Biography

Interview with Norman Rodger and Ally Palmer by Mike Melville, Manic Pop Thrills, April 2009.  Used with permission.

A Brief History of TV21 (1979-1982)

AP - Norman and I knew each other from school days in Prestwick and we were in bands together in our teenage years. Norman ended up at college in Ormskirk, near Liverpool, where he met Neil, who would become our bass player. We formed in September 1979 and moved to Edinburgh, mainly because our friends Another Pretty Face had moved here and we thought that would give us a bit of a start!

NR – It took about six months before the first single came out in March 1980 (Playing With Fire/Shattered By It All) but at the time that felt like we were dragging our heels by not getting something out. The second one (Ambition b/w This Is Zero/Ticking Away) followed shortly after, both on our own Powbeat label.

NR - We signed a one-off singles deal with Demon Records at the tail end of 1980 and did the ‘On The Run’ single. On the back of that we got the full deal with Deram and the album ‘A Thin Red Line’ came out in November ’81… then we split up six months later! (laughs)

AP – It was kind of a whirlwind when you think back now. We actually realised a while ago that we’ve been together longer now than we had the first time but maybe that’s inevitable because we’re less in each other’s pockets.

Getting back together

NR – I was at Tynecastle one day and this guy tapped me on the shoulder and started singing ‘Ticking Away’! It turned out it was a guy called Bryan Chalmers who runs the Citrus Club in Edinburgh. There was a whole series of connections of people who used to go to the football and someone had told Bryan who I was and he’d introduced himself by singing ‘Ticking Away’!

NR - A couple of years later Bryan said that he’d been approached by someone to do a John Peel Night to mark the anniversary of his death. He wanted to get all the bands from Edinburgh who had done a Peel session in the 80s to appear. In the end he got us, the Twinsets, Paul Research from the Scars and William Mysterious from the Rezillos.

NR – We did the gig as a one-off but we had such a blast doing it we kept going, we started rehearsing regularly and then began picking up more gigs.

Recording Forever 22

NR - We started by re-recording some old material, just to see how it sounded and we liked what we heard, so we thought we should try some new stuff and things started to fall into place. Bit by bit the songs appeared.

NR - When we started recorded the album over the course of the 8 or 9 months, grabbing studio time whenever we could between work and family commitments, and as we did so we became to get more and more self critical and professional about how we were doing it. It paid off because I’m very pleased with the way it’s turned out.

NR – The album was scheduled to mastered in January and although we’d finished recording the tracks by the end of last year, we still weren’t 100% happy. ‘How Did You Get It So Wrong?’  was a particularly tricky mix and when we realised we were up against the clock, I spent about four days locked in my shed trying to get it to work. I think we’ve ended up with about seventeen mixes of it! My wife was saying ‘What are you playing at? How is that so different from the one you had six weeks ago?’  But you just start to become absorbed in it and become completely obsessed with trying to get it right. I suppose that’s when you realise you’re taking things a lot more seriously!

AP – It’s a funny thing, like any band, when you record an album you get to the stage where you don’t want to hear it again! But occasionally I’ll stick it on and it sounds fresh.

The songs

AP – ‘Through Different Eyes’ is an old song but one that didn’t make the “Thin Red Line Album” first time around. It seemed to work and to be quite relevant now in terms of its style.

NR – I think it’s evolved into something quite special. When we did it before, it was always a bit leaden, which is probably why we left it off the first album.

AP - ‘When Cole  Was King’ came from Norman’s “Shame” album.

NR- Ally played on the recorded version of that and when I played in the band Shame with Neil and Simon it was always part of the set. When we started playing with TV21again, Ally and I were really rusty in terms of our ability to play. So for the first couple of gigs we played the simplest songs we could play and ‘Cole Was King’ fitted into that mould.

NR - There’s obviously a bunch of new songs but we also put ‘On The Run’ on there too. To be honest, there was a bit of debate as to whether we should include that in the album but again as it never made the album first time around and it is an ever present in the live set, it just seemed appropriate to include it.

