melodylane

MELODY LANE: Hi SPIKE, you ‘re going to celebrate the 30th anniversary of your debut album A BIT OF WHAT YOU FANCY with a tour and you’ll also release a new version of the album that will be re-recorded …Will we see any member of the original line-up on tour?
SPIKE: It would be great, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. When we reformed the band, GUY BAILEY didn’t want to play live anymore and NIGEL MOGG…you know…we are still best friends, but they all want to do different things…It would be great if GUY came and played some show but I doubt …Maybe if we play some show in London he could join us but he just doesn’t want to tour anymore. We did a hell of a lot of a touring in the past years, when we first started the band we were seventeen or eighteen I don’t remember, and it took us six years to get a record deal…And we toured constantly before A BIT OF WHAT YOU FANCY, and then we toured very much for the album and then we recorded BITTER SWEET & TWISTED and we toured again…Before the lockdown happened we played Australia and America and I met NIGEL MOOG, we had great time, such good laughs and I really love him…You know…I still love touring, the rest of the guys don’t love touring that much…It’s a hard life to be on touring, we’ve been through it since we were seventeen, we ‘ve been through it since we were kids; everybody’s got families now, so it’s hard for everybody, I am talking about for the original band members, who’s left of the original band…I guess they could play on it… they could do some guest appearance on the remake of A BIT OF WHAT YOU FANCY, I’m sure it would be wonderful. You could have no idea what it was like to do that first album, it was one of the most incredible times in anybody’s life…

MELODY LANE: Throwback to the eighties…”THE BANG GANG BAND”…Can you tell us anything about this “cult project”?
SPIKE: It was just a single, it was called THE BANG GANG BAND, it was me, NASTY SUICIDE from HANOI ROCKS and THE CHERRY BOMBZ, BERNIE TORME and BUTTZ singer from THE BABYSITTERS…The reason why THE BANG GANG BAND happened, is that we used to play at the MARQUEE club all the time, but MARQUEE club closed at eleven o’clock in the night, there was nowhere for anybody to go, no late rock ‘n’ roll place to go… so what happened was that I opened up a club down at Gossips in SOHO called “BUTTZ ’n’ SPIKE’s”, with my friend BUTTZ,  and it stayed opened at night…and all my friends stayed there drinking until three in the morning… Usually Thursday night we used to jam …So while drinking and playing at night…we started  THE BANG GANG BAND. I remember we used to play HUNGRY LIKE THE WOLF by DURAN DURAN, with BERNIE TORME playing this wonderful  guitar, it sounded like an heavy metal song…

MELODY LANE: 1986..In the beginning, before changing the band name from QUEERBOYS to QUIREBOYS you toured with THE CHERRY BOMBZ the band in which played both HANOI ROCKS guitarists ANDY McCOY and NASTY SUICIDE. HANOI ROCKS have often been cited as in influence by major bands…Did you like them at that time, were you and the other ‘QUEERBOYS’ into their music? 
SPIKE: Yes we toured with THE CHERRY BOMBZ! …of course, with toured with them and you know…when THE CHERRY BOMBZ split-up they asked me to become their singer, after ANITA CHELLAMAH, but obviously I stuck to my guns and stayed with the QUIREBOYS. As for HANOI ROCKS, I’d never heard them. One night I went to MARQUEE CLUB and that was the first time I saw them play and then we became really good friends with MICHAEL MONROE, ANDY and NASTY and we were all friends with JOHNNY THUNDERS…Well you know…me and GUY BAILEY started the QUIREBOYS and the only influence that we had was THE ROLLING STONES; we liked a lot of country music and punk  as well, but we’ve never really been into of what everybody expected us to be into… I’ve never ever own an album by the FACES… FACES,NEW YORK DOLLS or HANOI ROCKS… even if we liked their punk rock side…With MICHAEL MONROE and SAMI YAFFA we are good friends, we have always good laughs. I’ve played harmonica on all QUIREBOYS stuff and MICHAEL passed on to me a few good licks because I was doing everything very simple…We played many shows  together and I remember my son being about ten or eleven and we were playing this big festival and MICHAEL climbed from the stage lights and my son told me “ Dad are you gonna do that?”…and I said “No!…Are you crazy?!”..So funny! They have a great band… and STEVE CONTE on guitar … I’m happy they are doing really well.

