Christie playing Yellow River in 1970 in London
Certain songs – including a lot of stuff from The Beatles, as well as “universal” tracks like California Dreamin’ from The Beach Boys and Mrs Robinson from Simon and Garfunkel, just have this special power: as soon as you hear the first note, you immediately get catapulted back in time, and the real miracle here is that it’s a time that you may actually not have lived.
Still, you feel like you were there since that particular song was released because no matter how hard you try, you don’t remember the day you first heard it: no matter how hard you try, you don’t remember a day in your life when that song wasn’t there.
To be and to remain timeless in music is possibly the rarest victory to accomplish for a song and the author who penned it, and Jeff Christie, former lead vocalist of the 1970s British rock band Christie, is one of the few that managed to make it: he is the man behind Yellow River, the remarkably phenomenal song released 50 years ago in 1970 which reached number one in 26 countries that year, being among the biggest worldwide hits in the 1970s.
Christie in the 1970s
Now, it’s not that Yellow River may remind you of The Beatles because of some thinly disguised Yellow Submarine reasons; it’s because of the exquisite 1970s feeling and taste it leaves, it’s because after you hear it you get a little bit happier, it’s just because like most Fab Four’s songs, Yellow River is still being played, danced and loved as many as five decades after its release.
We have met Ivor Novello Award-winning Jeff Christie to talk his masterpiece, the other great songs that followed including San Bernardino and Iron Horse, the state of rock music in the 1970s and what it was like to have Yellow River featured as a part of the soundtrack for Oscar-winning movie Roma by Alfonso Cuarón in 2018.
Jeff Christie and his bandmates in the 1970s
Jeff, I know you’re recording a new album, would you like to talk about it?
Well, I think it’s hard for me to define. It’s hard to explain the songs. Some of them are mid-tempo, there are two or three up-tempo songs, and some of the songs are sort of philosophical. Others just come from trying to write down what I feel, what I see around, and sometimes it is a little bit dark. I think, as a songwriter, it’s a very mixed bag. There are two or three songs that are really old songs that I have re-recorded and completely rearranged to give them a complete face-lift, so they’re almost unrecognisable. And the rest of the songs are kind of hard to describe, I don’t know. You know, I am a songwriter that comes out of the 60s. Basically, the great writers from the 60s and 70s were my influences. The 60s and 70s have been a golden era for British music, with so many great songwriters.
Jeff Christie today
Are you also going to play live at some point?
I stopped playing live performances after I had some spinal damage in 2013, and it just became very, very difficult for me to play as fluently as I could play before and I kind of struggled with that for about a couple of years until it just became too difficult for me to continue getting on and off planes and waiting around in airports, hotels, dressing rooms etcetera. But my voice is still working okay, so I still can play and sing a little bit. I had a good five years working with Christie in the 70s, and once the band finished in 1975, I stopped playing for about 14 or 15 years, and then I started playing again in the 90s as there were a lot of people telling me there was a nostalgia circuit interested in hearing my songs again. I resisted it at first, but then I kind of fell in with the idea.
What was this nostalgia circuit like?
There were these guys I discovered in a good local band 10 years younger than me playing Christie songs at their own gigs as well as playing 60s and 70s stuff, and I was like ok, let’s rehearse a little and see how it goes. Their enthusiasm dovetailed with my missing playing live, and the rehearsals went well so from then on it was onwards and upwards so to speak. I eventually started doing a few gigs in the UK and Europe and it built up over the ensuing years. A high point was playing the Olympic Stadium in Moscow and St Petersburg in 2001 and doing TV appearances all over Europe but you know, I think it was Keith Richards or Charlie Watts who said that when you play live, you actually spend 90% of your time hanging around and only 10% of the time playing. And that’s what’s exhausting. But the recording studio was something different, so I looked for a situation where I could work and record my songs and do things at my own pace, very slowly and methodically and adjust my focus solely on writing and recording in the controlled environment of the recording studio. You know, there are two different things: playing live is one thing, and playing and recording is another thing, totally.
