1997 Interview © Dr Jochen Bartsch &  may not be reproduced without permission

JB : Not half an hour has passed since you came off stage at Birmingham´s beautiful Symphony Hall after a concert that, to me, must rank as one of your best ever. You seemed genuinely pleased yourself. Is the tour going well for you?

HM : The tour has been great. We´ve had tremendous response from the fans, many  of whom say this is the best show they´ve seen from us. Many have written letters, not wanting anything, but simply to say  the show was fantastic. There´s a good feel about it. I just happened to feel good tonight, unlike last night in Northampton. I was on edge all night. We had Pete and Butch, two people from the Barron Knights, in. I didn´t feel good at all last night, I felt as if at any moment I was gonna make a dreadful mistake. I felt like I was fluffing things, not in a major may, just not good. Whereas tonight, I felt much better. It´s funny, the psychology of shows. You can go out on stage, like actors do, and convince yourself you´re gonna forget your lines or say the wrong words, and the more you get into that, the more you´re going to convince yourself that things will go wrong, that it will not be a good performance. Whether the audience themselves would really know the difference is doubtful. It might still be a good performance, but not as good as possible. It´s totally different if you can go out with a more carefree attitude, the way you often do at a rehearsal. One such night was the impromptu night in London with The Helecasters last winter. I was totally relaxed, it didn´t bother me at all and I felt great on stage. I usually feel like that, but every so often you can feel that anxiety and that´s what I had last night. Tonight was just great.

JB : And it showed, too. Let´s now turn to your next recording project, "Hank Plays Andrew Lloyd-Webber".  Six tracks are already in the can, recorded while you were still with The Shadows. Will these be re-recorded now?

HM : No, The Shadows tracks will go on as they are. There´ll be six existing tracks and ten new recordings.

JB : So the format will be similar to the "The Best of Hank Marvin & The Shadows" CD....

HM : Well, even my tracks on that one had been released previously, hadn´t they? These will be ten new tracks which I´ll be doing this year. But it hasn´t yet been decided which ones these will be. I actually have a long list of 17 or 18, maybe 19 songs. From that lot I will prune down to ten tracks and start recording them around July, I guess. A track I´d like to do myself is the title track from "Phantom of The Opera". I´ve always thought that this  would make a terrific instrumental. That´s about the only one I have firmly fixed in my mind that I want to do. I´ve got a cassette of quite a bit of Lloyd-Webber stuff in my car, which  I´ve played a few times. But I find it quite difficult to really listen properly while I´m driving, particularly when the songs are being sung during a show. The way they are sung by show-type singers doesn´t always make them sound inspiring from a guitarist´s point of view. I´m undecided at this stage whether to approach the music with using an orchestra as is often the case with the originals, or perhaps tackle them totally differently in more of a group approach, which could be quite interesting.  I´d still need strings then, of course, so it might be a change to go about it from a more orchestral point of view, interpreting the material in my way rather than get influenced by existing structures.

JB : That sounds as if you were considering moving yet another step further towards becoming Hank Marvin, solo artist. Looking at the past three tours, my impression was one of you gradually moving into the spotlight on your own and regarding everybody else in an increasing manner as a mere backing band. So the forthcoming album seems to be one more step in that direction.....

HM : Well, I suppose albums were basically the same insofar as in the eye of the public it was mainly me playing on them. You speak to an average person and they are usually quite unaware of who´s actually playing on an album. They may know Ben´s on it, and perhaps Warren, because of the obvious connection with Brian and myself. But on stage things simply had to be done this way. I haven´t noticed a tremendous amount of change from last year. The attention simply does focus on me. On the first tour we could spread it a little more, because there was Brian in the band. But when you do this sort of thing you´ve got to be prepared to  shoulder the responsibility of being out on your own and not try to spread the responsibility unfairly on other people in the band, because it simply is not their responsibility. Otherwise you might as well start another band and call it Hank Marvin & The Soandsoes. The way it is, is perhaps the way it should be going; Think of Eric Clapton.... He´s had a variety of different bands, but it was always Eric Clapton. Some bands might have been better than others, but if you do this sort of thing, you´ve to look at it, bite the bullet and say, ´I´ve got to be out front, this is my responsibility to shoulder the focus and not expect other people to do so.` In Ben´s case the way this tour programme has worked out has simply led to him being less up front than it might otherwise have been. It wasn´t my desire. We had quite a lot of numbers we had thought of doing, for example "Shadoogie", which would have been extended even more than last year and would have featured Ben more strongly. But we had far too much material and had to throw some of it out. So we ended up with the show as it is. Obviously we had to move forward a bit and include five or six numbers from the Holly album. It´s too easy to keep doing Shads numbers. It wasn´t a seriously considered plan to say,´Let´s have Ben do less this year,` it´s just the way things turned out. Maybe next year he´ll do more again.