MELODY LANE: We’ve had a couple of great interviews with STEVE CONTE in the years. In my opinion he’s such a great guitar player and songwriter…and he’s got Italian roots…  
SPIKE: Did he tell you about the bottle?

MELODY LANE: The bottle?
SPIKE: Yeah…Another funny story…We recorded our first album in Los Angeles, CHEROKEE STUDIOS and COMPANY OF WOLVES, STEVE CONTE’s band, were recording there as well…QUIREBOYS sang backup vocals on one of their songs…And at the end of the song you can hear a bottle being crushed. That’s me smashing a bottle of champagne on the top of the piano, at the end of their song …But we were drunk and it was empty… We were young ah ah ah!

MELODY LANE: In the past you recorded a couple of great covers with legendary POISON guitarist C.C.DeVille. HEY, GOOD LOOKIN’ for the SON IN LAW movie-soundtrack and  STAY WITH ME for a ROD STEWART TRIBUTE…Tell us something about C.C…It is known that his life was a bit ‘wild’… 
SPIKE: That’s way I ended up living with him for three months ah ah ah!!! I lived with him in his house on the Hollywood hills… Well… C.C. has always been a very good friend of mine, I lived with him for three months at one point. He asked me to do this movie thing… this song called “HEY, GOOD LOOKING” a cover from HANK WILLIAMS…  C.C. ‘s such a great guitarist, he loves STEVE MARRIOT and he loves English music and when he played with me he played in a completely different way from how he played in POISON…We played CHUCK BERRY all night.He’s brilliant…He offered me to join his band and I did this movie soundtrack with him, but you know…at that time he was out of POISON and offered me to join him and start a new band but in no way I was gonna leave THE QUIREBOYS…THE QUIREBOYS ‘ve always been my band like POISON his band… but we are still very good friends.

MELODY LANE:  From guitars to drums…on A BIT OF WHAT YOU FANCY you had the great IAN WALLACE on drums…He played in KING CRIMSON…
SPIKE:  Yes and he played with BOB DYLAN and Traveling Wilburys. We fired our drummer because he was not good enough, after he’d played with us for ages, and the  first day we played live with IAN WALLACE we realized what a good band we had. He was a very simple drummer but brilliant, that’s what THE QUIREBOYS needed…We’ve changed so many drummers because it’s so difficult to play in THE QUIREBOYS because “A LOT OF PEOPLE CAN ROCK BUT A LOT OF PEOPLE CAN’T ROLL!”…IAN WALLACE told me that!  He knew how to play English rock because he was English as well… It’s like when you play pool: if you play with somebody that’s really shit…you play shit, but if you play pool with somebody who’s really good then you play better…IAN WALLACE was probably the greatest drummer I have ever played with. The QUIREBOYS have had so many drummers over the years, I think we’ve had more drummers than every other band...but IAN ‘s absolutely one of the best, he’s sadly missed. DON HENLEY, from EAGLES, is one of the greatest drummers in the world right? And he could have anybody he wanted and IAN WALLACE was his favorite drummer! IAN played on DON HENLEY’s albums and with his live band…Unfortunately IAN couldn’t come in tour with us and it was such a pity; he taught us so much…I learnt so much from him…

MELODY LANE: Is it true that you auditioned for SLASH’s SNAKEPIT… for their first album?
SPIKE:  It’s true...We’re friends… Slash asked me to sing in his project and then he was planning to tour for the album. I went to Los Angeles, I sang on a few  demos and I wrote some songs with him…but that was a rough period in my life: I moved to Canada, I was becoming a dad and you know…With QUIREBOYS we had been touring constantly for seven or  eight years  and when our second album was released we kept on touring, we didn’t  stop… and  we were worn out; I didn’t want to tour again, I needed some time off… Remember I met Slash years later and he said “You’re the only one who ever turned me down!”