And which one do you enjoy the most?
Recording is much more scientific and more focused. When you’re playing live, it is for the eyes and the ears, whereas when you’re recording, it’s just for the ears, if you understand what I mean, and so you can experiment a great deal more. I have always loved working in studios because I could just follow my muse, but when you’re playing live, that’s exciting and immediate and in the 90s and noughties I was playing live in this nostalgia circuit, mainly with bands from the 60s and the 70s with some very big audiences in Europe, Germany, Scandinavia and Holland to name a few, and all they want to hear are the hits, they want to hear Christie’s hits, and also to hear music from that era. It was fun but very restrictive; we would go out and play my songs, but also, we’d be putting other songs in from that same time period that were of a similar nature because that’s what the audiences were paying for so the whole experience of origins was a trip down memory lane. That’s the whole point of that circuit. With this recording, I don’t have to do that. I mean, I can wear different hats: Christie was very much a sort of country pop-rock band if you like, and that sort of style was our signature.
Christie in the 1970s
Do you see yourself more as a songwriter or a performer?
I think of myself more as a songwriter and recording artist these days. I need to be free to roam musically and I don’t like to be tied to one style. Now, whether this is a money-making prospect is doubtful in this age of streaming. That’s another conversation, and not my raison d’être for being a songwriter. A poet writes poetry because that’s what he or she does. And a songwriter writes songs because that’s what he or she does. An artist doesn’t want a record company or management telling them that the next four songs must all be the same successful formula because that goes against the grain. There are dry periods that can go on for a period of several weeks and nothing. happens, then suddenly, out of the blue something happens and I’ve got an idea. I sit down and before I know, I’ve got, you know maybe half or somewhere near three-quarters of a song. And this is what’s been going on for years and years and years.
And what’s the difference, now?
When I was playing, I didn’t really give the songwriting aspect enough space, I suppose, because I was playing and touring a lot. But now that’s gone and life changes whether you like it or not, I found a great little studio not far from where I live, which is very convenient for me, it has some really good equipment and a good engineer. Over the last couple of years, and particularly since the pandemic, it’s been just fantastic because I’ve been able to really wrap myself up in it and I’m absorbed and focused on all aspects of the writing, arranging and production and performance of these songs, which is very fulfilling as well as time-consuming – which is fine, as there’s not much else to get occupied during these difficult times. And you know, I’ve never stopped writing songs. I mean, sometimes I just think it’s not me writing songs, I think they write me. But, you know, in the old days, in the 60s and the 70s, there was a tremendous pressure – if you had big success with hit records – to repeat that formula which is not good for a writer’s creativity.
Christie performing San Bernardino on the BBC in 1970
Were all 60s and 70s bands forced to follow that formula?
Some people could escape that if they were very, very big, you know, like The Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, to name a few but very few people back then could just do what they wanted in terms of creativity, the power was centralised with the record companies mainly – to use a 70s expression: “money talks, bullshit walks”.
Who are your main influences in music?
So many, it’s a long list but I was influenced a great deal by the early American rock n’ roll writers like Lieber and Stoller, Carole King and all the Brill Building songwriters in New York, also the great American Songbook songwriters. During the 60s, as well as the Lennon/McCartney/Harrison triumvirate and Ray Davis, Pete Townsend and other Brits there was a whole new breed of American great writers like Jimmy Webb, Bacharach and David, Brian Wilson, Bob Dylan, Smokey Robinson, Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Curtis Mayfield. Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry were also big influences for me.
Did you attend their live shows back in the days?
I saw all these people when they came over except Elvis as he never left America. We were just so lucky, we had all these fantastic influences. And then, of course, the Beatles exploded on an unsuspecting world and that was the changing of the guard. In the UK, I was influenced, as were so many, by seminal British bands from that time, and also by blues artists like John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson, so you have all these incredible musical influences, that sort of mesh together, and eventually, you get your own style.
