‘Like an Angel’ (a track later featured on ‘Happy Head’), was released on Dan Treacy of Television Personalities’ Dreamworld Records label, sold 14,000 copies and soared to the top of the UK Indie Chart. This was quite an auspicious start, but at this stage in your career, what ambitions did you have for the band?

We had no ambitions. We started playing music because, you know ... I don’t know, it was organic, it was natural. I know I’ve said that before, but ... and we never thought in a million years that it would be a career or something that we would make a living out of. It’s kind of different today, where you can leave school and go to a college where they teach you how to be in an Indie band [laughs], there was nothing like that existed when we started. So, there was no one more surprised than us really when it happened. When we started, we had no manager, no booking agent, no contacts in the music industry, we were living in Wolverhampton and I sent cassettes out. I sent one to a few different people. I sent one to Alan McGee at Creation [Records], but I sent one to Dan [Treacy] at dreamworld Records and Dan was in the band Television Personalities and he just really liked it and he invited us down to London to play a gig. We played at his club ... he ran a club and we played there and the gig got reviewed in the NME by Everett True and he gave it this amazing review. I was still living at home at the time, I was still living with my mum. I was twenty years old, you know, and the phone started ringing, because my mum’s phone number [laughs] was on the demo that I sent and then all these record companies from London started ringing my mum! She would answer the phone and she’s say, ‘Ooh, Dave, there’s someone on the phone for you from a record company!’ and I was like, ‘Really?!’ So, it was organic and we didn’t rush into it, we kind of waited and we eventually got the right offer. But after ‘Like an Angel’ [debut single, 1985], we didn’t do another Indie record. We were going to, but we did a deal with Geoff Travis from Rough Trade, who had an offshoot with Chrysalis called Blue Guitar and we did that and that it was it really!

In May 1986, your track ‘Happy Head’ was featured on the infamous 22-track NME cassette compilation, ‘C86’ and in August of the same year, you recorded a four track (‘Open Mind’; ‘Take Me Up’; ‘Behind Your

Back’; ‘Up Tight’) session for John Peel. Soon after, you were snapped up by Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis for his new Blue Guitar label, a subsidiary of Chrysalis Records and also signed with Sire Records in the US around the same time. How did you find the experience of being signed to those labels and how much of a difference did a larger deal make to yourself and the other members of the band at that particular point?

Well, it was good, because we had no money. Myself and Paul were both unemployed and Tony and Keith, they had jobs, but they weren’t high paid, great jobs, they were kind of shitty jobs and to be able to get a wage and to make a living and be in a band, it was all we kind of wanted really. You know, we didn’t have loads of money thrown at us or anything, it just made things a lot easier. It made us go into an actual proper recording studio, you know, and we just a little bit more money to be able to do the basic things and to be able to buy proper equipment. You know, we had shitty equipment before, like I had a cheaper, less expensive guitar and you know, it was just nice to have that. At the time, it felt like a big deal, but they were small luxuries really and we didn’t have to worry about what we were going to do the next day. It made a difference in that way and the other thing was, we had freedom from both labels [Blue Guitar and Sire Records], we were allowed to pick who we wanted to work with and produce our records and, you know, we had a say in what we wanted as singles. Obviously, there would be input from the record label and, you know, we would understand that you wanted to put the commercial or radio-friendly single out ... I know that sounds kind of cheesy, but you have to do that. So, there would be a bit of give and take, but for the most part, it was no different to being on Dreamworld really, we just had a little more ... I hate to talk about it in monetry terms again, but it was nice just being that little bit more comfortable and being able to do what we wanted to do.

As we just mentioned, that ‘C86’ compilation found you positioned alongside twenty-one other bands of the time, including Primal Scream; The Wedding Present; The Pastels; McCarthy; We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Going to Use It; The Soup Dragons and The Servants. At the time, what was your opinion of the other bands of the so-called “C86 movement”?

