Charles Hayward on Robyn Rocket’s Zoom Zoom

Robyn’s Rocket Zoom Zoom Charles Hayward transcript

Hi, I’m Robyn Rocket and you’re listening to Robyn Rocket’s Zoom Zoom: a monthly show where I interview artists who inspire me. I’m a space trumpeter and I put on gigs at Café OTO in London, called Robyn’s Rocket. The next one is on December the 14th. This month’s guest plays a lot at Café OTO. His name is Charles Hayward and he has been in many bands and ensembles, as well as doing stuff solo, and doing work in the community. Right now, you’re listening to the Sun Ra Arkestra Rocket #9. Then we’re gonna hear a track from when Charles worked with Japanese guitarist Keiji Haino.

R: Hello I’m Robyn Rocket and you’re listening to Robyn Rocket’s zoom zoom, a monthly show here on Resonance FM, this month’s guest is Charles Hayward. You just heard a collaboration between Charles and Keiji Haino - I hope I’m pronouncing that right - number 9 taken from an album with a long title, but it’s actually a poem “a loss permitted to open it’s eyes, for but three hours, and there glimpsed finally a mystery begs earnestly ask me nothing, now once more the problem is yours alone”. Charles do you want to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do?

C : My name’s Charles Hayward I’ve been making music all my life. I intend to make music until I die. I play drums, and I write songs and sing , I’m a father and a grandfather. I try to let myself be the whole of me as opposed to a little package, sort of rectangular box of me, so I let myself be a improvisor, I let myself be a writer, I let myself be a side-man, I let myself be whatever the gig tells me. I try and let myself experience all of life inside music. 

R: Would you tell me a bit about growing up because I think you grew up in south London?

C:  I grew up in Camberwell. My father had a beautiful collection of 78’s. He was a prisoner of war, got to be friendly with a few of the African American GI’s. and they turned him onto American big band jazz, before that  all he’s had access too was English British dance music, but they turned him on to Count Basie and Duke Ellington and Art Tatum and Ella Fitzgerald.  He came back and just built this collection , before I was born and while I was you know a young boy , with all this incredible jazz which he played me. My mother, she could play the piano , she used to play the top line the melody, and sort of thump on the bottom a sort of rhythmic bass line that was like cluster notes. More like a drum. I’d read the sound and hear it as a bass line. It was just incredible how you bring yourself to the music I can remember being like 18 months,  2 years old and playing pots and pans on the kitchen floor, well there was a particular moment where I got given a present  and found myself playing the boxes rather than playing the present, I just sort of  invented a drum kit out of boxes.

R: How old were you when you got your first drum kit?

C : I got my first drum kit when I was 10, and I think they thought it was gonna be a fad but it just became a sort of obsession very quickly.

R: And up to that point had you had any, like, formal music education?

C: I’d already started playing piano when I was 4, so I knew a bit about stuff a bit.

R: Were you doing a lot of music at school?

C: The 1947 Education Bill meant that. if you passed your 11 plus. very, very well you might end up at, what we call now an independent school, so I ended up going to Dulwich College, and, um, being like a fish out of water the whole time I was there. There was this weird contradiction between my parents’ expectations and my parents’ lifestyle and what the school was about, so that was quite uncomfortable. Because you know, I did have a very, very privileged education and it took me years to get rid of it - in fact I’m still getting rid of it - but they had an amazing music department. I was in the school choir and school orchestra.

R: Playing Drums?

C: Well, percussion and sometimes it was the triangle.

R: That was Ted the toad by count bassie. Hello you’re listening to Robyn Rocket’s zoom zoom I’m Robyn Rocket and this month I’m chatting to Charles Hayward and before we heard Count Basie we were talking about your life in school with music , and I wonder what kind of recorded music really made an impression on you?

C: The first record  I bought was the Shadows I think. I loved the Shadows and then I really loved the way the Beatles wrote their own material and played all the instruments and sang while they were playing it, just the whole totality of it, yeah, and then I heard The Who’s ‘anyway , anyhow,  anywhere’ and  nothing has ever been the same really.

R: I’m Robyn Rocket you’re listening to Robyn Rocket’s Zoom I’m chatting to drummer Charles Hayward and chatting about  music that was important to him growing up and he mentioned The Who’s ‘anyway anyhow, anywhere’ , and that’s the track you just heard.

C: My brother and I we used to basically do the middle  bit of a ‘anyway, anyhow, anywhere’ we sort of took that as a model and forgot about the song writing and just did that. So we’d do that after school, we’d get home and I don’t think we’d even get out of our school uniform. We’d just sort of like play for like three quarters of an hour, work up this incredible sweat. My brother never learned to tune the guitar. He couldn’t play  a chord. He basically used it like a noise machine so when I worked with Keiji Haino about 40 years later it was like playing with my brother.

