Kershaw on KershawGuitarist March 1987

Nik Kershaw is, without doubt, one of the most musical and inventive guitarists in Britain today. He shies away from the 'Guitar Hero' tag, though, preferring to concentrate on song writing and producing. Neville Marten snatched a couple of hours with him just prior to his first UK tour in nearly two years.

I know you're something of a gadget fiend; have you got any new toys of particular interest?

Well, the new Rockman I suppose, which I think is totally fab and groovy - so good I got two, just in case. Unfortunately I didn't have them for recording but I've got them for live work.

So they just missed the album?

Yeah unfortunately, but there's a bit of old Rockman on it which is totally different. I was surprised at the difference. One - the top end - the general frequency response, it really is good. The old Rockman sort of goes 'oink' at you and you sound very weedy and muffled but this one's got everything in it. It's got much more variety in the sound which is handy if you're recording - I don't use the variety of it that much on stage, but it's the basic sound. I think mainly it's the compression that does it.

But the old one had compression didn't it?

It did, but it was very noisy, very crude. This one's probably just as crude but it's got a roll-off gate on it so it doesn't go 'clunk' at the end. It just rolls the top off so the hiss goes; it's nowhere near as noisy as the old Rockman.

What context do you use it in?

I use it for everything. It's got two setups on it and there are four possible positions on each setup: very dirty, slightly dirty, clean 1 and clean 2. You obviously have them set differently and one's for rhythm and one's for the other stuff. The other good thing about it is that you can have different rhythm volumes. You've got a rhythm switch so you can stay in one mode and just halve the volume, which is kind of handy. So you've got dirty rhythm and clean rhythm. The only problem that I've found with it is with the transmitters on stage. We're having lost of problems with it because some of the frequencies that come out of the

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Rockman are so bloody high that it gets every kind of transmitter noise you can feasibly think of. It goes into the Rockman and comes out with all this rubbish on the top frequencies and you think "What's that?" there's something wrong with your Rockman and you plug a lead into it and it's perfectly alright. We haven't sorted out a way of getting round that yet. We've talked to people that have used them and no one's found a successful way of using the 'clean 2' sound - which is the toppiest sound - with transmitter, which is a real drag. Any track that I'm using rhythm on, I end up going on a lead for.

How do you do that in a live situation?

Well, you have this thing called a guitar roadie (semi-hysterics) which is well-handy. It's something that I take for granted nowadays but which I didn't have a few years ago. No, but it doesn't have to be done in the middle of numbers or anything because I don't actually play that much guitar on stage - it's usually just the odd twiddly bit.

Has the Rockman got rid of the need for amps?

No, not totally. No one's got any amps on stage actually, except the bass player who's got a rig at the side. But I am using the Dean Markley amp in conjunction with the dirty Rockman sound which just thickens it up a bit.

Do you have the valve or hybrid Dean Markley?

It's the all-valve one. It's an instant sound. It's a bit boring after a while unless you're gonna start messing about with your effects and stuff, because there's only one sound that I use with the amp. That's the only criticism I've got with it. But it is instant - you plug it in and there it is which is nice and which is obviously why the Rockman appeals to me as well. It's the compression, that's what it is, because it just makes everything so much easier to play - I don't know why, if it's totally psychological or what.

I always find that it adds a lot of fluidity to your own playing.

Yes Exactly.

Do you use compression that much in the studio?

For guitar, yes. The engineer just slaps some on as a matter of course, without me even asking now. The guitar feels very clumsy to me if it's not compressed because it's so dynamic. There are two sorts of dynamic. There's the volume dynamic, which I find very confusing sometimes for some reason, and the sound dynamic - the envelope of the note, or

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where you've got your hand on the stings or whatever. That's OK. But for recording you need compression to hear things anyway. If you're really subtle about something, you're not going to be able to hear it over a gospel choir or something. During the course of time you just end up doing things that make things easier for you.

How about reverb; do you use that on the take or do you put it on afterwards?

It varies. I mean my engineer always tries to put it on afterwards because it's easier to drop in and out of - oh he of little faith - and that's usually where we do it. But you can get some nice effects by dropping in on reverb - just stopping in the middle of a note, totally dead. There's this glorious guitar and all of a sudden it just chops it off and another note starts. It's kind of weird. I usually end up doing it on my demos because the engineer won't let me do it. It's probably not in the engineer's textbook of good things to do but, like most things with engineering, you can get good effects doing things wrong.