Great! I mean, we knew a lot of them. It started in 1985 really, we’d played with most of those bands on there and we got to know a lot of them, even though we weren’t quite the same musically, you know. But, it was great. You know, it never felt like a competition or a race. Primal Scream were probably a bit more well known that we were at the time and yeah, The Wedding Present were known and, you know, it was nice. It was nice to have something in common with bands playing with guitars doing a similar thing to what we were doing, you know. We didn’t really think of it being anything more than that, there was no competition or anything and it was nice. Even bands that didn’t sound like us ... we would play gigs with bands like Bogshed, for instance, who didn’t really sound anything like us, but they were really funny, great guys as well and we got on really well with them. They were from not far from you in Hebden Bridge! [Laughs]. So, yeah, it was like that, it was great, it was really good.

A constant and rather lazy comparison throughout The Mighty Lemon Drops’ lifetime was to Echo and the Bunnymen, largely due to you both having Psychedelic influences, but your influences obviously went much deeper than that. I do remember you once saying, “The press would lead you to believe that the only reason we exist is because of Echo and the Bunnymen. I don’t even like them!” Did this comparison with Echo and the Bunnymen become somewhat tiresome over the course of the band’s career?

Erm, not really. We didn’t not like them. I mean, I saw them play not long ago, but I just thought it was lazy to compare us to one band, because of course there was similarities between what we did and what they did and we did like the band, but there were a lot of other bands ... especially if you look at Liverpool, bands like Wah! Heat for instance, Pete Wylie’s band, that was for me, like his guitar playing was as big of an influence ... actually, more of an influence than anything else really. I mean, from my point of view, I love like Gang of Four and Dr. Feelgood and Wilko Johnson’s guitar playing was a big influence on me as well. But, you know, there were a lot of different influences. We were influenced by a lot of the ‘60s kind of bands, the Garage bands, like The Seeds and a lot of the ‘Nuggets’ [‘Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era’, compilation, 1972] kind of stuff as well. That was as big an influence on the sound of the band early on. Kind of that combined with the kind of early-’80s Post-Punk kind of sound. But, come 1986, the Post-Punk thing had kind of, you know ... things had got mellowed out. I mean, I really liked bands like The Icicle Works and Lloyd Cole and the Commotions and all that, it was great, but there wasn’t really much of an edge to it and I think that’s kind of what we wanted to do, put that Post-Punk energy back into it and, going back to like Wah! Heat, that kind of aggressive guitar sound, put with that ‘60s influence, so it was a mixture of all those things.

Your 1986 debut album, ‘Happy Head’, reached number 58 on the UK Album Chart, but its follow up, 1988’s ‘World Without End’, often described as presenting a more mature sound to its predecessor, peaked at number 34. At this point, you also found a healthy degree of success in the US (where, as previously mentioned, you were signed to Sire Records) with ‘World Without End’ becoming a number one Modern Rock / College album there in its year of release. Having made a name for yourself in the UK, how did you find the experience of

then promoting yourselves to audiences in the US?

Well, we went into it blind, really. None of us had really been there before, you know, so it was a new thing to us and we just did exactly the same thing as what we’d done in the UK, we just kind of played the same songs and all that. But, it was a real eye-opener, because it’s obviously a bigger place and you don’t get like one music paper ... like, in the UK, you had the NME, which from literally one week to the next can tell you what’s going on, whereas over in the US, it takes much longer to get something. This was obviously before the internet, in those days it wasn’t really like that. Our crowd [in the US] was slightly different. I’d say there was about 20 / 30% that knew what was going on in the UK, that were kind of Anglophiles, who would buy the NME and would know what was going on and stuff, which was great. Especially early on, we would have a lot of those types, like the die-hards, people who had bought the ‘Like an Angel’ EP and stuff. But then, there would also be people who liked a lot more, I don’t know, diverse kind of stuff, you know, like more mainstream bands like The Cure and Depeche Mode, who we didn’t really feel much affinity with, you know. You’d call it ‘Modern Rock’ and it was kind of nice in a way, we didn’t think it was a bad thing.

Moving on to the final album represented by ‘Inside Out: 19851990’, your 1989 third album, ‘Laughter’ and following the departure of bassist Tony Linehan after the writing and recording of just two tracks (‘All That I Can Do’ and ‘Second Time Around’), you were now the band’s primary songwriter. Lineham was replaced by former Julian Cope bassist Marcus Williams and there was a bit of a shift in musical direction around this time and reflecting the album’s title, ‘Laughter’ could be viewed as an altogether lighter, Poppier affair complete with a horn section, layered guitars and a live sound. Was this change of direction planned before

you began making ‘Laughter’ or was it more something that developed due to those aforementioned changes within the band as you went along?