MELODY LANE: You played several shows with GUNS’N’ROSES in the years… you opened for GUNS ‘N’ ROSES a legendary concert in London in 1987, during the APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION tour…And then Rolling Stones and even David Bowie…You played very big shows…
SPIKE: Oh yes at the HAMMERSMITH ODEON…We opened for GUNS ‘N’ ROSES and FASTER PUSSYCAT…TAMIE DOWN, from FASTER PUSSYCAT, is still one of my oldest friends!...and you know… a few months ago on our American tour, before the lockdown, we were having dinner and talked about that concert…I just said to TAMIE “ Hey, do you remember that night when we played  HAMMERSMITH ODEON?...You lent me your radio mic!” and he went “Did I?” And I said “ Yeah and it was covered in fuckin’ lipstick you big poof!...And he said “Oh my god I still wear lipstick!”…We still have a good laugh about that when we meet…And with Bowie…it was memorable…We played in Germany and his fans were not really interested in our music, they stood there still in silence…so I told them “ it’s not QUIREBOYS’  fault you lost two world wars and one WORLD CUP”…and we got out great after that!

MELODY LANE: I’d like to talk about your solo album 100% PURE FRANKIE MILLER, I love it…And the cover by TYLA is just amazing… 
SPIKE:  Isn’t it a beautiful cover? I speak to TYLA every single day…he lives in Edinburgh, he’s wonderful, he’s one of my oldest friends,I do everything for him and he does everything for me…he keeps me alive with his humor! 

MELODY LANE: Such a great band THE DOGS D’AMOUR…
SPIKE: You know… BAM ROSS their drummer joined us for our last tour in America and Australia…He played drums for THE QUIREBOYS and he was so great…he’s brilliant! And in the past, some years ago, BAM’s wife SHARE, she played bass for THE QUIREBOYS…that’s funny. You know…SHARE ‘s from VIXEN , and now she plays also in DOWN’N’OUTZ  with JOE ELLIOT and the other members of QUIREBOYS.

MELODY LANE: Tell us something about your other friends involved in 100% PURE FRANKIE MILLER and why did you decide to record this tribute…
SPIKE: …Several friends played on it, BONNY TYLER, SIMON KIRKE and ANDY FRASER and it was the first time they played together since the FREE and then IAN HUNTER on the piano and RON WOOD from the ROLLING STONES…and I’m trying to have KEITH RICHARDS on my next solo album, that would be cool!...In one of my first solo album that’s called  ‘IT IS A TREAT TO BE ALIVE’  I recorded a FRANKIE MILLER’s cover titled ‘WHEN I'M AWAY FROM YOU’…then ANNETTE MILLER, FRANKIE’s wife, she would come to QUIREBOYS shows with FRANKIE, he was on a wheel-chair because he suffered this terrible brain hemorrhage …We got to become really good friends and one day she said to us ‘Look, I’ve got so many songs from FRANKIE that nobody’s ever heard”. So she sent me 7 CDs, something like 300 songs, that I had to go through…some songs were finished, some songs had only one verse or a chorus. So I worked on those songs and you know…I could communicate with FRANKIE through his wife, somehow they communicate with each other, so he was involved… and I recorded a sort of tribute album not with the FRANKIE’s most famous songs but with the unreleased ones he had written until he had his accident; and there were so many people, also famous people, asking me to play on it, to be part of it…but the whole idea of my FRANKIE MILLER album was that you had to be a friend of FRANKIE MILLER to play on it. Everybody that played on my album knew FRANKIE, they were all really good friends of his. So It was a sort of a tribute album with his songs that nobody had ever heard before. It was an amazing thing to do and I’ll love to do it again. On my next album, that’s going to be released very soon,  I’m going to do a few more songs by FRANKIE even if not a whole FRANKIE MILLER album…and  the first single is going to be RAINING WHISKY. Unfortunately, two weeks before the SWEDEN ROCK FESTIVAL, ANDY FRASER died … and it was so sad because it was the first time that FRASER and KIRKE would have played live together in 40 years…

MELODY LANE: Spike thank you very much for your time and for these great rock stories...A message to our followers and readers...
SPIKE: Thank you guys! Hope to see you soon out there! We'll have a pint!