JB : Am I right in assuming you left some of the "Hank Plays Cliff" tracks in your set, because the live CD and video are really only beginning to sell now and can do with a few plugs?

HM : Yes, that was partly the reason, but we also wanted to do it anyway, because it was the previous album. Again, if you look at what I can do on stage, it was important to do a few things from the Cliff album. I´d never throw it aside and say, That´s history now`. These are big titles and different in the way they are played, so we included them in our set. It wasn´t only the idea of the current release tying in with that. In fact originally it wasn´t thought of like that at all, it was purely coincidental. I simply wanted to do something from the previous album.

JB : Can you say something about the selection of Holly tracks, because you always seem to have to do the splits between the traditionalists who want note-for-note copies done in your style and the more progressively minded fans. Why did you pick the ones you´re actually playing on this tour?

HM : Again these were quite good and popular titles. "Oh Boy" has a good feel and is nice to play, I´ve always thought of "Raining In My Heart" as a terrific tune and a lot of people know the melody. So you´re not hitting them with something they don´t know; it´s a famous melody. "That´ll Be The Day" is a bit different in the way it sounds now with the harmonica sound. "Everyday" is a great arrangement by Mark, very musical, not too simple and straightforward. I like the treatment of "It Doesn´t Matter Any More",  and it´s nice to be able to do it acoustic-style on the stand. That was something I had always wanted to do, but at first I could only use an electric guitar. Then,  when I could get a stand this year and switch to an acoustic without any problems, I thought that was magic. So by and large the tracks from the Holly album were chosen for their popularity, the variety of the music and the fact that we thought people would like us to do them. But we had to be careful to sprinkle them evenly and not to do too much.      A lot of artists have made a mistake there and not varied their acts enough. We would, for example, have liked to do "Wishing", but that was a hard one because of the open tuning and would have taken a lot of working out. I would have had to teach Ben and Mark whole parts of it, and the harmony and lead parts were a bit tricky, too. So at the end of the day we looked at the big titles, the variety of styles and things we thought would work on stage.

JB : Coming back to your Lloyd-Webber project, there will doubtless be those who will say that you´re definitely leaving your rock ´n´ roll roots behind for the sake of pure commercialism....

HM : I don´t think good rock ´n´ roll was commercial, anyway. Perhaps what you mean is more middle of the road....

JB : Frankly, some people will call it selling out......!

HM : I don´t quite see it that way. I´ve always liked melodies as well as good rock ´n´ roll. For a guitarist like me it´s always difficult to find good melodies, anyway. And to be able to play some of his melodies gives you something to get your teeth into. And also there might be a few songs that turn out to be more rocky than one might think possible. I can understand people thinking that way, because they tend to want to stick you in a certain slot, don´t they? When I was very young, I didn´t like anything that wasn´t rock ´n´ roll. But as I grew, I began to appreciate other forms of music. I think it is important to do that. If they don´t want to do that, I can accept it. If that´s the way they feel, that´s fine. I´m not gonna change them, nothing I can say is gonna change them. All I can say is that the way we´ll treat the music of Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice is not necessarily that of a slavish copy. There is, of course, always the danger of taking things too far out of their original setting, and then the more traditionally minded people, who expect to hear the tunes in a certain way, will say, ´He´s murdered the songs.` I don´t think that will be the case. We have got enough sense between me, Mark, Ben and Warren when we approach the arrangements to have respect for the music and do the arrangements without destroying their feeling. But we´ll try to inject something into it that is hopefully new, and, as I say, in some cases it can happen that we´ll give it more guts.

JB : Your faithful fans will look forward to hearing the magic combination of Lloyd-Webber´s compositions and your style, so here´s to the next album and tour. Thank you very much for the interview and good luck for your next ventures.