I think it was like ... you know, Tony leaving the band definitely made a difference, because he was the co-songwriter with me, which meant that I kind of writing all the songs. So, it did change a bit, but things had changed in the UK then and also spending more time in the US had a bit of an influence on what we were doing. I don’t know, it was still, again, kind of organic. It wasn’t the record company telling us what to do, it just felt like, you know, we kind of wanted to me, I don’t know, not a Poppier album, but, you know, we’d learnt to play our instruments a little better as well, you know. So, it was just a natural progression really. I don’t ever remember us sitting down and having a discussion about it, it just happened, you know. It was like a natural thing. I don’t know, things were kind of changing a lot more in the UK by then with music. This was 1988 / 1989 and the Dance culture was really starting to evolve and come into Indie music, like a mixture of the two. That’s not something that we embraced as a band, which is ironic, because we would listen to those kind of records and stuff, but we didn’t really ... I’m not saying that any of the bands sort of jumped on that bandwagon, but it was something we didn’t really want to do ourselves, you know. That was when things changed, when Marcus [Williams, bassist] joined the band ... He’s a Northerner, by the way, Marcus. He’s from Rochdale and he’s back living there again. I was only talking to him a couple of days ago. I haven’t seen him since 2010, that’s another story, but yeah, he’s from up your end. But, yeah, anyway ...

It would be fair to say that ‘Laughter’ made a far greater impression in the US than in the UK, peaking at 195 on the US Billboard Hot 200 and seeing you undertake a 70-date tour alongside Sire Records labelmates The Ocean Blue and John Wesley Harding. In addition, two

singles from ‘Laughter’ reached the top ten of the US Modern Rock Tracks chart, with ‘Into the Heart of Love’ and ‘Where Do We Go From Heaven’ peaking at number five and number eight, respectively. Did the fact that the US were more appreciative of the ‘Laughter’ album surprise you?

Yes and no. It [‘Laughter’] was the only album we did that actually got into the [US ] Billboard [Hot 200] Charts [#195], but the fact that because the musical climate had changed so much ... well, not the underground side, but the kind of top 40 kind of side ... in the UK at that point, it didn’t surprise us really that it was more accepted in the US, because, it’s like I said, a lot of the bands that we were aligned with ... because in 1988, we spent a lot of time in America and we toured with Love and Rockets and The Church, the Australian band, and we kind of felt a little more aligned with those kind of bands at that time. I don’t know, it’s kind of funny to put it into perspective, looking back, but we seemed to be more in that world than the one we did in the years before and it was also kind of going on independently to what was going on in the UK, you know, because it was getting more ... I hate to use the term Dance-centric, but it kind of was, you know. So, yeah, it didn’t surprise us, but we didn’t really think too much about it anything. It was just nice to be appreciated somewhere! [Laughs].

So, you were never tempted to do a Dance album then?

[Laughs] You know what, a year or two later, there was a remix done of a track from a later album, which kind of had a little bit of that kind of feel to it, but, I don’t know, I’m not totally proud of it. A tiny bit, maybe. So, we kind of did it, but we didn’t really want to be defined by that and do a Dance album when that was the thing, you know. And that’s fine, you know, I don’t have a problem if any of those [other bands] did, then that’s great, good for them, but, I don’t know, we just wanted to do our thing really. But, there was one song we did a remix of.

Following ‘Laughter’, you parted company with Chrysalis Records, but remained with Sire Records and two further Mighty Lemon Drops albums, 1991’s ‘Sound ... Goodbye to Your Standards’ and 1992’s ‘Ricochet’, followed before you called it a day shortly after the release of the latter. Were there any particular events during this period which led to you calling time on the band?