AP - First time around, we refused to put it on the album because it had been out as a single. But, given that single probably only sold a couple of thousand copies you start to think that, in the grand scheme of things, how many people have actually heard this? We think that it still has merit and value. It’s an important song to us and I don’t think it feels dated at all.

AP – ‘Look to the Sun’ is one of the best songs to play live. It’s a rock song and it’s not as poppy as some of our older stuff but I think it’s a great song.

NR – I think my favourite two are ‘Forever 22’ and ‘In Another World,’ the latter being off at a different slant from the other material. It was another one that was contentious as to whether it should go on but I think it adds a bit of a contrast to other songs.

Vinyl v CD

AP – It’s quite important that it’s coming out on vinyl. We’ve got a friend who financed the recording and he recently set up his own vinyl plant in Canada. He runs a distribution company an d sees vinyl as being more important than CD at the moment. We weren’t going to bring it out on CD originally but then we realised it’s quite hard if you don’t have CDs to give to people!

How is it different being in TV21 in 2009 compared to 1981?

AP – We just do it as and when we can. Sometimes you get a bit impatient but then you realise we’ve all got jobs and other commitments, so it’s very different from the last time around. We’re much more relaxed about it but if our partners ask us, is this not supposed to be a hobby? And, yes, we’ll say, of course it is. But it can’t ever be, because it’s a creative thing and you naturally start to look slightly ahead. It’s quite a bizarre place to be.

AP – First time around we were so serious about it, we thought it was our future. It was what we always wanted to do. It’s a dream – if you’re not going to be a footballer, you’re going to be in a band. So there’s a huge shift in that sense.

NR – Playing wise it’s not that different but the big difference is the technology. For the demos, we recorded all the bass, drums and vocals in the studio but the guitar parts at home. I did mine in my garden shed and Ally recorded his in his bed-room. It’s amazing to be able to do that and the sound quality you can get from a computer compared to what you used to have to pay thousands for is incredible.

AP – I can’t remember exactly what it cost to do the 5 demos, maybe a few hundred pounds, but when we did our first single in 1980 on eight track recording equipment it cost more then for a far less polished sound.  If you take inflation into account it’s an incredible change.

NR – The whole live circuit’s changed too. When we first started there were loads more places to play in Edinburgh but there were no festivals then other than the like of Reading or Knebworth.

AP – We’d love to be able to play festivals, almost as a thing to tick off as a band. Every year we think maybe this year if we get something together in time. But it looks like we may have we’ve missed it again this year!  2010 perhaps?

Phase 1 - The Big Takeover interview

The following interview is edited from a longer conversation published in a New York magazine, The Big Takeover, Winter 1991, Issue 30. Despite being conducted retrospectively, some eight years after TV21 had split up, this is probably the definitive published account of the first phase of TV21 and is re-published here with the kind permission of the magazine's editor, Jack Rabid, who also conducted the original interview with Norman Rodger.

Back copies of the magazine, featuring the original, full interview can be purchased by visiting the Big Takeover web site at http://bigtakeover.playhear.com/html/main.isx

Norman Rodger - TV21/Shame
Interview with Jack Rabid

This is one of those cases where I urge you to read this interview even if you're not familiar with the artist. Rodger is a very interesting man with things to say about music. His story is also interesting, furthering our efforts to chronicle what happens to bands that don't make it big despite being great and having signed to a major, how they get entangled in the whole wasted web of the record biz and fade into oblivion unjustly. Besides, Scotland's TV21 were brilliant. It's true that few remember them now, but there was a time a decade ago that we looked forward to their import releases and hoped for shows here (they never made it) as much as any of their better remembered contemporaries The Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, Wah, Undertones, etc., many of whose names pop up routinely in the course of this interview.