Do you still demo everything first?

Depends if I've got time or not.

Does the old AR man's theory that you can recognise a good song irrespective of the quality of the demo actually hold out, or is it a must to come up with something decent?

Oh, yeah! People like things packaged and presented to them. Also I've started writing for other people now so they've got to have something to listen to.

Can you tell me who?

Yeah, I don't see any reason why not because she might turn it down anyway! I'm supposed to be writing and producing a single for Bonnie Tyler so that could be quite interesting. The demos I've done for her - well, one of them, is very finished. But luckily it's a song that didn't need much on it so it sounds very finished. But you have to be careful when you play demos

to other people because there are so many things that you know are going to happen, that are going to go on it, but how are they supposed to know that.

Or they might hear something totally different to you

Yeah, and then the worst thing is you get in the recording studio and get three quarters of the way through recording it and someone walks in and says 'oh, I didn't think you meant that'. I thought it was going to be something completely different. The other worst thing is doing a really good demo and spending the next two thirds of your life trying to recreate it.

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That was something I had planned to ask you.

Well, that does happen. Not necessarily in my mind, but a lot of the time, someone comes up to you and says 'Well, I preferred the demo; there was something about that demo'. Recording-wise it was probably totally crap with fallout left, right and centre and technically absolute rubbish. But quite often demos have got a certain charm about them but when you get into the studio with all this gear and all this money and all this time, you can totally lose the point after a while. It's very difficult to pinpoint where you've gone wrong, but that's something to learn by. It's very easy to get carried away by the technology - I've done it several times!

But that seems to happen going from a four-track demo to a thirty two-track studio or from a sixteen-track demo to a twenty four-track studio so is it the equipment or simply doing it a second time.

It's partly that. It's partly getting bored with it, which I do very quickly so I want to do something different. But yeah, I find it very difficult trying to get the best out of something keeping on going over it. I'd love to be able to keep things as simple as possible and it's always the philosophy with which I go into the studio. But ninety-nine percent of the time I just cannot resist that next overdub cos I think 'Cor, wouldn't it be nice if I had a counter-melody doing that on the horns' And you bung it all on and its perfectly valid and it all probably works very well in theory, but you just chuck it all together in the stereo image, which is very restrictive in certain ways, and you can't hear anything so you do end up losing the point. So, demos for me are good because at least you've got to think about the arrangement, as opposed to just blindly piling stuff on and seeing what works. You've actually got to think before you put it on tape. If you can keep the arrangement as simple but as effective as possible, that's obviously the ideal thing. Once you've recorded to that stage in the main studio, you've just got to have the sense to know when to stop after that - which is the most difficult thing when producing.

Was that a major problem for you producing your own stuff?

It didn't seem so, at the time. The last album is more complicated than the previous two and we did spend a lot more time recording it, but I don't think it's just because of that. I think it sounds great but I don't know if it could have sounded better if I'd kept it simpler. I mean there are a load of things going on in the tracks that I know were a waste of time; they didn't detract from the finished product but it could have done without them. You know, the odd little hi-hat triplet and the fourteenth harmony of the gospel choir. Just those little things you can save so much time over and, at the same time, you can create a lot more space. The thing is a lot easier to listen to as well - there's no doubt about it. The thing about popular music is, I suppose, to gain access to someone's brain and it's not easy to do it if there's too much going on. It's going to distract people and put them off it. But if it's really simple, it's immediate and will go in there without trying or thinking about it. This is my theory, anyway.

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Complicated stuff only delays it. If pop music lasted long enough people could get into it no matter how complicated it was.

Yeah, it's such a transient and trivial thing - well not trivial, necessarily - but definitely transient and disposable. That's something that you either accept or you have to say 'This is art, and you're going to sit there and listen to it - every little snare drum fill or whatever, because I've spent all this time recording it!'

If you wrote a simple 'three chord basher', which made you very accessible to your audience, would it offend you to use it?

No! Not at all why should it? I mean that's what everybody's striving for - the perfect simple song. No! Please! Tell me what it is!!!