Christie back in the days
What do you think of today’s music?
A lot of the songs that you hear these days are so processed and formulaic, I just find the lyrics just kind of bizarre. But look, it’s a whole different generation and they have their music just as we had ours, but there are gifted writers and artists around. Amy Winehouse was one massive talent, how gifted and tragic was she though, sometimes genius will find a way to self-destruct.
Self-destruction apart, it’s a crap generation making crap music.
The thing is that if you think about my generation of songwriters, we’re on a different level, it’s just a different, different time. You had some great stuff in the 80s and also some great stuff in the 90s. But, you know, much of the stuff that you hear today comes down to a certain style of singing, it’s like vocal gymnastics and there’s not a great melody behind it and very often confined to a few repetitive notes and uninteresting chord structures but although there are many talented artists and writers out there today the creative bar was set so high in the 60s that comparisons are a bit pointless.
As for myself, I’ve always been a melodist. I listened to classical music and still listen to lots of classical stuff like that, and melodies are just so very important. Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Wagner, and Beethoven were melodists and masters of their craft.
How do you feel when you hear Yellow River playing at the radio, or elsewhere? The song has also been featured in Alfonso Cuarón’s movie Roma in 2018.
Yellow River in 1969 and I would never have predicted that after 50 years that song would still be playing! It is a lovely feeling after 50 odd years. If somebody would have told me when I wrote the song that 50 years from now that I’d be driving along, I would turn on the radio, and then I’d hear my song playing, I would have been like “oh, come on!”. But that’s, that’s what’s happened, and it’s fantastic, it’s just wonderful. The other two big hits from Christie were Iron Horse and San Bernardino that still get airtime too. Every year that goes by, I never would have thought radio would still be playing my songs 50 years later. But somehow, it doesn’t stop and that river keeps on rollin’.
Christie in black and white
When critics discuss Yellow River in Italy, they’d often say that it sounds like a Beatles song. What is your view about it?
Well, well, I’m very surprised to hear you say that, that’s actually the first time I’ve ever heard anybody say that. To me, it sounds nothing like The Beatles. I take it as a great compliment, though. You know, I’d always been a very curious kid who loved classical music and Italian Opera Arias. Nessun Dorma and those type of things just hit you immediately, they go straight towards your emotions. Even if you don’t speak Italian and you don’t know what the song is about. Italian is a beautiful language and is perfect for this sort of music just like English is perfect for rock ‘n roll. But I would never have thought Yellow River is anything like a Beatles song. That’s very interesting and flattering I guess and just shows you when you write a song how people interpret it how they want. And I guess it means different things to different people and different cultures.
What was your relationship with The Beatles and the Beatlemania back in the days?
They opened the doors for so many of us. I mean, before the Beatles it was just Elvis, and then McCartney and Lennon came along, and they wrote these songs and sang them, and after that everybody else realised you didn’t have to go according to the old order anymore, which was like getting established songwriters to provide the songs and then artists would record them, that’s why lots of people say that The Beatles made it possible for all of us to write our own songs. I don’t know anybody from my era, from the 60s or 70s, that hasn’t been influenced by The Beatles, that would be impossible. There was always this friction between Lennon and McCartney, they were always competing with each other. They were both brilliant in their own way. McCartney had a genius for melody, so did Lennon, and Harrison did too when he could get a look in.
Is it true that you played at The Beatles’ legendary Cavern Club in Liverpool?
Yes, we played at the Cavern in Liverpool and the last time I was there a BBC Radio presenter and a journalist called Spencer Leigh showed me a brick in the Cavern wall with The Outer Limits – which was the name of one of my first bands – written on it. All the bands who played there had a brick in the wall named after them, and so to be included is quite a cool thing.
Christie in a very British environment
What else did you do with The Outer Limits?