With the exception of the last single which is ghastly, here's some encouragement to track down their recordings, they've withstood time's test. This dynamite quartet from Edinburgh started in the late '70's and released their first two singles on their own Powbeat label in early 1980; both were produced by ex-Teardrop Explodes' Troy Tate. These 45s led to their signing to Demon Records, who released another great single with similar drive but a better, more unique streamlined sound (and much better production) called "On The Run." As well, former Rezillos and Shake drummer Ali Paterson joined on drums, replacing Colin MacLean; an interesting punk footnote, and a big improvement for the band.

Hopes were high for their debut LP "A Thin Red Line," produced by Ian Broudie (who had been working with the Bunnymen and Teardrops, he now leads Lightning Seeds and still produces), and released in November 1981 on Deram records. Largely they delivered, with a couple of terrific singles taken from it, "Snakes and Ladders" (with a great b-side "Artistic Licence" produced by the Pretenders' duo James Honeyman Scott & Martin Chambers) and the terrific "Something's Wrong," a mighty, powerful pop moment in time. In particular the horns of Dave Hampton stand out, throughout other great songs like "Waiting For the Drop" and "Ideal Way of Life."

As revealed here though, fights with the record company threw the group into disarray and after that horrible last single "All Join Hands" (the direct result of the problems), the band split, so fast it seemed as shame.

Frontman Norman Rodger took a few years off to get involved in social causes and work, spent a few days in The Waterboys on invitation from his old Another Pretty Face mate Mike Scott (who cameos on a few TV21 recordings), and has been recording ever since with his band he calls Shame. The band has included 2 of his 4 TV21 mates, bassist Neil Baldwin and other guitarist Ally Palmer, though Palmer is no longer with them. Through their association with long-time Canadian TV21 fan Iain Walker, Shame toured Canada and released an EP there on Walker's Shake Records in '86, and an LP, "Symi" in 1990. Though not as good as TV21, there are moments on these records that show Rodger still has it in him.

3 days before this interview, Rodger (and Baldwin) finally made their U.S. debut, but under less than desirable circumstances; Shame did a showcase for U.S. major labels at a totally empty Cat Club in New York. The barren atmosphere and need to impress the big wig muck mucks made the show something of a non?starter. But it was quite a flashback to hear Rodger's distinctive thick Scottish voice come through a P.A.

The interview took place in Norman's room at the Consulate Hotel, New York City, 15/2/91. My thanks to Iain Walker (Shame manager) for his help setting this up.

JR: So you've been on your own the last 8 years?

NORMAN: Yeah. When TV21 split, I didn't really want to get back into this. After a year of chasing my tail around record companies, I thought, "That's it, it's not going to happen." I pretty much gave up music, apart from still writing stuff, and doing bits and pieces. I did that brief stint with THE WATERBOYS as a favour to help MIKE SCOTT out but that was only for a few days. I also did a few independent singles with a couple of bands from the North of England, doing production, which was quite good fun

JR: What were those?

NORMAN: One was called THE TIER GARDEN; they were from a place called Barrow-in-Furness, in Northwest England. And from the same town, PERFECT CIRCLE. I did 4 singles with the former, and one with the latter, and another that didn't get released. It was a lot of fun, they were nice guys and they'd all been big TV21 fans. So it was kind of common interest in terms of styles.

JR: Did you play on any of them or just produce them?

NORMAN: I did some backing vocals and bits of keyboards.

Apart from that, I didn't do too much in the first 2 years after the split, until 1985 when I started doing stuff with a band called THE COLLECTOR which then became SHAME.

JR: Did you ever have an offer from Scott to become a permanent Waterboy?

NORMAN: No, that was never part of the deal. When TV21 split and he was putting what became The Waterboys together, he said, "Look I need someone to play bass on a couple of tracks," so I did that on the 1st LP, played a TV show, The Old Grey Whistle Test, and that was all. The whole band at that point were like pick-up musicians, there was no permanent lineup at all.

JR: When did (ex?TV21) ALLY PALMER drop out of SHAME?