But you do think in fairly complex ways - maybe you don't think you do.

I do tend to try and not do the obvious, which might tend to make people a little wary of it. If there's some other chord I can use, rather than the obvious one, I will usually go to for that, because I find it more satisfying musically. But that's self-indulgence really. It's a funny word 'self-indulgence' because it's like plenty of people have accused me, and lots of other people, of being self-indulgent, but how are you supposed to write music without being self-indulgent? Who would they like you to indulge? Is it them? If you indulge the fans, you're just writing their music, if you indulge the press, it's ridiculous; you should just indulge yourself - that's what music is. You've got to do what satisfies you. There's just no point, other than money, which does rear its ugly head every now and again, but you try to ignore it.

'Wouldn't it be good' which is seen by many people as a 'classic' was fairly straightforward. Do you try to strive for that type of thing again?

You have to take notice of other people's reactions - well, you don't have to take notice of it, but you can't ignore it. I know a lot of people love that song. I can't look at my songs like that because I hate looking back at my own stuff; I can't listen to it. Well, I can - but I don't go out of my way to do it. It surprises me when I listen to it. It surprises me because I never remember it sounding like that because you've played it live for a couple of years as well, so that messes things up cos you play it totally different.

As someone who knew you before your success I was always taken aback at hearing you on the radio or seeing your face on magazine covers - especially at moments when least expecting it. Does that happen to you?

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Not much anymore. It gets you every now and then, when you're not expecting it. Well, it's only when you're not expecting it that it's going to be weird anyway but, when you're in a camera shop in Tokyo or something - that's quite strange.

Did that actually happen?

Yeah! It's funny, and that's when it hits home to you that something you're doing, locked up in a studio in north London or something, has actually travelled that far without you having anything to do with it. You're in this totally strange culture that you know nothing about, and you've got nothing to do with, and all of a sudden that comes over the radio. It does get you every now and then. Some of the new stuff - I was very interested to hear it on the radio, because it was the first time I'd produced and I was interested in how it sounded on the radio and of the bastards never played it (laughs).

Why was that?

They didn't play this last single very much - independent radio played it to death but the BBC didn't. You usually get one that has a fight with the other one. But I thing BBC got very embarrassed about playing the first single to death, and it didn't do anything, and they got a bit shy on this one.

Let's talk about your guitar playing.

Well I don't listen to that much guitar music as such and when I do it's probably someone like Holdsworth, who's up there with the Gods, and you think 'Well how on earth am I supposed to do anything like that.' It doesn't actually inspire me to try and play like that because I cannot imagine playing like that. It's not just a technical thing; it's like having a mind that works like that. I don't have a mind that works like that. I have to be in total control of everything before I start. I hate making an idiot of myself so I don't take any risks. Usually if I play any guitar solos in concert now, they're usually pretty standardised - I might stray a few notes every other night or something - which is pretty boring of me and probably I shouldn't do it. If I'm in the studio I spend hours and hours on guitar solos, piecing them together so everything's nice and perfect. Then you get a geezer like Holdsworth that can do all this stuff totally out of nowhere. He doesn't sort of say ' I'm going to play an E flat' and plan for it and pack his lunch and go off to the studio and play an E flat. He says I'm going to play an E flat and his finger plays an E flat, even though it's just one note in a three-hundred note scale that he's playing in the space of thirteen seconds, or something, I just don't understand a brain like that. So, listening to other guitarists of that quality I don't learn anything. I haven't got the patience like other guitarist have - and like I used to have - to be able to sit down, slow

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the tape down and see what he's doing. And if they're not as good as that I don't want to listen them anyway, so it's useless and nobody's teaching me anything. I need a good old guitar teacher to sit me down and hit me over the head - 'If you don't do this, you're not getting any supper!' But any of the things I've learnt are things I've stumbled across by accident by playing solos - by messing about with little techniques. I mean, ever since Van Halen came out, everyone's been trying to play with two hands which everybody can do and which is really boring, because nobody's done anything with since Van Halen - except Holdsworth

And he won't use it now

No but he wasn't actually playing all the solos and stuff; it was the interesting things he was doing with chords, like playing the chord and resolving it with the other hand. That makes sense, that's music, that's fair enough. And there's one of the magazines - I think it's this one isn't it; yeah it is, where some geezer puts all the dot solos down and I think Keith (Airey) knows him quite well. He's got a lot of Holdsworth solos that Keith's been fretting over, if you'll excuse the expression. I just don't know how anybody works that stuff out - that's brilliant.

