Interview with Mike Rudd of Mike Rudd’s 1st Base – The Fringe Seriesamnplify_writer2018-11-25T13:14:20+11:00
Project Description
Interview with Mike Rudd of Mike Rudd’s 1st Base
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Mike Rudd // The Fringe Adelaide 2018
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Perhaps best known for his 1971 number one hit, I’ll Be Gone (Someday I’ll Have Money), Mike Rudd of Spectrum fame, brings his trio Mike Rudd’s 1st Base to The Adelaide Fringe for an intimate acoustic experience. The show titled, Life After Life, sees Rudd together with George Butrumlis and Jeremy Alsop to bring audiences a re-imagined selection of Rudd’s repertoire, emphasising the reinvention and renewal that has taken place throughout his career. Mike Rudd recently chatted with AMNplify about Life After Life, the music industry, his musical influences and more!
So, you’re here for the Adelaide Fringe with your show, Life After Life, what’s the main concept behind this?
Well, every show has to have a title, and the Fringe demands it so, I just drew Life After Life out of the air but in many respects it describes what the band is; which is an acoustic version of what I used to play as a Rock n Roll band, and occasionally still do. So, that transition, we’ve called Life After Life.
Well you’ve already answered my second question with that really which is, how did you come up with this idea?
Yes well actually, if I go to the idea of putting together a band with piano accordion and upright acoustic bass and I’m playing nylon string, it’s just something that I feel I’d like to do. And the songs that I choose for the show work really well as acoustic versions and people get to here the lyrics properly for the first time.
That’s always nice….
Well, it could be a good thing or a bad thing! (Laughs)
So, what I’ve noticed so far with each Fringe venue this year, they seem to have an individual theme. What I’ve picked up from the German Club after seeing their programming is with the ‘Concert Series’ it seems that they’ve gone down the route of nostalgia and the re imagining of previous classics. So what can your audience expect from your show?
Well, they can expect some stuff they’ve heard. Well my level of fame is restricted to one big hit basically so, they’ll hear that, in about three different forms! (Laughs) And the rest of the stuff comes from albums in the past but there’s also some new stuff as well. A little bit of new stuff, not too challenging! So, it goes from Spectrum, The Indelible Murtceps, Ariel and beyond!
So a good range then! In regards to your newer work, what have you got planned for your music, post Fringe?
Well, this particular outfit has not recorded so far, so that should be an ambition of ours, to record some of the newer songs that remain unrecorded. So I think that’s what I’ll be doing post Fringe, recording what is now 1st Base but will be The Mike Rudd Trio from hence forth. Just advertising that there folks! (Laughs).
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Mike Rudd
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So,I’ll Be Gonewas released in 1971, what was is it like breaking into the music industry back then and can you see any differences to it now?
Well, I don’t know a lot about the music scene now, and I didn’t know much about it then either! But it was a thrill to hear our song on the radio first, that was fantastic. There was actually a six month hiatus between recording it and it being played on radio because there was, they call it a radio strike, where radio refused to play songs from overseas based record companies because they weren’t prepared to pay a fee every time one of the tracks of their label were played. So there was a six month hiatus and at the end of that we’d quite forgotten that we’d recorded it, and then we were in Sydney and we heard it on radio there, and we went ‘Oh Okay! That’s our song!’ And we were thrilled! It wasn’t a quick rise up the charts at all, it took quite some time, and we were one of the first bands to have a video clip, although it wasn’t actually a video clip to start off with, it was really a film clip. We thought possibly it would be played in film theatres or drive ins, which were still going in those days! (Laughs) But then it was transferred to video and sort of became, along with Daddy Cool, one of the first music clips to be played around Australia. I’m sure that actually helped the progress of the record, but it sort of went up state by state, with a national number one for one week!
So, throughout your career, who have been your biggest musical influences and why do you think they have impacted you/your career?
When I started playing it was The Beatles basically, and in fact I used to do quite a few Beatles’ covers in those days, and then The Rolling Stones and then as the scene diversified we kind of found our direction was going more along the bluesy path. There was a band called The Pretty Things who weren’t as big as The Rolling Stones but there was a connection with The Rolling Stones: They did a similar sort of thing and while we were in New Zealand we were heavily influenced by them. They toured New Zealand and got thrown out because they caused such a sensation, but yes we went along to see them play and we did quite a few Pretty Things numbers ourselves and thought ‘We’re sort of up on the same level at least as these guys.’ So we had a residency, and didn’t notice it as a residency in those days, which we had for about a couple of years and our audience sort of expected us to do anything and we did but when we came to Australia we decided we had to narrow down our focus, so it became a toss up between blues music or soul music and the band split up! Bugger me! (Laughs)
So these influences, as you mentioned, likeThe Beatles,The Rolling StonesandThe Pretty Things, so in turn they did help you and influence your sound as artists would you say?
Yeah I suppose so. I think, I mean I saw all those bands live so yes I had, the stage presentation, the amplification and so forth was in its infancy; I never had fold back right up until 1973 when Spectrum ended. I never used fold back because we just thought that was luxury! Fold back?! Luxury!! (laughs)
Well then just for a bit of fun for our last question, if you had to listen to one song on repeat, and only one song what would it be?
Oh crikey!
Bit of a hard one?
It is hard! Look I would suspect it would be classical, I’m not going to nominate. Oh I will nominate, because I’ve only heard a fragment of it once which is the Idyll for Strings by Janacek. So I’d like to hear it again!
Well thank you so much for speaking with me and it was very nice meeting you!