WAH & PEACE

Legendary Liverpool loud-mouth and former ligger extraordinaire himself Pete Wylie - The Mighty WAH! Himself - is back from a wilderness of near-fatal injuries, court appearances and cancelled recording contracts with his first new album in a decade. Chris Roberts reports.

Nine years ago, Pete Wylie, who is The Mighty WAH!, was considered hot. Again. He leaned on a railing in Liverpool. It gave way and he fell 20 feet into basement, breaking his back and chestbone. He came to, and a fireman asked him if he knew his name and address. "You should know my fucking name, mate," Wylie quipped.

Then he nearly died.

"I was in hospital flirting and joking with the nurses, I didn't know. And on the fourth day this doctor came up to me and said, 'Well, Mr Wylie, we don't think you're going to die now, ha ha.' And I shrugged, 'OK, ha, ha,' Then he went, 'No, seriously, we thought you were going to die.' Me sternum, when it snapped, missed me heart by half a centimetre. Once that's in your heart, mate, you're dead. That's a big one for your head to take on. And then you realise you were born for a purpose... nah, fuck that. But it does chill me still, when I think about it."

Of all the times you've bounced back, was that the toughest?

"The hardest one, yeah. Physically, I'm not a miracle, but I'm in much better nick than I could or should've been."

Are you jinxed?

"If I am, then I'm the luckiest jinxed person in the world. This is something I've come to realise: everything is concurrent. I have this condition: It's called optimisery."

Any regrets?

"It depends on what day you ask me."

Pete Wylie is on stage in London, for the first time in ages, a week after I interview him. It's another comeback. It's one of the best, and worst, gigs I've seen. It's his entire career in 90-odd minutes. When he plays the songs, even with a band put together in a few days, it's magnificent. He is Scouseteen, the last white bluesman, a powerhouse of wounded soul. He's got it. He is utterly brilliant at what he does, touching heights that few dare dream of. But he doesn't just do this. He elects, not without beer, to shoot the gig in the foot between every glorious song. Emotional lightweights - that is, the kind of people that run the industry in which Wylie is trying to make a living - leave early.

Interminable rambles and rants, longer than the songs, destroy the momentum dissipate the passion. They're very funny: he'd be one of the quickest, most cutting stand-up comics on the circuit if he chose to be. "Get on with it!" someone yells. "One thing I never, ever do, pal," he snipes, "is get on with it."

He's great company, but he doesn't care for conventional mystique. He has no self-censoring switch. This wouldn't matter if he was mediocre. But he's got genius. Listen to the old records. Listen to the new one. Wylie's still big, it's the music industry that got small. He'd defend his hedonism by mentioning Baudelaire, Pollock. They got caned, too! Who said that genius was easy? But when you read poems, look at a painting, you're not distracted every few seconds by the artist taking the rise out of himself, telling the audience, "I confess I'm a prick. I am a prick."

Music needs to flow, to carry you away from self-deprecation and mundane reality. Wylie's music does this. Listen to the records again. There, he isn't embarrassed by his greatness, his instincts, his ambition. He trusts himself. By the end of the gig, I'm drained. By the comedy, the tragedy, the bathos. The thinking too much.

Time and again, for 20 years, Wylie's done this. Taken off. Bombed back down. Icarus with an electric guitar. Even the guitar has a story behind it. Everything to do with Wylie has a story, or 12, behind it. He won't lie down. He won't stand up. He is Zelig when he should be Ziggy. Songs Of Strength And Heartbreak, an album that will burn star-shapes onto your heart, is at last being released. It raises another 20 stories. I hope there are stories ahead of Pete Wylie, I really do. "Heart As Big As Liverpool", not so much a single as a continent, may even be a hit. He deserves it.

But will he let it happen?

"I'd like to tell my new record company I'm usually slicker than this," he barks, onstage. We don't know whether to laugh or cry. This in itself makes him invaluable.

What are they gonna say about him when they tell the story of the blues? "I say to people: this is not an act. I love Kerouac, Sinatra. It should be written across me forehead. I've still got that adolescent, fucked-up, confusion thing. I don't have a choice. I've tried Prozac, it just makes me accept things, which makes me at my worst. When I stopped taking it last year, that's when things started moving again. It isn't that I have that classic 'tears of a clown' thing... I'm happy. I am. But there's this other thing going on at the same time, there's this constant arm wrestling in my head between the dark and the light... One thing I'm good at is getting motivated and motivating others. Encouraging. Yeah, I've hung out with bands in the past, and you can call it ligging, whatever that means... I just like buzzing with other people, I don't care."

After the way the ligging tarnished your 'cred' as an artist, do you have to think twice about going out with mates in bands?

"Nah, mate, I have to think twice before going home..."

