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King For A Year | |
Mark KingArticle from Making Music, April 1987 |
IT'S EXACTLY 12 MONTHS SINCE LEVEL 42 BASSIST MARK KING SAT IN THE MAKING MUSIC INTERVIEW CHAIR. AND TONY BACON SPOKE TO HIM. AND GRAHAME TUCKER PHOTOGRAPHED HIM. HERE WE ARE AGAIN, HAPPY AS CAN BE... (EXITS LEFT, SINGING).
"Anyway... Prince Charles moves down the line, and he says to Eric Clapton 'I'm told we've met before'. And Eric Clapton says, 'Yes, 11 times.'"
But the big question on everyone's lips — did Mark meet the royals after last year's bash? "Yeah... I could've saluted again, you know?"
So Mark's a royalist, is he? "Well you know it's funny, isn't it. I think everybody thinks, oh, bloody toffs is all the same, pheuurr. And then they actually come sweeping up to you, and before you know it you're going, 'Oh sir, guv'nor, gawd bless you me lord, I'll fight for you!' It's like I've never met this bloke before, but yeah, I'll lay down me life for him. Princess Di? Yeah, really nice. Prince Charles has got quite a rough hand, though. Which is probably what Princess Di finds attractive.
"Anyway," Mark continues, his mind safely back at the après-gig gathering, "Prince Charles moves down the line, and he says to Eric Clapton, 'I'm told that we've met before.' And Eric Clapton says, 'Yes, 11 times.' Ha ha. But I'm sure that Clapton understands, cos people must have gone up to him loads of times and said, 'Ah Eric me old mate, you must remember me, back then, you know...' So it was all right."
Well that's a relief. The prospect of God punching out a royal is not a pleasant one to contemplate. And while we're on the subject, did you know that Mark once tried to register his publishing company's name as King Music, and discovered that you can't have a company name with a royal-type title in it?
Anyway, here we are back at the King music room. And look at all that gear. Apparently it was co-writer and co-producer Wally Badarou who suggested that Mark get his Yamaha 'multi-DX' 816/Linn 9000/Apple Mac computer team as it would duplicate Wally's home set up. Now, when Mark and Wally get together for songwriting sessions, Wally will turn up with just a small box of discs — some for DX sounds via the Mac, some for complete song-sequences of drums and keyboards via the 9000. Mark explains that his new-found tools are essential for "a non-keyboard playing musician", and save studio time by ironing out all the arrangement problems in advance.
"The benefit of having all the gear here is great," Mark says, waving an arm around his purpose-built haven. "I can work as it takes me. And I do try and regiment it, I do sort of work a 'day', mid-day to 6 o'clock. I know the other guys in the band seem to find that a bit fuddy-duddyish somehow. But you need to discipline yourself to do it every day, and not do what normal musicians would like to do and go off on another plane entirely, wander about in the park and not get it together because oh god, man, I'm just not in the mood. Which is what musicians are s'posed to do, and would do. But if you say right, it's 12 o'clock, here I go, I've done all the twatting about in the morning, sit down — and it works! Before you know it you've put down loads and loads of ideas that you start cross-referencing, and you're coming up with really nice tunes."
What we're charting here, in fact, is the gradual but certain shift of Mark King toward 'the songwriter' from 'the flash bassist'. He describes this shift, which began before the 1985 "World Machine" LP, as "a definite change" and concludes that it has patently paid off. "Yeah," he grins, "the band is obviously 10 times as successful as it used to be. I'm thrilled about that. There are some things that tend to suffer, of course — for example, instrumentals are very few and far between in terms of Level 42's output. But I'm not a lyricist, everything I do is 'instrumental'. And I can indulge my bass playing when we play live."
Now, what else can we fiddle around with in Mark's playroom while pretending that we're actually 'doing an interview'? Let's see — ooh, the Mac computer has a great flight simulator program. "There's a bit where it will go on autopilot so that you can go out and cut the lawn and by the time you come back it will have flown to the Bahamas for you," Mark recounts.
"I did an interview with Andy Peebles on Radio 1 the other day," Mark natters as I try to land a Cessna at O'Hare airport, "and I'd chosen three old tracks that I really liked and had been influential to me over the years; Jan Hammer's 'One To One'; Herbie Hancock's 'I Thought It Was You'; and Return To Forever's '500 Miles High'. And playing them back to back between our LP, the production quality of these old records — records that I used to hold my hand on my heart and say these are the finest you're ever gonna hear — the recording was bloody awful. I don't think that people quite appreciate how sound quality and reproduction is so staggeringly good now, and how quickly it's improved. It's only when you do an A/B like that between the old and the new that it brings it home."
Now what? Oh look, there's a Juno 60 leaning against the wall that I hadn't noticed. "It's waiting for a MIDI retrofit so I can get some analogue sounds into the system," says Mark. But back to the screen.
"I read an interview with Miles Davis the other day," Mark continues while crashing into the Sears Tower again, "and some arty journalist obviously wanted him to have a go at technology today, to say that drum machines are awful or something, and Miles Davis said he thought the business in that respect had never been in better shape. But, he said, it still requires a musician's abilities and the creativity of an artist to make all this stuff work well.
"Now this is Miles Davis, who always had to channel his work through drummers — brilliant drummers, of course, Billy Cobham, Tony Williams, Al Foster — but now he, who is like the god of everything, can sit down at say a Linn 9000 and play what he wanted to have played in the first place. He doesn't now have to get heavy so that drummers can come up with great quotes like, 'Coo, that Miles Davis is a scary bastard to work with'."
So they say. Now quick, see what I've found here Mark, it's a tape box with "Running In The Family" written on the edge. What can it be? "It's the completely mixed and finished first version that we dumped because we decided the lyrics were shit," he explains, and gets up from the wreckage of the by now clapped-out Cessna.
Give in. "Me, Mark King, I'm known as a bass player," he says, back to serious mode for a sec. "But I'd be stupid to sit there and say look, because I'm a bass player I have to just come up with bass riffs. What, does that mean for me as a musician? I think a musician, in 1987, is a far more encompassing creature than he was four or five years ago, and has to be, by necessity. And the ones who aren't, they aren't having any success. Nor will they have any success."
Bassics (Mark King) |
Mark King (Mark King) |
Mark Of Distinction (Mark King) |
King For A Day (Mark King) |
Level 42 (Level 42) |
Improbability Factor: 42 (Level 42) |
A Level Presence (Level 42) |
Interview by Tony Bacon
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