I think really, because when you’re younger, like seven years or eight years is a long time and it feels a lot longer. When you’re older, it doesn’t feel like it, especially now, when I look at how long some of my friends’ bands have been going. I think I said earlier, but I was twenty years old when I started the band and I was twenty-seven years old in 1992, twenty-eight in 1993 and it felt like we’d been around for a long time. I mean, we made five albums and we all just felt at that point that, I don’t know, we all wanted on. We were all really good friends still, but we just felt like we’d been and done everything that we kind of wanted to do, even though the last album that we made, ‘Ricochet’ [1992], I kind of stand by that, It’s a good album! It didn’t get a release properly in the UK at the time, but it did okay in America and we did one last tour of the US in like October [1992] and we played our last show in November in Chicago, Illinois, which is a weird place to play your last show ... well, not a weird place, but being a band from Wolverhampton, to call it a day in Chicago in 1992 [laughs] is kind of bizarre! And, you know, I remember when we played the last gig, we all kind of just looked at each other and laughed and just went, ‘Ha, okay, see you back in the UK’, or wherever we were all going off to. Funnily enough though, myself and Marcus, the bass player, were also helping out, you know, playing with the band The Blue Aeroplanes as well. They had the same management as us and we knew them and we liked the band as well, but a few of the members had left and they kind of put together, because they had some shows lined up, an emergency line-up and I had some songs that were possible Lemon Drops songs that we

weren’t going to use, so myself and Marcus did two albums [‘Life Model’, 1994 and ‘Rough Music’, 1995] with The Blue Aeroplanes. So, those were fun times as well!

So, what was the experience of being a member of The Blue Aeroplanes like?

Well, it was great for me, because I didn’t feel the same kind of pressure as I did with The Mighty Lemon Drops, because The Blue Aeroplanes wasn’t my band, it was somebody else’s band, so I could just show up and play guitar and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this song! Do you want to use this?’ So, it was really nice to not have that pressure, but to be in a band and to drink the rider! Yeah, but it was great, it was like a honeymoon kind of period almost, you know. But yeah, there’s two [Blue Aeroplanes] albums that me and Marcus are on, they were on Beggars Banquet Records. Yeah, it was fun, it was a good laugh; it was a good time. And I had another band at that time, this was when I was living in London, called Starfish and it was myself and Susie Hug, who was in a band called the Katydids and again, I knew Susie and Katydids had finished because Adam [Seymour] joined The Pretenders and Susie and I put this band together called Starfish [1993/1994] and then we had a couple of other mates, like Donald Ross Skinner, who was Julian Cope’s guitar player [between 1984 and 1994]. He was in the band and his brother, Gavin [Skinner, drums] and Gavin was actually in an early line-up of Primal Scream [1987-1988] and he’d been a band called Whirlpool as well. So, Starfish, we did one single [‘Answerphone’, 1994] and we kind of had a bit of interest and stuff. But, by that point, I was working in London at, well, it used to be called Record and Tape Exchange, in Notting Hill. I was working in a record store by then [laughs] and it was at the point where myself and my wife decided maybe to move to America. So, that was kind of the end of that! [Laughs].

You just mentioned there about your move to Burbank, California in the

mid-’90s, but at the start of our chat, you did say that you try to get back here at least once a year. Is it strange coming back here after being out there for so long?

It is a bit. I mean, some things have not changed, because I’m still in touch with a lot of my old friends from back in the day. It’s funny because I’m from Wolverhampton originally and I’m still in touch with a lot of my old friends even back to school day and stuff, so it’s nice to get back there. And also, I kind of lived, not like a double life, but the band started in ‘85 and then we started spending a bit more time going to London and all that stuff, but I ended up moving there in 1990 and I lived in London from ‘90 to ‘95 and then I moved here in 1995. So. I’ve kind of had a double existence of part-Midlands, part-London and now can you throw the US into the picture as well! [Laughs]. Not that I have a really busy, active social life or anything, but that’s the closest thing that I have! [Laughs]. So, how did you end up moving out there then?

My wife’s originally from Los Angeles. We met in the UK; we’ve been together since 1987 and we’ve been married since 1989, so a long time, like thirty-three years. But, she’s originally from here and I mean, I loved living in London and it was great really, but we never really had any money, because the cost of living there where we were living, it was ... you know, even when the band finished ... The Lemon Drops ended, but we didn’t even really break up even, we just kind of stopped around the end of ‘92, beginning of ‘93 and, you know, I had a job and that and we were both working, but it was kind of hard. We got by day to day, but we never really had any money, you know, so we kind of got a bit tired and fancied a change, so I ended up moving out here.