You don't so much interview Pete Wylie as just turn up. Even that's optional. "If you wanna go for a walk or anything. I can just turn the tape over when it clicks," he says. We're in a cafe off Portobello Road. He knows everybody. He eyes up the girls, drinks like a fish. I get maybe half a dozen words in. I'm told that's pretty impressive. Wylie talks like Brownian Motion wiggles. Classic Rock'n'Roll anecdotes, philosophical theories, wanton ribaldry, accidental heroism... at one point, I slip in a actual question, and his answer begins: "OK, two things about that... no, three things, OK... no, right, TEN things I could say to that... number one is..." By the time he gets to 10 (and he does), he's taken innumerable sparky, spiteful, spurious and splendid tangents.

I attempt to get The Life Of Wylie out of him chronologically, but when - seriously - it takes him 11 eloquent, enthused minutes to get from Friday, October 1, 1976 ("Eric's, the punk club in Liverpool, opened; we'd spend our whole day in the street doing nothing, but doing it with a purpose") to Monday, 4 October, 1976 ("I started university doing French with Latin and Greek... I was very bright, very fat, very shy kid, before I was in groups... then the confidence grew"), I cave, Wylie's mouth wanders where it will, a force of nature. Sit back. Hold on tight.

"Oh, none of us were cool. Despite later proclamations. At least there was no cool in any sense that'd be understood by anyone outside..."

Wylie emerged in the late Seventies as an obsessive Clash and Bowie fan and one of the Crucial Three, alongside Ian McCulloch and Julian Cope. Can you imagine the ego clashes? They soon split.

"I gave Mac the first copy of this album, partly to say, there you go, I'm not a deadbeat. But also: he's me mate, y'know? For all the things we say about each other, I love him. The worst thing that ever happened was when we all started doing OK, cos the tension thing went, they wanting to be the best in the class thing. I'm not competing with those guys any more. Just with meself. But I still want to be the first in our gang to have a hit this millennium, and all that lark."

The first incarnation on Wah! followed. Then, Wah! Heat. Then, Shambeko! Say Wah! Then, The Mighty Wah! There were truly great singles: "Better Scream", "Seven Minutes To Midnight", "The Story Of The Blues", (which went Top Three), "Hope", "Come Back", "Sinful"... "There isn't one song that I'd totally diss."

The career wilfully avoided any sensible trajectory. Albums rarely coincided with hits. Record companies were fallen out with on a regular basis. Arrogance wrestled with insecurity. Mick Jones, now a friend (he's filming the gig I mention), gave him a Les Paul guitar previously used by The Sex Pistols' Steve Jones. "Oh, cos we'd been in this other band, The Nova Mob - me, Cope, Griff and Budgie - and Gary Numan's big, ugly, fat manager stayed the night and the next day me own guitar had gone... so Mick made Keith Levene of PiL go and get this one, and said, 'Pay me back when you're famous." That's why I kept changing the name of the group. Makes sense. His detectives could never keep up with us.

"Me and Paul Rutherford were big, soft soft fans, used to follow the Clash round. Mick took us under his wing. He specifically said: 'You two, out of hundreds, something's gonna happen to you two.' He got us to form a band called The English Opium Eaters, which lasted about 10 seconds. Then Paul and Ian Broudie carried it on for about two hours..."

Wylie tries not to name drop. He just can't help telling the truth. His Forrest Gump collisions go on. It's irritating how much more talent he has than any of them. "Court Jester" to Big Audio Dynamite, The Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, The Farm, buddies with Caberet Voltaire, the Cocteaus, The Go-Gos, Shack, an affair with a Bananarama...

"Then again, maybe I'm horrible. I do wonder. I might think that I'm acting in a pious and saint-like manner, but people are thinking I'm obnoxious. You don't know.

"Late Seventies, early Eighties, I'd walk into places thinking "Be Travis Bickle." Sadly, it was more Michael Barrymore. But in me head it was Travis, to compensate for me self-consciousness. I remember I was chatting up this girl, and she said: "Me fellas gonna kill you.' I said: 'Where is he? She said: "Oh he's not here, but he's seen the way you walk, and he's gonna burst yer..."

"One thing I hate is frauds.If I fuck up, I fuck up, and I don't give a fuck. I've made what people call mistakes, but I've never faked it. I adore Kevin Rowland in lots of ways. There's that empathy with people who go through the ups and downs. I like guys who take a risk. I am the king of doing the stupid thing. I will continue."

Pete's mobile rings (in vain, of course), allowing me the opportunity to comment on the pin-up girl on the mouthpiece.

"Ah, now, beside the fact that there's some pervy pleasure to be had from speaking into Milla Jovovich's stockinged thighs every time you're on the phone to some boring record-head, I've got Kelly Brook in a bikini inside me Elvis metal cigarette case. She's there to remind me that if I want a go at that, I've got to keep it together, right?There's a bit of carrot and the donkey there. I'm on a Kelly Brook vibe right now. She's there above the telly to remind me to get up off the fuckin' couch. She's in the kitchen to remind me not to have that extra sausage. So I don't become Peteloaf. She's in the hallway to say: where are going? What are you up to? Actually, I think in real life, she'd probably wanna join me... I have to have these things, It's the terrible truth... so, what was I saying? I was probably lyin' anyway, fuck it."