It's Phil Hilborne; he really is a good guitarist.

He must be. It's extraordinary because they're right. You can tell when you're playing them and you think 'Oh, that's how he does it.' There are things that Holdsworth's doing on that album - not Metal Fatigue, Road Games, where he's doing stuff that doesn't even sound like a guitar and this geezer figures out how he does it all. There was this violin bit that Keith was doing the other day and that's clever. These people are invaluable that do that, because I haven't got the patience to sit down and do it and, if someone else has, that's great! I mean, Allan Holdsworth's not going to suddenly start giving guitar lessons at five pounds a throw is he? And even if he did I couldn't afford the airfare anyway, if I try and play a solo without using my brain I end up just using the licks that you learnt ten years ago and nobody really wants to hear them again. If I start using my brain I can try and think of tunes to play. Sometimes I just get a rough cassette of the song and bring it home and sing over it - just warble over it. I can then see that this note might be nice in that place and that note might be nice in this place. It can get a bit contrived so sometimes that doesn't work either, so you actually try to play what you've sung…That's good for the technique because you are playing things that aren't natural on the guitar. So, with a combination of those, every now and then you can sit down and have a blow over a solo and all of a sudden you actually do something, which is unexpected. And it's great when that happens. But I always have lots of goes at guitar solos. I usually make sure there are four or five tracks left to do the guitar solo.

What, and then choose one?

Well, I might persevere on one track if it sounds ok. If there are a few god bits we might patch them together but if that sounds a bit too bitty, I might learn it and then play it - which is quite a fun way of doing it. But, basically, my fingers aren't any faster than they were two years ago - which isn't necessarily a bad thing; I mean speed isn't everything.

No, although technique obviously allows you to express yourself more fluidly.

Oh! Definitely. But the thing is that acquiring technique is probably the most boring thing on this planet. It's like learning to play the drums. I've never been so bored as learning rudiments on the drums. It's like playing scales on the guitar; I'm just too impatient for that. I go in and practise my guitar and do some scales and think I should be writing a song - I should be doing this, I should be doing that. So the only time I get to play the guitar is when I'm playing on my own records or when I'm playing live. I never practise.

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You don't play that much guitar for a song writing guitarist.

I just didn't want it to sound like a guitarist's album. I sort of shy away from the fact that I'm not Pat Metheny and I'm going to do a guitar album. So anything sort of halfway in between defeats either object. So I'm trying to think of it as a songwriter and a producer - 'If I wasn't a guitarist, would I have guitar on this bit?' It's trying to do the best for the track and sometimes I have to honestly say 'No'. Sometimes I have to honestly say 'Yes' and sometimes I just fancy playing guitar. I could sit there and blow over all of it, which might be perfectly valid but I don't think it would do my songs any good. If I'd written them on guitar it would be different, but I don't write on guitar. I write on sequencers and drum machine; I write on a recording studio. I usually end up laying more guitar on demos than I do on the finished product because I can't actually be bothered to programme synthesisers and because I can play guitar easier than I can play keyboard. Whereas if you are in a studio you can really think about things and put what you want best in…It's no quantity its quality (laughs). But yeah, I agree, I don't play that much guitar for a guitarist and part of me would like to do that, I must admit. It's fine if you have enough variety to offer people. I've sort of got enough in me for a couple of good solos on an album but after that I start repeating myself terrible - don't show people what you can't do.

Yeah but everybody does, Larry Carlton, Pat Metheny, everyone.