And you never came back!

[Laughs] No, never came back! Yeah, I thought about once or twice, but it’s

alright, it ain’t so bad here at all! My life’s not really that much different to what it was over there, you know. It’s about the same, I do the same sort of things here as I would have done over there, you know, but it’s great here, beacuse, well, I live in Burbank, which is a suburb of Los Angeles, but we still get the same ... most of the bands from the UK come here at some point. The one thing that really keeps me up to date with what’s going on over in the UK is every year, I go to Austin, Texas and they have this thing, South by Southwest [festival, aka SXSW] and, you know, a lot of the newer, up and coming artists and bands always kind of want to play there and you get a lot of kinder older bands playing, obviously, too. So. it’s kind of nice going to that because I’m a little bit older now and I don’t go out as much as I used to. You know, when I first moved here, I was thirty years old and I’d still go out like several times a week to bands and go to gigs and stuff, you know. I don’t do it quite as often now, being a little bit older, but it’s great going to South by Southwest and seeing like a year’s worth of gigs in like five days! [Laughs]. It’s really nice because it’s spread out over the whole city and there’s a lot of venues and a lot of clubs and all that and it’s really good, because a lot of the British acts that are playing are already quite well known in the UK and they’re playing in little, tiny pubs and clubs, so it’s exciting really! You get to see the new bands and you get to see them in a small kind of environment. It’s great, it’s really good and that’s a good way of keeping up, for me, on what’s going on.

Since then, there was of a course a very brief reunion in 2000 for a one-off comeback gig in Wolverhampton, but you were also reportedly offered the chance to reform for the Coachella Festival in 2007. With you having relocated to Burbank, California in the mid-’90s and having since enjoyed a successful career as a record producer and record engineer for acts such as The Little Ones; The Blood Arm and Everybody Was in

the French Resistance... Now! amongst others, as well as a sideline in composing music for television, film and music libraries, with your work having been heard in such TV shows as ‘Gilmore Girls’ (The WB / The CW); ‘The Osbournes’ (MTV); ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ (The WB / UPN) and ‘The Bill’ (ITV) and having released new music with your band David Newton and Thee Mighty Angels over the last few years, can we safely assume that there is little chance of any further activity from The Mighty Lemon Drops?

We didn’t turn it [the offer to reform for the Coachella Festival in 2007] down. I think it was offered though, I saw it somewhere that it was talked about, but the band, no, we weren’t even together at that point. Tony was living in New Zealand at that time and I’ve actually not seen Paul since we did the gig in 2000. I’ve seen the others. I’ve seen Tony and I’ve seen Keith and I’ve even seen Marcus, the second bass player, but I’ve not seen Paul. Tony, I still see quite often, he lives in London; Keith, I see quite often. I saw him last year. They’ve all kind of flirted with other things musically since then. Tony works in like IT, computer-related stuff. He worked for MTV for a while and I think he’s working for the BBC at the moment and Keith, he stills lives in the Midlands. One of his best mates was Jon Brookes from The Charlatans, who sadly passed away [in 2013], but Keith worked with The Charlatans for a while. I think he drum-teched for them. But, yeah, we will still get offered stuff. Rat from Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, they did a thing at Wolverhampton Civic Hall, and he asked if we’d be interested in doing like a co-headline kind of Christmas holiday thing. So, that was a couple of years ago and then he asked Paul and he wasn’t into it, so we didn’t do that. And I recently got back in touch with Adam [Mole] from Pop Will Eat Itself, I’d not seen him for a long while. I was in London in February and I went to see ... do you remember a band from the early-’80s called Wasted Youth? They were like a Post-Punk band and

all the Stourbridge lot, as we used to call them, Pop Will Eat Itself, The Wonder Stuff, they were all really into them, they were all really into this band, Wasted Youth and they did a reunion gig in February and it just so happened that it was when I was going to be there and sure enough, I ran into Adam and Graham [Crabb] from Pop Will Eat Itself. I’d not seen Adam for like twenty-five years! But, he was saying as well, ‘You should do some gigs!’ and I was like, ‘Hey!’ I don’t know, I might be interested, Tony might be interested ... I don’t know about Keith. But, I think Adam got in touch with Paul as well and Paul said ‘No’. So, that is what it is. But, still, it’s amazing who I run into and all that!

