FASCINATING RHYTHM

Bill Wyman.

After three decades powering the rhythm section of the Rolling Stones, Bill Wyman has gone back to the music he grew up with, with help from the impressive array of talent that is his Rhythm Kings. Sam Inglis hears how their new album Double Bill was made.

"When we did the first album, a lot of people were saying 'Yeah, it's great — who played the bass?'" laughs Bill Wyman. "That's nice, innit? They just didn't think it was my bass guitar sound, I suppose, but I'm playing it like an upright bass, with a different technique, and flat‑wound strings, so it sounds more like an upright than an electric. It fools a lot of people. Of course, you can never really achieve the perfect sound of a double bass on a bass guitar. But I can't play a double bass, because my hands are too small!"

Some people are evidently finding out that the man who's spent more than 30 years thumping a four‑string for the Rolling Stones is a more versatile musician than they thought. Bill Wyman's post‑Stones project boasts an all‑star lineup that includes Georgie Fame on organ and vocals, Gary Brooker (of Procol Harum) on piano and vocals, well‑known guitarists Albert Lee and Martin Taylor, along with singer Beverley Skeete, backing vocalists, a brass section and a rhythm section led by Wyman. The Rhythm Kings is a supergroup, devoted to playing the music Wyman has loved all his life. "When I left the Stones in '93 I didn't want to do any music," he says. "I'd just had enough, I'd been playing music for almost 35 years. I just wanted to get away from it and do other things. So I did that for two years, and then I wanted to do something musically, but I wanted to do something different, so I decided to just do anything that came to mind, no matter how out‑of‑date it was, whether it was a music‑hall song, a Fats Waller song, a Creedence Clearwater Revival song, or Donovan, or early Bob Dylan, or Louis Armstrong, or ragtime, or country, just anything that came to mind. I thought 'Why not just do all those songs that I like, all those songs I wish I could have been part of?'"

The first person Wyman brought into his new project was guitarist and long‑term collaborator Terry Taylor. Bill and Terry had known each other since the late '60s, and Terry had contributed to a number of Bill's previous solo projects. "We originally thought we were going to do it as a duo," explains Bill. "We were going to call ourselves the Dirt Boys, and we were going to do it like the Everly Brothers, with guitars and perhaps a drummer, and just sing country, early blues, and jazz. Then we got a drummer, and found Dave Hartley the piano player, and that just changed the whole thing, because he's an absolutely stunning player, and he can take the simplest melody and turn it into something wonderful. So then we thought 'Mmm, it'd be nice to have a really great jazz guitarist,' and it just built — then we thought 'Oh, we've got a rockabilly song, we really need Albert Lee...'"

"And then once we'd done it we thought 'Are our voices good enough?'" says Terry. "And then we thought 'It'd be nice to have a horn section', and 'Oh, it'd be great if we could have a couple of girls doing backing vocals.' We were going to try several different girls, but once we'd heard Beverley, we thought 'There's no point in looking at the rest, let's use her.' And then Georgie obviously was keen to sing a couple, and Gary Brooker wanted to sing, and Albert Lee's a good singer as well. So now we've got four top singers on each album, and five major players."

"A lot of the songs we do were done in the '40s and '50s when it was just changing from the big band era and going into the rock & roll era, and in‑between there were those eight or 10‑piece combos with people like Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan," explains Bill. "The Rhythm Kings is that kind of band — horns, piano, and a brass section, there's only two brass players but they double up, and two backing girl vocals. There was no organ on those old records, but I think that's one thing that really fits, it always works with these early songs, as the bass does."

While putting the band together, Wyman and Taylor were also amassing a vast amount of potential material. "Bill has a large record collection," explains Terry. "So we just went through it for about six months. We had six or eight C90 cassettes filled with odd songs from like Etta James and Aretha Franklin to Carl Perkins, to Little Hat Jones to Scott Joplin to Elvis. From the '30s right up to the late '70s, we just picked anything that took our fancy."

Old‑Time Music

Terry Taylor.

