How have you managed to keep gaining new fans while keeping your diehard supporters? I’m always soft at the last minute at the courthouse and I was thinking, ‘Well, they should be allowed to make a living.’ I could’ve just said, ‘You’re not having anything, so fuck off!’ but I didn’t want to.” We let them use that Oliver/ Dawson Saxon name. I always knew where the songwriting strengths are in the band. Was there ever any doubt that you'd keep the name and continue as Saxon? But when Graham left, he knocked on Steve’s door saying, ‘Let’s get together and fuck these guys over’ and I don’t think Steve wanted anything to do with it.” The thing with Steve is that he went and we didn’t hear much about it. The split with Steve Dawson and then with Graham Oliver was very acrimonious and seemed to drag on for years. The problem with Saxon is that we didn’t have the power of the US dollar to keep us going through.” A lot of people would say that Priest and Maiden and Whitesnake put out a lot of their best stuff between 19. “The early 80s was a golden age for all the bands. Why do you think the band's success tailed off as the 80s came to an end? Then we released the album, and by the time the next single went into the charts, it was huge.” We got a call one Tuesday telling us our single, Wheels Of Steel, had entered the charts at number 35, and if we went Top 30 that week we’d be on Top Of The Pops. “We did a tour with Motörhead before our Wheels Of Steel tour, and we were playing some songs off the album. Your second album, Wheels Of Steel, turned you into one of the biggest bands in the UK. We got bigger gigs and a bigger audience and the first album was making some impact. “Definitely! We were playing working men’s clubs in the North East and Wales and the odd gig at the Marquee if we were lucky, then suddenly it changed. Was it exciting to be part of that new wave of bands? The producer was melody-orientated, so we went more with melodic songs, even though we were tending towards the heavier songs by that point.” We’d left a lot of that style behind by then, but those were the only songs we had. It was a culmination of prog rock style stuff and the Free thing. Together we came up with some great stuff.” The two styles worked really well together. They were fuckin’ useless, actually, but they could play good. We were more proggy, they were more like Free. They lost a guitarist and we lost a drummer, so we got together. “There was this other band, S.O.B, which was the other half, with Steve Dawson and Graham Oliver. Those were the bands that started me off on the long trek of wearing a headband and travelling around in the back of a Transit van.” It was all very riffy, and that’s where we come from. Deep Purple was one of the biggest bands back then. We started writing songs and making demo tapes. From that, I met Paul Quinn and we formed a band, Coast, which was one half of Saxon. That was really the first band I sang in. “The first serious one was The Iron Mad Wilkinson Band. Lovely guys, but they were all eight-foot wide and three-foot tall!” They had all these Polish guys down there. The face was only three foot, so I was too tall. I went down the coal mine to earn some money, but I was too tall. But I got bored of it and I wanted some money to buy instruments, because I was getting into music at that point. I’d make tea and fetch fish and chips, and do floorboards in endless new houses. My job was just banging fuckin’ nails into things. “I was a carpenter when I first left school, an apprentice. What were your career prospects before music became a job? We’re steeped in ritual and a lot of our music is quite ecclesiastical, without necessarily meaning to be.” Metal has obvious parallels with religion. She was a Methodist and my father was a Protestant, Church Of England, but the Methodist stuff was much more singalongy. My mum played the piano and the squeezebox and the church organ. Is that where you got your love of music? There wasn’t really much music around, but my mother was a musician.” As I progressed I got interested in history and that sort of thing, then I got into music. Were you a good student or were you a troublemaker? Your mates were your mates for a long, long time. I was brought up in the 50s and early 60s, playing out and climbing trees, swimming in dams and getting up to mischief, in that small village sense. My father started life as a coal miner, but some huge fucking brick fell out of the ceiling and hurt him, so he moved into textiles and Skelmanthorpe was a textile village. Where did you spend most of your childhood? I only vaguely remember it as we moved when I was four or five.” “I was born in Hunley in January 1951, a little town between the Dales and the Moors.
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