Yeah, I suppose so. It's like, who's that harmonica player, Toots Thielemans. He was on some show and he said 'Never be ashamed of what's easy on your instrument' which is really good advice. But it's something I can't take because it always puts you off if you do something that you feel is really easy - like the normal, common or garden way you play. I suppose you've got to remember that you've played it in your bedroom for years, played it in every solo that nobody ever heard for years, played it live for years, but not many people have actually heard it. But you always forget that, so playing it with any conviction is really difficult, because it's just too easy for you. It just sounds too much like you. It's nice to go into a recording studio and come out sounding like somebody else. It's like going in and having your hair cut and coming out looking like someone else - but you just look like you with a haircut. It's weird! If I do a solo and I do it in one go it might be ok but, if there's nothing that I haven't heard in it, then I have to do it again. That's not to say I don't repeat myself because I do, but I try to keep it to a minimum.I must tell you a story about when I phoned Allan Holdsworth in Los Angeles. It was so embarrassing! I mean, just imagine what it's like to actually meet one of your heroes - and what an anticlimax it was - so embarrassing. I didn't even meet him; I didn't even get that far! I was on quite a big high - we're touring the world, we were in Los Angeles doing the Greek Theatre - anyway, I got this number for Allan Holdsworth and I phoned him up. So! I've actually tracked him down - he was in a studio somewhere practising his SynthAxe. He came to the phone and of course there were the usual embarrassed silence cos I didn't know what the bloody hell to say to him 'I've been a great fan of yours for years etc, etc.' It was ridiculous! But, having got over that, it occurred to me - the horrible truth came to me that he didn't actually know who the hell I was! He'd never heard of me and that totally destroyed me for about 20 minutes. I had to go the toilet and I couldn't come out for about 20 minutes. Terrible, it was! It's weird because, on a different kind of a level, people come up to me and they're in some band that I've never heard of. I now really try to not let on that I've never heard of them and I play along, because I know how much it affects people.

Are you looking forward to the tour, although it will all be over by the time this issue is out?

Well, I'm looking forward to about the third gig, cos you've got over the business of things falling to bits in the first two.

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So terrible things happen, then?

The most worrying thing is the non-human element, like sequencers, because they sometimes have minds of their own. Like. We've been through production rehearsals and a problem occurs. Everything's there and you're doing it and everything's as it's going to be on the night - and that night's like a week away. All these things keep going wrong with sequencer - all these MIDI things. The Yamaha QX1, as well as running certain keyboards, is changing the matrix which patch the MIDI keyboards and is also changing preset on certain keyboards. The QX1 is running the presets of a certain keyboard all the way through a song - it's horrendously complicated. Things were going wrong every now and then and just when you think you've ironed them all out something else happens and it keeps going on like that. At the moment I think we've got everything sussed. It's really silly things. The thing with the QX1 is it's all so tied up; you can't actually see - there's no television screen or anything. So you string all the synths together in a chain but it might be changing the preset on the Prophet 2000 when it should be changing them on something else. The only way that that manifests itself could be that the Prophet 2000 disappears altogether because there's no sound on the preset that it's gone to. So keyboards are the bane of my life at the moment. It's nice to be able to plug a guitar in - kerchannnng - well that's me sorted out! Yeah it's nice to be able to forget all that and get it all working clockwork so you can get on with it and not worry about other people. I've got a lot of confidence in my band and I know they're not going to let me down. Its equipment and things going wrong like that that's always at the back of my mind. When you can stop worrying about that and even worrying about knowing your part… Nobody imagines that anybody's worried about that. I mean you go and see a gig and there he is. He's doing it, he did it on the record and he's doing it now. But believe me, Forgetting words, forgetting what key songs are in, it's unbelievable the things you forget. You just get total blanks and, if you have one on a night, the chances are that the whole night is going to be a disaster. The most annoying thing about it is that you get back stage afterwards and nobody's even noticed (laughs) and you think what's the point? Also, especially with guitar, you've got no knowledge of what's coming out front and you might play a really good solo so in big venues you've got to play in certain way. You've got to play simply and very blatantly as well, because everything else just gets lost. So you've got to do the best under those conditions. So, by the time it gets out front, god knows what it sounds like! When I go and see other people, I look at the guitarist and his fingers are going thirteen to the dozen, really flying about. All the band's going 'WOW, it's amazing' but all you can hear is load of white noise at the top of the rig and you think 'Yeah, I'm sure that was really nice - but I can't actually hear anything.' So that's always at the back of your mind as well. So! You just can't worry about what's out front. You've just got to perform, pretending everything's sounding really good.

It's worrying.

Yeah! Still - a lot of people would like to have my worries

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