Although they favour tried and tested recording technology, and although most of their material dates back to the middle of the last century, the Rhythm Kings are not slavishly attempting to sound like the old records from which they take their inspiration. "If we do a song from the '30s, it won't sound like that song if you compare the two tracks," insists Bill. "The piano playing is totally different, the quality of the sound of the piano is totally different, the guitar sounds are different. They never used an organ, and on most of them there was never a bass. Before the '50s it was very rare that there'd be a bass on anything, and then it would be an upright. Sometimes if you're doing a blues track from the '30s, sometimes there was just a bass player and a violin or something, and then on the next song there'd be a piano and a trumpet, or sometimes it'd just be a harmonica and a singer. They used really weird mixtures of two or three instruments, it was whoever could play anything on that plantation or in that small community that wanted to have a go at doing something, and they'd just get together, two or three of them.

"We do those songs, but we don't try to do them exactly the same as they were done before. What we try to do is capture the feel and the atmosphere of the song. We usually follow the same general arrangement, although we do change things a bit sometimes, but mostly we stick to the same chord structure if it's a good one, and the same melody lines, although we change them if they sound too old‑fashioned. But generally, we just try to capture the magic of that moment when they recorded it, the atmosphere and the mood that they did it in. That's much more important than what everybody plays. If we're doing an old Ray Charles song, we don't sit down and analyse it and try to play it note for note exactly like he and his band did, because there's no point."

"In fact, we don't even rehearse it," laughs Terry. "We listen to it, and then we just run through it in the studio a couple of times and then take it."

Kings Of The Studio

Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings have now been a popular live attraction for several years, and when I met Bill and Terry they had just shared production duties on the band's third album Double Bill. As Bill explains, the Rhythm Kings' approach to recording is based around preserving the freshness and spontaneity of the band's live performances: "I remember times in the '70s when bands like Yes or Genesis or Pink Floyd spent three days getting a drum sound — three whole days getting a drum sound! We get our drum sound while we're running through the song! You don't need all that crap. I think that's well over the top, it's not necessary. In three days, we'd cut nine songs. You run through each song two or three times, make sure everybody knows it, and then you cut it. And while we're doing that, the engineer's getting sounds and the teaboy's getting the tea."

"We try to get three done a day, at least," agrees Terry. "Sometimes we do more. There's no rehearsal. We just play the band the song we want to do, they all have a listen to it two or three times, and then we go into the studio and start playing it."

"We do everything live and it's all done in three takes," continues Bill. "Every track we've ever recorded has been done in three takes maximum, mostly one or two. If it gets past that, you kind of feel that it ain't happening, so you just move on to the next song. If you're going to do traditional music like this, you have to get a bit of an atmosphere on it, like there was on the originals, and the only way to get that is to grab it while people are enthusiastic about playing, and having fun doing it. It's mostly up‑tempo, good‑time stuff. So if you dither about on it, and you do 10, 12, 15 takes, it becomes better played but it loses atmosphere. It's important to have most of it done live, and then you might just drop in a couple of piano notes or something. Sometimes we redo vocals because there's bleed‑over of sound, and we do the horns as overdubs and the backing vocals as overdubs. And, of course, if Albert Lee's in America when we cut the tracks, then Albert will overdub; if Martin Taylor's on tour, travelling, he'll come in and overdub, so some guitar things are overdubbed here and there, but we try not to do too much overdubbing."

So what do the Rhythm Kings look for in a studio? Terry's answer is succinct: "Tape, an old desk, and some good old mics. We also like a big recording area where we can sit around, so we'd have Georgie on the organ, we've got the piano, and we've got the drums in a booth. Beverley does some live vocals, and we like to record like that, you get a better feel."

"We use a lot of old microphones, stuff that was in the Stones' mobile studio from the late '60s onwards," adds Bill. "We use valve mics for the vocals, because they're the best vocal sounds you can get really. Every vocalist that ever works with us always says to us that they're pleased with the vocal sound, and it's because of the mic. We just put them straight into the desk, and I go straight into the desk with the bass."

"We don't use a lot of computers," laughs Terry.

"There's no typewriters on our albums!" agrees Bill. "It isn't that we've got anything against modern technology, it's just that for what we do, it's better to use old stuff and tape, because we get a much warmer sound. If we were doing rap tracks or something, obviously we wouldn't use an old desk and old mics and all that, we'd go and use a bleeding computer like everyone else does and save ourselves some money."