R: What about gigs? What gigs do you remember going to as a kid, as an audience person?

C:  First gig I ever went to as an audience person would have been  something with my dad I think, it could of been Nat king Cole or Ella Fitzgerald . So I went with my mum and dad to see Manfred Mann and Johnny Kid & the Pirates were on as well. They were incredible!

R: What made them incredible.

C: That they were sort of breaking this weird glass celling of the physicality of the music. Instead of it being  something that was on stage that you sort of read like a book, it was actually coming out off the stage and wrapping itself around you and was more like being in a room then just about  telling you something.

R: that was feeling by Johnny Kidd & the Pirates. I’m Robyn Rocket and you’re listening to Robyn Rockets zoom zoom. This month’s guest is Charles Hayward, and we’ve been talking about the first gigs that made an impression on him and he talked about Johnny Kidd & the Pirates. Charles what about being in bands yourself, how did that come about?

C:  I tried making groups when I was like 11 and 12 but they were just no good, all my pocket money, everything, all my Christmas presents all my birthday presents went on just basically drums , musical instruments, amplifiers , endlessly going round second hand markets looking for bit and bobs for next to nothing. I shudder now. I’d get banjos and I’d saw off the neck and make them into drums. Everybody I wanted to work with had no obsession like that at all and they were using my guitar, a guitar I’d bought on holiday but then  later when I was about 15 or 16  I met two other guys and they asked me to join their band and they were a year older than me and this was quite a big deal back then and we started out playing very simple sort of garage band, simple four chord round and round things we wrote ourselves, sort of like very early Pink Floyd-inspired sort of things with a tune at the front  and then some sort of a freak out. So one of these guys went on to join Roxy Music and the other one went on to join Matching Mole. They never accessed the music facilities at all. In fact Bill taught himself completely. I was there when he taught himself. I saw him go from not playing bass to playing bass at first it was called, Pooh and the Ostrich Feather, Pooh with a H, I’ll have you know, then we became Quiet Sun.

R; Here’s a track by Quiet Sun called RFD.

R: Hello, I’m Robyn Rocket and you’re listening to Robyn Rocket’s Zoom Zoom a monthly show where I interview artists who inspire me. This month I‘m chatting to Charles Hayward. If you want to listen to this show again , see a transcript or a track listing of any of the other shows I’ve done, you can visit my website. My name is spelt  Robyn and my website address is robynrocket.com/zoomzoom

You just heard RFD by Quiet Sun.  Quiet Sun was a band which my guest this month, Charles Hayward was in when he was at school, and so far in our chat we’ve been talking about his life growing up in Camberwell 

C: Basically I did very, very badly in my O Levels because I wasn’t happy. The school let me stay even though I completely did not meet their standards for going into the sixth form , they sort of let me go into the sixth form. Within a year  of being in the sixth form I was trying to negotiate myself out of the college.  I realised  I had this weird privilege thing and it was starting to really upset me and I negotiated a meeting between me and the head of the history  department and my parents and I tried to get them to let me leave, but they just completely ignored me , like “that’s not what’s gonna happen, what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna work harder” there was a lot of expectation that I was gonna be some sort of poet or writer or novelist or scriptwriter. There was a lot invested around me that thought I was gonna do that. When I was 15, for one night only, I had a play of mine performed at the Royal Court Theatre , then I was still not succeeding inside the school and I needed to get them  off my back so I told them I was going to be a teacher and I lied about going for interviews up in Wakefield and all over the place just so I could get days off and I spent the last year using the time there…well I was hardly ever there. I was basically just playing.

R: How did it happen that a play of yours was performed at the Royal Court.

C: Well, that happed because I wrote it at school and the teacher thought it was really good  and got it, sort of,  performed by the class and then this teacher he sent it around. The royal court the directory I think who was called William Gaskill, he thought it was good and he put it on with another play a longer one written by  a professional playwright.

R: So how did you go about getting gigs as a musician?

C : I did the proverbial looking in the back of the melody maker for musicians wanted  and waited for the phone to ring and did that for quite a bit of time really. There were two things going on , there was the music I really wanted to make and there was also the fact that I knew I needed this sort of  stuff that wasn’t even really related to the kind of music, it was more like  getting in the back of the van , getting the stuff out of the back of the band, doing a soundcheck, so I joined the Mojos and did what they used to call  ‘the chicken in the basket’ circuit. I played all these, like, working men’s clubs and ‘talk of the south’ sort of Top Rank cabaret clubs but I was also keeping my name known doing all these auditions with bands who’d sort of give me the time of day but nothing happened, and eventually I got a call from Gong, so I joined Gong for 2 months, but I was much too young and couldn’t handle it. And then I went back to waiting for the phone to ring and stuff. 