Around three years ago, and until the middle of last year, it seemed that Wylie was finally receive what he readily and rightly calls "justice". He'd hauled himself back from debt, dole and nearly being crippled. A lavish album was recorded for Columbia, with ex-Smiths drummer Mike Joyce, Jim Horn (Spector, Pet Sounds, Thriller) and Mick Jones guesting, and top-of-the-range producers (Mike Hedges, Steve Lironi, Peter Collins), in London and Nashville.

Wylie visited Gracelands (his own Liverpool pad, Disgracelands, is infamous for its explosion-in-a-pop-art-gallery decor) and stole some soil from Elvis' grave, some carpet, and a branch. For this, he was cruelly punished. So late in the day that some rave reviews of the album, including Uncut's, had already run, Columbia decided to pull the plug. Wylie's been dropped before, but now? On the verge of a fairytale resurrection which was gathering feverish word-of-mouth? How did they work that one out? Pete shakes his head, and is quiet for almost half a second.

"I've asked Poirot. I've asked Clouseau. I've asked... loads of other people whose name ends in an 'O' sound. Ringo, De Niro, Jacques Cousteau. They probably know more about it. I've got a collection of theories, no facts. It was a total shock."

His list of possible explanations includes: Sony shareholders complaining that he wasn't exactly Mariah Carey, that his A&R man's previous releases (Kula Shaker, Montrose Avenue) hadn't set the world on fire, that Wylie "goosed the golden goose" at a Sony conference, "in an incident which was funny but tasteless... I was told it'd be cool to be rock'n'roll, but other people's idea of being rock'n'roll is different to mine... you can't piss on the Madonna, the holy relic, which I did... I'll tell you after, it was funny as fuck."

Then there was the court case involving an ex-girlfriend: "I was arrested and convicted for making threatening phone calls. The judge has said I can't say anything about it for another year. But then I will. And, y'know, I was foolish, but I've paid my debt to society..."

The night Sony dropped the bombshell, Wylie was at the tail end of a successful TV and radio promo tour: "I laughed me head off. Cried. Rang Mike Joyce. Laughed. Cried. Went for a meal. Got very, very drunk. Ended up in the hotel restaurant with me dick in a chocolate cake. Yeah, that one's true. Then somebody said: "Right, we're taking you out." So I went for the first time to a lap-dancing club. Don't remember it; I was slaughtered. Woke up the next day with a degree of disbelief and the small matter of looking at me dick and thinking: 'What the hell is that all over it?' So I retired. I left the music business, so I could do some music. Then along came the cavalry."

This being Castle, who've picked up "this massive record, which cost loads of money, for next to nothing. Everyone assumed that it must be me that's the problem, as I'm perceived as a 'difficult' artist. You used to get medals for shouting at record companies; now you get vilified by everyone. But for all the joking around, when people hear the songs, they're spellbound."

To the notion that the anthemic "Heart As Big As Liverpool" (now a fixture at Anfield) will only sell in the red half of Liverpool, Wylie says, "You don't have to be from Manhattan to enjoy 'New York, New York'. Anyway, 'heart' is the key word. I wanna be the new Neil Diamond, nothing wrong with that."

Alex Cox scrapped his holidays to make the video, in which Wylie is "up in Heaven, dead in a white suit, Frankie Vaughan through David Lynch... it will be legendary. At the end of the world, when you're dying, you're not thinking about Portillo, or Edwina Currie, you're thinking about your loves, friends, heroes, family..."

2000 should also see a compilation, joyously entitled 'The Handy Wah! Whole'. Will Pete ever write down his amazing life story?

"I don't know if I could do it in print, cos of the way I talk. Don't know what that means yet. Maybe I've invented a a new art form. The Wylie."

Go on, then: I can't resist this one. Is it true that you asked Mike Tyson out for fight?

"Absolutely, and I had witnesses. I was in New York with Big Audio Dynamite and I bought them a bottle of tequila. Except I drank the whole bottle. Walking through the crowd in this club, there's a booth full of tuxes and evening-wear and sequins: I think, they're not 'rock fans'. Look closer, and Tyson's there. I compute things: go over to my mates and tell them I saw Tyson, or go over to Tyson. So I go up to him, and say: 'Awright, mate, I'm from Liverpool, and we're dead 'ard, I'll have yer out now.' He just went, in that lisp, 'Take the guy away, he's intoxicated!' I got thrown out by bouncers built like shit-houses.

"But I made the front of the New York Times. It's one of the great moments in your life, y'know what I mean? I'll live off that forever. I thought I might get a call off him when he came to England recently, but he's probably still scared. I've got lots of tales, and I love that. I had a night out with Keith Richards. I got Mick Jagger to leave the Wag... When I first read 'The Dice Man', I went a while using the dice as guidance, but there's a point where this big enormous dice just comes down and twats you... fate can just take you anywhere. We might leave here now and I'll get knocked over. Or: I get spotted as the new Marlon Brando. You just don't know."

Pete Wylie: almost too entertaining for his own good. Take his songs of strength and heartbreak seriously.

He walks on.

Songs Of Strength And Heartbreak is out now on When!/Castle

Chris Roberts
Uncut magazine. May 2000