NORMAN: Um, eventually about late '87 I think. I think he was feeling that he'd gone about as far as he could go; I guess he felt that his talents lay elsewhere and he basically knocked it on the head, but he plays on 2 songs on our LP.

JR: Which TV21 songs did he contribute the most?

NORMAN: Of the stuff that got released, probably "This is Zero," is the most Ally song. The way we used to work in the early days was that although a lot of the first songs were mine we gave them group credits 'cause we thought it was important at that point. The later material was more of a joint effort, someone would chuck in an idea, a riff or drum track and we'd take it from there, so it was quite a democratic group. But ultimately that was our downfall, because we tried to be too democratic, we had 5 different people trying to write songs, it was just stupid. By the end… well, the "All Join Hands" single kind of summed up the mess we'd got into in terms of direction. It's OK, but it's not what we wanted to be.

JR: A big letdown, both from what preceded it, and in that it ended up being your last record.

NORMAN: Yeah. After our LP came out we had major, major problems with management and with the record company. They signed us basically as a pop band, with stuff like "Playing With Fire" and "Ambition" but by the time they'd signed us we were starting to do the album material and they didn't like it. So from day one we had fights about what the direction of the band should be. After we released the album they said "Look, why don't you spend some time in the studio, come up with some new ideas." Basically we just fucked around for a couple of months in the studio everyday just trying to come up with some ideas. Most of it was just a waste of time, like the B-side of that last single, the classic example. A really good laugh to do but it was a waste of time and money.

JR: Sad way to go out for such a good band, too.

NORMAN: Well we kind of got ourselves back together a bit and I think we realized we were making a complete mess of things, so we stopped pissing around and decided the only way we could do it was to go back on the road and start doing gigs again. Eventually we got the gigs with THE ROLLING STONES, opening for them on the Scottish dates of their 1982 European tour. But by that time it was just too late, it had just gone past the point of no return. We just thought, "Well, this is a good place to stop. Let's call it a halt here." Which is a shame, but there you go...

If we'd held on another month or two, we might have got a deal in another country which would have kept us going. But at that point, in Britain, we were all back on the dole, completely broke, and pretty disillusioned with the way things had gone. I got offered a solo contract with the same label and it seemed like the only way forward. So we split the band up and then they withdrew the offer! (laughs)

JR: You made it to the rest of the European continent, but you never came to America.

NORMAN: Yeah, I think there certainly were plans to bring us over here and certainly we kept pushing to get over. But the record company wouldn't give us the tour support to do it.

JR: Because you had nothing released here.

NORMAN: Yeah. Otherwise, we did a tour of Poland (in late 1981) which at the time was a very odd experience - just prior to marshall law being declared. Solidarity (the trades union) was really at its peak. And it was a wild and very, very strange experience being there. But good looking back, it was a good time to go, though there were some awful points. We toured Holland as well, just before we split. I think Holland was a turning point in many respects. They were the first gigs after that time of all the pissing about in the studio, and I think we realised just how bad things had got, they were pretty terrible gigs, from a playing point of view.

JR: What made Poland strange?

NORMAN: The whole thing. At that point, because of the Solidarity situation, half the country was on strike, and you would go into some towns and you couldn't anything to eat and the next day you'd go somewhere else, and you could get whatever you wanted 'cause they weren't on strike, it was wild.