Finally, could you tell us a bit about your career since The Mighty Lemon Drops ended and projects you are currently involved in at the moment?

Sure! Well, when I first moved here, I didn’t really know what to do. The only thing I’d done since The Lemon Drops was work in a record shop and have a couple of bands and we got a house in Burbank at the right time, when it was still sort of affordable and it had a two car garage out the back and I was like, ‘You know, it would be great to have a recording studio’. I didn’t really have a lot of money at the time ... I didn’t have any money at the time really and I just slowly but surely started buying like plasterboarding and wood and stuff and I slowly converted the garage into a studio. Because living in Burbank too, there was a lot of like TV and film studios going digital, so you buy all the old anolog equipment for like no money. So, I basically built a little recording studio in my garden. I think when I started out, it was for my own doings and then I recorded a friend’s band and it turned out okay and then it was like, ‘Dave’s got a studio!’ and then ... I thought it would keep me out of trouble for a few years until I found a proper job, but that was like twenty-five, twenty-six years ago now and that’s kind of what I’ve been doing since, you know. I mean, the bands that I’ve worked with, they’ve pretty much all been local, Los Angeles, you

know, but I’ve had a few that have done okay in the UK, that have got picked up. Heavenly Records picked up a couple of the bands that I worked with. There was The Little Ones who did okay [Newton produced their debut EP, ‘Sing Song’, 2006], Heavenly signed them and they toured with Kaiser Chiefs in like 2007 and I went to Cardiff Arena and saw this little band of my mate’s from Burbank playing to like I don’t know how many thousand people! They did Earl’s Court as well, which is like huge! I did a band called The Blood Arm as well and they toured a lot in the UK. I did two or three albums [‘Lie Lover Lie’, 2005; ‘All My Love Songs’ EP, 2010 and ‘Turn and Face Me’, 2011] with The Blood Arm, which were all recorded in my shed! So, yeah, and I did a record with Eddie Argos from Art Brut [Everybody was in the French Resistance... Now! ‘Fixin’ the Charts, Vol. 1’, 2010] and that was me with Eddie and Dyan [Valdés] from The Blood Arm and they were a couple at the time and I knew them, which is really weird because Art Brut, I loved that band so much before I even knew Eddie and everything and he’s now like one of my best friends, you know. And he started dating Dyan and then they had this idea for this side project and, you know, I was kind of given the free rein to do whatever I wanted to do and I played a lot of the instruments on the record and all that and we toured ... we did like a full UK, like European tour and everything as well! It’s really funny too, because you know The Lovely Eggs opened for us as well? Well, I actually bought one of your magazines a few years ago, because there was a piece on The Boys and The Lovely Eggs were on the cover [Issue Seventeen, February 2020]! I just sent off and bought that from the UK [laughs], because The Boys were one of my favourite bands growing up and I saw that there was a Boys piece in it and then I saw that The Lovely Eggs were on the front cover! I still have it! At the moment, I’ve mainly been doing a lot of work on this [‘Inside Out: 1985-1990’], because I did a lot of the transferring and digitalising of the tracks, but other than that, most of the bands that I’m working on at the moment, it’s mainly been kind of local stuff. And I do my own thing as well, Thee Mighty Angels, which is my own band and we had a single out last year [‘Winter Tragedy’] and a full album the year before [‘A Gateway to a Lifetime of Disappointment’].

Thank you for a wonderful interview, it has been such a pleasure talking to you. We wish you all the best with ‘Inside Out: 1985-1990’, all your future projects and for the future.

No worries, likewise, it was great, I’ve enjoyed it! Keep up the good work!

‘Inside Out: 1985-1990’ is out now on Cherry Red Records.

www.cherryred.co.uk/artist/ mighty-lemon-drops-the