R:  Tell me about some of the other bands you were in at that time?

C: I was in a very early free improvisation group called The Amazing Band  which was led by a guy called Mal Dean that was an incredible experience. I learnt an amazing amount from Mal Dean, the whole thing grow up from us just playing together, one time Mal said  it’s Coltrane or it’s Coleman in terms of two roads forward. Coltrane uses the piano and Ornette doesn’t, therefore the avenue suggested by Ornette has got more protentional in it, and it was like ‘oh my gosh, yeah’,  that really sort of influenced me that comment.

R: We’re goanna hear 2 clips of two tracks , ‘Free Jazz part 1’ by Ornette Coleman and ‘Miles Mode’ by John Coltrane.

R: You’re listening to Robyn Rocket’s Zoom Zoom, I’m Robyn Rocket and that was two bits of two tracks: ‘Free Jazz’ by Ornette Coleman and ‘Miles Mode’ by John Coltrane. I’m chatting  to Charles Hayward about his life in music .

R: How did This Heat come about?

C: Well I got a  call from Jeff Lee who used to be in Henry Cow and  we had a band that was in 2 parts. It had Jerry  Fitzgerald and Jack Monk on bass, Catherine  Williams , Jeff Lee and me and then Jerry and Jack left  and Charles Bullen and Alan  Muller joined. The group was too influenced by things like Gong and stuff, it wasn’t really itself. I knew there was some other music  happening somewhere in my head, there was something that was more distinct. Then the thing with Jeff Lee just wasn’t working so Charles and I left  and we determined that we were gonna make a group  that was gonna be something more distinctive and less jazz and less silly, less gong, less I don’t know, silly stories,  more x-ray photography we were improvising , but we weren’t improvising jazz and we weren’t improvising European free improvisation  we were sort of improvising these weird pictures sort of weird little atmospheres, so there was an indication  that there was something else. It was less about notes, more about sort of the density of the air and more like that Johnny Kidd & the Pirate stuff where the guitar, where the sound comes out and wraps around you , less book, less music, more sound. We sort of had a real confidence in what we were doing  and we reached out  quite proactivity to John Peel  and we made a  nuisance of ourselves, in other words, and we had a cassette that was blue and yellow, our demo cassette, that meant people could see it … ‘oh yeah it's on the second  pile from the top’,  and we’d be phoning up all the time and then when they heard it they liked it a lot and we got on Peel , and because of that we got gigs abroad.

R: Let’s hear a track by This Heat, ‘This is Water’.

R: I’m Robyn Rocket by this heat

Why did Not This Heat happen?

C: That happened  because I did a  gig with Alan Wilkinson and Matt Matell,  I was playing,  ‘cos I like playing with Alan Wilkinson because I think he’s a super intense player.

And afterwards this guy sort of came up on stage and introduced himself  and said he wanted to make  a series of records covering This Heat material, and then Light in the Attic was gonna re-release This Heat and he went, ‘Oh well that blows the covers project completely out the water but what about if you  were to play a gig to launch the reissue’,  so he suggested we had this reunion thing. At first Charles and I weren’t going to play that much on it, well there  was no way I couldn’t play it, I just had to be doing it cos I just love the songs and I love the  fact that I knew we could play it better then we could then. That’s how it happened really.

R: And can you tell me about Camberwell Now?

C: Camberwell Now was the group after This Heat, that built a cassette switchboard and made 2 EPs and 1 album. The album is called the Ghost Trade.

R; What’s a cassette switchboard?

C: It was 4 stereo cassettes, each with a left and right, and two different sounds on them, that would then be played through a series of sort of almost morse code keys, so that when you pressed them down you’d hear what was on the cassette and when you took your finger off  you wouldn’t hear what was on the cassette and we’d make our own sounds we’d record things like Saturday night in a pub  so it was somewhere between  a  sound machine and something like a mellotron or something, we’d make the sounds ourselves we’d make bass notes using a metal rod and they’d sort of be ‘ooooo’ there’d be sort of a lot of vibrato in them and then you’d play one against another and both of them doing that so the thing would be.. well as I say the album is called the Ghost Trade , and basically it was like we were playing these ghosts.

R: Let’s hear a track from Camberwell Now, this is ‘Working Nights’.

R: Hello, you’re listening to Robyn Rocket’s zoom zoom ,that was ‘Working Nights’ from Camberwell Now’s Ghost Trade. I’m Robyn Rocket chatting to Charles Hayward.