"That way you spend longer doing it, though," warns Terry. "You can spend a week on a track messing around, but we've been through all that and we don't like it. Obviously it ends up digital, but we keep it in analogue right until the very last minute. And that is in the mixing process, because what we like to do is give it to someone to mix without us being there... on digital, so you've got recall. And we need recall, because he'll bring it back to us and we'll go 'No, we can't hear Martin's guitar, the vocal's not loud enough, there's too much echo on everything.' And then he can just recall it all instead of starting from day one again, like if you were doing it normally on tape. So we need that digital mixing so we can do the recall and adjust things. We used Brian Tench to do the mix, but we've got another engineer that we record with, Stuart Epps [see Engineering The Rhythm Kings box]. He's an excellent engineer, he gets some of the best drum and vocal sounds."

"Stuart's a great engineer, but he's not a very good mixer!" laughs Bill. "People are very good at what they do, and if you try to give them something else, they don't make it for some reason. But I couldn't mix either. I could go into a studio and spend all day on a track, and I might play it to Terry in the evening and he'll say 'Horrible'. I know I'm not a mixer, so I'll give it to someone who I think can mix it, and then listen to the results, and then we'll make changes."

"It's just little adjustments we make really, they're very minor," explains Terry. "He gets it nearly right. He was hoping to get one track right this time, and he did, he got one out of 24. The others we had to send back!"

"Sometimes it was just a little bit more vocal, volume‑wise, and a little less echo. It was just odd little things, he did pretty well," says Bill.

"We don't like too many effects, either," insists Terry. "We don't like too much reverb and stuff. We used Soul II Soul for the mix, which I think has a Neve desk, and they've got digital effects, but he hired in some old compressors and stuff as well."

"Most of the recording for this album was done in this little studio called Snake Ranch, up near the 606 Club," adds Bill. "A couple of tracks were done on a farm that used to be Alvin Lee's studio, out past Maidenhead."

"We also used Soul Studios out in Cookham, which are now owned by Chris Rea but used to be owned by Jimmy Page — a couple of the tracks on the album were recorded there," adds Terry.

Making Arrangements

So when you have an unrehearsed band composed of top‑flight musicians playing largely for fun, what exactly is the role of the producer? Unsurprisingly, Bill and Terry see their job as largely corrective — keeping the sessions running smoothly, picking up mistakes, and occasionally suggesting alternative arrangements. "We give the musicians a free rein," explains Terry, "because then you get the best out of them. Rather than telling them 'You've got to play that,' you just say 'Play what you feel'. And if it isn't right, we'll tell them.

"Our job starts with either choosing or writing songs, and how we're going to do those songs, then deciding who's going to sing it, are we going to have an organ on it..."

"Who's going to be the main guitarist — is it an Albert song or is it a Martin Taylor type song?" continues Bill. "Is it going to be a vocal by Georgie, Gary, Albert, or Beverley? Or me?

"When it comes down to it, I do have to say 'Yes, that is going to work', or 'No, I don't like that'," says Bill. "Sometimes we cut a whole track and it all sounds good, but I'll think 'Something's not right there', and we'll talk about it, and I'll say 'Take the organ out'. And you take the organ out, and it sounds fantastic, because you suddenly realise that what he's playing on the organ is filling up all the inside of the song, and when you take it out, it's all clear, and it all fits perfectly — or it might be the piano or one of the guitars, it could be anything. It just makes a complete change to the track, so I do have to have those final says all the time, and sometimes it can be a bit difficult when you're talking to Gary or Georgie or Albert or Martin. They're all top‑class people who've got their own careers and their very highly acclaimed — to tell Albert Lee that his guitar don't fit can be a bit difficult sometimes, but someone has to do it! Jeff Beck tried to play on one track, but his sound just didn't suit any of the tracks. He'd begged me to get him on the album, he'd said 'I've heard about this stuff you're doing, I want to be on it,' and he came down and we tried and tried but it just did not gel. He's an extraordinary guitar player, but he's got a certain sound, and that sound just didn't sit on any of these tracks. But there's no prima donnas in this band. They're like 'Oh, all right, I'll try something else.' And they do, and suddenly it all gels.