At the University of Leeds with my band The Outer Limits we played alongside Bluesology and they had this keyboard player who was as quiet as a mouse, and so under the radar called Reg Dwight who a couple of years later morphed into Elton John.
In the early 70s, now with Christie, we had death threats in Africa, because we were playing in Lusaka. The security was so bad and there was a mighty thunderstorm and it was outdoors in a football stadium with no overhead shelter so we had to abandon the concert as there was a real fear of electrocution, there’s a lot of stuff about this documented on the website. And I could talk all day about touring with Jimi Hendrix in 1967 you know, this was an amazing experience. Everybody on that tour was famous, and if they weren’t famous at the time, they became famous later, like The Nice, or Amen Corner and Pink Floyd, who had just started to break through plus this guy from the Outer Limits called Jeff Christie who hit the jackpot a couple of years later.
Any other interesting memories about what the music scene was like in the 1960s?
It is hard for people that weren’t around in the 60s to know what kind of such an incredible atmosphere with young people there was. All of a sudden, we had all this great, great music, we had fashion and a lot of other very very cool things that were coming out. We sort of took American music and we repackaged it and sold it back to them: that’s what the Beatles did. Black artists were often completely disregarded over there, and it took people like the Beatles and The Rolling Stones and the British blues bands to take that music, recycle it and get it back to them. I played with many of these amazing people in the early days, people like Cream (Clapton, Bruce, and Ginger Baker). I remember playing support for may great bands like the Kinks, Small Faces, The Who, Spencer Davis with a young Steve Winwood, Jethro Tull. Edwin Starr, John Lee Hooker, Ronnie Wood when he was in The Birds, the list goes on.
Christie playing in Sweden in the 1970s
What was your dream job as a child?
One of the things that I always wanted to do was become a Spitfire pilot, childhood fantasy I guess, that was at a very early age, but then, probably from about 11 or 12 years old, it was all about music. Music had such a grip on me. My mother was a ballet dancer, and she introduced us to a lot of ballet and Opera, she exposed us to the arts, the great classical composers, and to Flamenco which I was besotted with.
I wanted to learn Flamenco guitar but there were no Flamenco guitar teachers in Leeds in those days, so in the mid-50’s I learned to play the piano very early on. I remember learning to read music and playing music and then got frustrated playing this music written by geniuses that I could never in a million years play as well as, so I started making up my own little tunes and melodies which was in hindsight obviously more than just an act of rebellion but a need to express myself creatively within a musical framework. So that’s how in a sense I got into songwriting by default.
Happy Christie on the grass
And then what happened?
By the time I was 13, I knew I wanted to somehow earn a living as a musician, it would be just the coolest thing I thought, and I was starting to get tired and bored of piano lessons when I heard Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel on the radio and the sound and the singer just sounded so exciting: rock’n’roll had arrived and the excitement of what I felt listening to it reminded me of how I felt when I first heard Flamenco so I nagged my dad for a cheap Spanish guitar and took to it like a duck to water, improving quickly and formed a group and within a couple of years, started playing small gigs and progressing nicely until we were good enough to try to get a record contract but we were playing other peoples songs as were most bands that didn’t have a contract. It was now in the mid-sixties and I remember an A&R guy once told me “you’re not going to get a record contract by playing other people’s songs, you’ve got to write your own songs”.
Fair enough.
And so I started listening to more and more great songwriters and picked up ideas and began to learn the craft of songwriting. I was very, very driven and determined to succeed in spite of the odds of being successful. I don’t know what I would’ve done had I not been successful I just had no interest in being anything else than a musician, that was my dream job and thankfully it paid off.
© Snapshot of the 1974 Spanish tour taken by drummer Terry Fogg: Jeff Christie with a fan and Greg Ainsworth on the left
The post 50 years from Yellow River, the song from Jeff Christie that sounds like The Beatles: interview first appeared on The Shortlisted.
from The Shortlisted https://ift.tt/3mFFFi9
0 Comments