Charles, I know you from your community work, can you tell me a bit about how that developed?

C: One of This Heat’s sound engineers found a disused morgue and coroner’s court and he sort of  got inside and he decided it would be a great place for a youth music project. And then just about the start of  Camberwell now I got invited to be the drum teacher.

R: Did you enjoy teaching?

C; I absolutely adored it, I adored it, I learnt from it constantly.  I loved working with the young people. Everybody learnt from it  , we confronted ourselves through it,  people come up to me afterwards  not really talking to me about the drums at all, and talked to me about  how it helped them  find themselves.

So then  I started working with a group called Entelechy.

R: On Entelechy Arts website it says 

“Entelechy Arts was founded in 1989 at the request of the Lewisham and North Southwark Health Authority, to support the resettlement of people with learning disabilities from the old ‘mental handicap’ asylums to communities in South East London.”

C: The thing I wa  involved in is called ambient jam and  I always understood it as being an even field between everybody so you had people who were designated as people who needed help  and other people who were - I’m talking about designated by the  outside world not the people themselves.

 We ‘d take everybody’s signal seriously, we would be introduced to whole new other ways of, sort of, experiencing the world, and then we would synthesise that back , by one way or the other.  I am obsessed with sound and one way or another some else is obsessed with dance. Everybody would interact with everybody else’s work and that interaction would then by interacted with but were everybody is equal, there isn’t like a professional and a person who doesn’t really know and can’t really  express and can’t really  be taken seriously  because they  don’t use language the way we do .

R: Did it get in the way of your other music work?

C: This was part of it , it seemed that the fact that  I was functioning musician was part of what  I was bringing to the party in the  community music  setting, a connection that nobody ran away from , they welcomed it. Some how or other it wasn’t getting in the way of what I make , I was learning from it. It was providing me, as a father of three, with a regular income and I was getting to know more of the people I lived amongst  this seemed to be a no brainer. And it integrated back into the meaning of the music I make anyway is, it wasn’t a sort of side line or anything, it was at the centre of what I was doing . 

R: I’ve really enjoyed chatting to Charles , we only have so much time in this radio series, but I will be doing a podcast series at some point in the near future. You can find this episode, transcripts and track listings as well as all the other episodes in this series and information about the podcast when I’ve finally made it at www.robynrocket.com/zoomzoom

I want to finish the show by talking to Charles about his current project  Abstract Concrete and this is a track by Abstract Concrete called ‘this echo’.

R : Hello, I’m Robyn Rocket and you’re listening to Robyn Rocket’s zoom zoom. I’ve been chatting to Charles Hayward and you just heard a track by his project  Abstract Concrete and it was called ‘this echo’. Charles, do you want to tell me about Abstract Concrete?

C: Abstract Concrete is all I want to talk about in some ways, so this is a new group with  Agathe Max  viola, Otto Willberg bass, Roberto Sassi on electric guitar, Yoni Silver on keyboard and me  on drums and vocals. It’s very structured music, hardly any improvisation at all , it centres  around the idea of song, song extended as much, not as much as possible, but less grounded in its own orbit, more able to  sort of handle stuff thar isn’t song inside it.

R: When you say stuff that isn’t song what do you mean?

C : Well, I suppose,  taking the instrumental reality  and themes as if they were another character, another, you know, essential  voice, as opposed to this idea of accompaniment or illustration or as description, more the song isn’t all about language. Basically I gave a problem with words, I sort of know how words can be used to manipulate and I mostly think if we were in some sort of utopian place  which is not  gonna happen, but if we were in some sort of space like that, that in fact  we’d sing everything, nothing would be spoken, everything would be sung. I think our politics should be sung, I think the house  of parliament people should sing, because  that way each time you use each word is not just the word, it is but it’s also that specific word at that moment and also  because I can hear lies and  mendacity and  deception  and manipulation inside  people’s voices you know  politicians’ voices especially, media people’s voices and I would think song would expose that more clearly.

R; thanks so much for chatting to me Charles.

Abstract-concrete.bandcamp.com

I’ve been Robyn Rocket. Executive producer, Paul Dutnall thank you for helping me make these shows, thank you to Resonance for putting me on and thank you Heart n Soul for believing in me. Thank you to the Total Refreshment Centre for being a source of inspiration  and everyone in the Heart n Soul community.

Next Robyn’s Rocket is on 14th  December and it’ll be streamed. More info at www.robynrocket.com

I was really inspired by my chat with Charles and I made a whole EP. I’m gonna finish with a track from that, its called ‘Ghost Train Yard’. You can go to my Bandcamp at www.hatonauts,com

Have a marvellous rest of your day whenever you’re listening to this.