But actually the strangest thing, now that I think about it, was our first appearance there, which was something of an impromptu session. We arrived at 8:00 at night or something, and the tour organisers ... we were the first British band to go over there for 10 years, and so it was quite an event... anyway, they had this big reception. They toasted us with all these different kinds of vodka, so we got totally blasted, (Jack laughs) just absolutely blasted. And, so where's there to go, what's there to do in Warsaw? So we ended up in this jazz club during the Warsaw International Jazz Festival, it was the only place that was still open that late, and one of the guys who was with our party, (Gary Crowley, now a DJ on Capitol Radio), told somebody who ran the club that we were actually a famous British jazz band and he insisted that he let us up and play. (Jack laughs) At this point we could barely stand, far less play. So they put us on the stage - there was a double bass - Neil had never played a double bass in his life before, and it was a right handed and he's left handed - a keyboard and a guitar and a little sort of drum arrangement, what could we do? we had to sort of swing it. The band before us were shit hot too and there were some serious jazz fans there! So we started up with "It Feels Like It's Starting to Rain" and we're trying to jazz it up, …it was just nonsense. (Jack laughs) Then we thought, "Fuck this" and we started playing "Johnny B. Goode." At this point the place just went into uproar. Some of the people loved it, dancing about and going crazy, and the other people were appalled, walking out or throwing things at us (more laughter). All the musicians started coming onstage unplugging the instruments and unscrewing the drum kit and taking it apart as we were playing. We ended up being thrown out. But it was good fun.

JR: Whose idea was it to use the horns on the songs on the LP, yours or Ian Broudie's? (The producer - now of LIGHTNING SEEDS fame)

NORMAN: That was ours. We already had Dave in the band at that point but Ian did a lot of work on arranging the horns. Looking back it was possibly a mistake as it was too much the current sound, too much part of that whole TEARDROPS, ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN thing and, for me anyway, one of the reasons that I don't really like our album is that Ian tried to make it sound too now - for then, if you see what I mean. Consequently, it got kind of put down as a kind of poor man's TEARDROP EXPLODES.

JR. That's what I was getting at when I asked whose idea it was for the horns on the album. I remember those reviews. I don't agree with them, but the use of horns might have been a bit similar, I think.

NORMAN: That was a shame, 'cause I think some of those songs, like "This is Zero" particularly, "Ideal Way of Life" and probably "Snakes and Ladders" are better than the earlier versions we had, but the rest of the stuff I think we did better as a straight 4 piece.

JR: You made a face the other day when I mentioned how much I admire the other single from that LP, "Something's Wrong."

NORMAN: (shrugs) Yeah, well... I don't really like it, it's OK, but it certainly wasn't one of my favorites. PETE WYLIE from WAH sings on there though it's not on the credits. It was just a complete oversight; we forgot to give him a credit (Jack laughs). He hasn't spoken to us ever again. He just turned up while we were mixing the LP and doing additional backing tracks and vocal overdubs at Rockfield Studios. We'd recorded the LP mostly up in Northern Scotland, and then mixed it at Rockfield in South Wales. Only me and Ali Paterson ended up being there to mix it, no one else wanted to travel all the way down there. PETE WYLIE and various TEARDROPS' people were there, some BUNNYMEN, MOTORHEAD and THE UNDERTONES; it was good fun - the place to be for a couple of weeks. So, anyway, as Pete was there and we needed an extra voice, he said he'd help out. You can't really hear him; he pretty much blends with the other voices.

JR: You toured with The Undertones once?

NORMAN: Yeah. They were great, really nice guys. I wasn't that big a fan of theirs until we did that tour, I used to like the odd single but Ally Palmer was a fanatic before the tour so he was delighted when we got on that one! He watched every gig. They were great live.

JR: One of the reasons I ask you about them was because the first time I saw your first 2 singles in a store I thought they were singles on the Good Vibrations label because of that distinctive fold out sleeve! (Undertones debut 45 was on Good Vibes)

NORMAN: (laughs) Yeah, that's who we ripped it off from, I think 'cause Ally had the original UNDERTONES' single "Teenage Kicks" from that label, and ourselves and ANOTHER PRETTY FACE both thought it was a good idea to do that kind of sleeve. But actually it was a bit of a bummer 'cause we had to fold them all ourselves, in me and Neil's bedroom. There were 5 of us used to live in this one little flat in Edinburgh, it was about this size (of the hotel room) and that was like our office. We used to have to do everything in that room, the floor was littered with little bits of paper, as we updated bios and did sleeves and posters, folding up sleeves and packaging records, mailing them out. It was good fun, actually.