"I think I'm more creative than Terry, but Terry's much more musically clever than I am. He knows every chord there is. I play an E, and he says 'No, that's a 10th diminished with a bottom G', or something. He knows all that shit and he's got a very good ear, so he can hear where one of the vocals is singing the wrong note on a certain chord, or if Georgie or Gary does something wrong, he'll correct them. It doesn't happen very often because they're all great musicians. Once in a while, though, it'll sound good to me, but Terry will say 'No, there's something wrong on that change into the middle section,' and then we'll listen back slowly and he'll say 'It's the girl, she's singing the wrong note,' or 'It's Gary on the piano, he's hit the wrong note,' or whatever. So we work really well together because he's got his parts that he's really good at, which I'm not good at at all, and I think I'm a bit more creative melodically than he is, so I'll work out the horn arrangements with one of the players, and the backing vocals, that's where my strengths lie."

One problem that arises when trying to record a supergroup such as the Rhythm Kings is simply getting all the musicians in the right place at the right time, as Bill explains. "They've all got their own working careers, they're all gigging. Georgie Fame's in Hong Kong at the moment, Albert's in Nashville I expect. Where's Gary — the Bahamas? They're all over the bloody place. We'll ring up and say 'Where's Martin? We need Martin to overdub two tracks,' and it's like 'He's in New Zealand, but he flies to New York on Thursday, and he might be back on Friday morning.' It's like that all the time. Or you'll get in touch with Georgie Fame and it's like 'Well, he's in Norway, he's got to fly to Holland tomorrow, and then he's down to Spain for three days, and then he's back in England overnight and then he's off to New York. It's a nightmare."

Love Letters

Some of the members of Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings (from left to right), Terry Taylor, Gary Brooker, Beverley Skeete, Frank Mead, Bill Wyman, Graham Broad, Martin Taylor.

The Rhythm Kings are the sort of musical project that only someone with Bill Wyman's public profile, contacts, resources and sheer enthusiasm could carry off. It's a chance for some of the world's most highly respected musicians to have fun playing music they enjoy, and both live and on Double Bill, the band demonstrates exactly what 'good‑time music' should be all about. "We don't make much money doing this kind of stuff," laughs Bill. "It ain't a money earner, it ain't a career move or anything. We don't sell very many copies of our albums, and it costs us quite a lot to do it, because we've got 12 pieces and everybody gets session fees, and then you've got 24 tracks to mix, so it becomes quite an expensive project. When you go on the road, you're playing places that hold 700 to 2000, with a 12‑piece band, with 12 hotel rooms and travel and so on, so on the road you don't make much money either. Everybody ends up doing it for the same reason we do it. It's a labour of love."

The Double Bill album was released on April 23rd.

Writing New Old Songs

Stuart Epps.

As well as the eclectic selection of old songs chosen by Bill and Terry, the Rhythm Kings also perform new songs written by the duo in the style of the '40s or '50s. I asked them how they go about writing songs to fit in with the classic material that makes up the bulk of their sets.

"We usually mess around on an acoustic guitar, or a keyboard, get a chord sequence and a tune going, and Bill will usually write the lyrics in the style of '30s and '40s songs," says Terry. "When we take a song in to the band, obviously they put their bits in, which is the nice thing about it. I'll play the guitar, Bill will sing it and sometimes put a guide vocal on a rough track, but once the pianist puts his chords in in his style of playing, and Georgie Fame does his thing, it all works."

"I always noticed when I tried to write soft rock stuff, I had some successes and some failures, as I suppose everybody does, but I never felt comfortable with it," admits Bill. "It would sometimes take me a long time to write songs. The songs that were successful were done really quickly — 'Je Suis Un Rock Star' was done in half an hour on a four‑track in France, like 'In Fashion' and 'White Lightning' and all those early things I did in the '70s on solo albums — but sometimes I'd have a track and it used to take me three weeks to do a lyric, and then when the record came out, I'd think 'I don't really like that lyric, it's too vague.' I find writing songs in the style of a certain era, whether it's a blues from the late '20s, or a jazzy‑souly kind of song from the '40s, or even an uptempo rockabilly‑style track like 'Hole In The Wall' — all you do is do the same thing. If you use the slang of that time in the lyrics, and the kind of chord structures they used then, it doesn't matter if you stick precisely to what notes they would have played in the '30s or '40s. You can do it more modern, but it'll still have that feel, because it's got the right changes. So it becomes much more simple for me to do a '40s song, or a rockabilly song, or an early blues, than it ever was trying to write pop. I feel more comfortable in it."