JR: "Shattered By It All" (on 1st single) was a big favorite of mine.

NORMAN: Yeah, I always liked that one. That was one of the first songs we ever wrote, before even "Playing With Fire" (other side). We couldn't make up our minds which was going to be the a?side, which is why we did it that way.

JR: The old "double a?side" way out.

NORMAN: More like cop out. In fact, "Shattered" was the first track to get played on the radio - we were just amazed. In those days all you had to do was go down to London, drop off your singles at Radio 1, 1 for each producer and DJ, and then it would get played 'cause the indie scene was so thriving. We went down on a Friday, hitched down with a bag of records in our bag, went to the BBC and then hitched back again the following day. It was on the radio Monday morning! National radio.

JR: That's like a 6?8 hour drive even when you have your own car! How long did it take to hitchhike?

NORMAN: I don't know, we got really good at it. 8 was about the record I think, sometimes a little longer. Neil and I used to do the dirty work 'cause we were on the dole. So the rest of the group would earn the money and we'd trek off down to London on the motorway.

JR: It seems you started with a great working relationship. What 'caused the split in the end, what soured it all? Apathy?

NORMAN: It wasn't so much we didn't care, although there was certainly a period where we didn't give a toss too much, but it was partly because of personalities. Well, there was kind of like 2 factions at the end I suppose, with Dave and Ali on one side, and Neil and Ally on the other. I was in the middle going back and forth. We just got mixed up. I should have ...or at least somebody should have taken control of the thing, instead of trying to be democratic and see what we could come up with. It didn't work.

JR: Did you do any BBC sessions?

NORMAN: Yep. We did 2 JOHN PEEL sessions, 1 RICHARD SKINNER, 1 KID JENSEN, 1 BBC IN CONCERT, so there's a lot of stuff around. The Skinner session was a good session, we had TROY TATE playing with us on that one, we played as a 5 piece. That was good fun. We also did some stupid jingles for that show as well, so it was sort of like a TV21 show. It was the 4 songs plus he played some records, I think, plus all these silly jingles, which were quite a laugh.

JR: There's a lot of socio?political content in your lyrics.

NORMAN: Yeah. We were drawn more and more into that. One of the reasons we split was we were having those songwriting problems, I was doing more and more political stuff and trying to fit them into the songs. Like "All Join Hands" was about THATCHER and REAGAN but it got so disguised you can't really tell. I'd been trying to come up with this formula that were about things that were on a surface level about human relationships, that were actually political. Basically it was bollocks…

JR: Was there ever a point where you thought TV21 were breaking it, and you wouldn't be in the position you are in now 8 years later?

NORMAN: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Around the time that "Snakes and Ladders" was released, we really thought that was going to do it. I think if that had, if that had come out and done the business, we would have certainly lasted longer and would have been much more successful That was really the start of the end in a sense, 'cause we fell out with the record company badly at that point, because they delayed the release by 6 weeks, after we'd arranged The Undertones tour. So we went on tour with nothing to promote. The single came out after the tour, and people didn't buy it. Then the LP was delayed for 3 months after that. Same old story.

JR: Seems like I hear this all the time.

NORMAN: Yes. So that was the first point we really thought we were going to go. And when the LP came out again we thought we had a chance, and again we had a fight with the record company about choice of singles. We wanted "Ideal Way of Life," they wanted "Something's Wrong" and remixed and edited it against our wishes using Roger Becherian (the Undertones' producer) and it's diabolical. So we had another long protracted fight with them about that. Consequently, the single was again released late, came out too close to Christmas, it disappeared. By that time the writing was on the wall. By the time we came to record "All Join Hands" we were very much at the mercy of the record company. They were effectively saying "Record it our way, with our producer if you want any more money out of us," and we got an extension of the contract for 3 months to release that on their sort of terms, to see if it was a hit, and when it wasn't they dumped us, and that was it.