Interview date: 05.10.2007
Neil Leyton is a spirited young guy whose guiding principle is to live his own mission. The first axiom of his sermon goes: “Be who you are and don’t let anyone else dictate the rules of the game of your life and the purpose of your life.” He’s stopped in Slovenia for the second time this year already, but this time as a stripped-down version of the hard-hitting trio of Chris McDougall (bass), Tommie Riot (drums) and Neil Leyton (vocals, guitar). Before the show, the independent Canadian punk rocker took almost three quarters of an hour for a pleasant chat in the refreshing premises of the famous Kamnik underground mecca Kotolovnica. As the photos with their snapshots of the moment already show, with all-out promotion of Slovenian beer during the interview in the style of a battle between the reds (RockLine) and the green chess pieces (Neil Leyton trio), you get spontaneous dialogue, laughter, curious little girls, in short, a genuine rock n’ roll atmosphere. We kicked things off with a head-on collision of the greens and the reds…
RockLine: Cheers!
Neil: Cheers!
RockLine: You’re obviously in love with Slovenia, this is already your second visit this year?
Neil: It’s beautiful here. Altogether this is already my fourth visit to you guys.
RockLine: What are your impressions of playing here?
Neil: It’s always great. I love playing here, in front of your crowds. People here know how to appreciate music. They know how to listen to music, to songs, and they know how to connect with the energy during our shows, they fall right into the ambience. I like that, people here still know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. In many places around the world, people come to a gig because somebody else told them to go to a gig and not because they actually wanted to, and then they don’t listen to the music at the shows at all. But here people really come to listen to the music, and that’s good.
RockLine: How did it come about that you’re playing five gigs in a row here in our little country? That’s a phenomenon of its own. How did you get in touch to make this mini tour happen?
Neil: I’d talked with Izak (Izak košir, the gig organizer, editor’s note.) a few times before about wanting to do more shows together in Slovenia. We’d never done five shows in a row. Three at most, plus an acoustic show.
RockLine: Whoa, that’s not exactly small either. So live shows are one of your main weapons for enlightening the masses?
Neil: I’m constantly on stage. At the end of this month I’m playing six acoustic shows in Italy, then comes a 14-day tour of Germany and the Netherlands. The original, first idea for Slovenia was to do just three shows, at the end of this October. Then Dragan and The Tide showed up, Izak was there, and they suggested we do this tour together with The Tide. And that’s how it happened. When it’s over I go back to London for a week, then on to Sweden to pick up Tommie (Tommie Riot, drummer of the Swedish band The Ghosts, who has been accompanying Leyton at shows quite often lately, editor’s note.) and straight back on the road to Italy again.
RockLine: Very exciting. I see you’re really never bored…
Neil: I honestly love traveling, discovering new countries, new faces, new people. On top of that, I work really hard at keeping in touch with the agencies that book gigs, so I have constant gigging on stages guaranteed throughout the year.
RockLine: What’s your basic artistic message? What do you want to present and bring closer to people, to the masses, through the prism of how you see music?
Neil: I think there are several important messages here. There are lots of smaller important things that add up and flow together into the basic portrait of my musical vision. Okay, if I go into a detailed analysis, I can say with some pride that the basic principle I work by lets me do the things I want to do. That gives me complete control over my musical ideology. I find that today people often choose the ideology of power. Many people use that power to control their own security, the feeling of power gives them security. Power becomes the main goal in their lives. But there are others too, who try to stay honest with themselves, who live themselves, who don’t play games and don’t pretend and don’t become corrupted and rotten. They don’t submit and they live the principle of their basic purpose. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re a garbage collector, a doctor or an artist, as long as you’re honest with yourself and you listen to your conscience. One of the main messages young people should hold on to is to listen to themselves, they should follow that much more than listening to teachers, parents or anybody else, the media too, say. But that’s not easy. Living your principle. It’s a thorny path, one you can steer well clear of, but then you lose yourself and somebody else runs the control over your actions.
RockLine: Your latest release “Bertrayal of Yourself” is about a year old now. Are you already preparing material for a new album?
Neil: Yes. The album is already half prepared. What we’ve done regarding the upcoming release is that we put an initiative on the official website for our fans, so they can become active supporters in the making and release of the new record. That means we can pull it off without a record label. We offered a kind of subscription package for our fans, and when they order the album through our site they get, at a ridiculously low price, besides the new album also versions of the raw demo recordings, a live DVD, a live CD, then extra special material, the original handwritten lyrics for the new record, a detailed explanation of the concept behind the album, the original chords to the songs,… That way we make sure we cover the costs of recording, live shows, preparing demo recordings, video footage. So the album will be finished this December. The raw mixes are already done, the recording is happening in Sweden, and I’m counting on the album coming out next spring.
RockLine: That’s an insanely good idea. So you run your whole management policy completely independently, all on your own!
Neil: Yeah. What matters is that you don’t lose control over your copyrights and your original authorial material that’s on the official releases, so control over your work, over your art. I think artists today should use labels in the music business more as help with distributing the records themselves. Even if they offer you loads of money to make a record the way they want, labels I mean, I’m not interested. There are lots of sad stories about the ends of very talented young bands who drowned, in the sense of losing their own creative identity, by signing contracts with the big labels. I build on a loyal base of sincere fans, so I stick to playing small clubs, for a handful of people you know won’t leave you hanging. That’s fun. And I don’t need power and I don’t need a big name. Things are really nice when you have control over what you do. Because what happens is that once you lose that control, you become addicted to something somebody else is offering you, tied to it, dependent on it, and so you submit to somebody else who dictates how you as an artist will develop, express yourself…
RockLine: Neil, tell me, what are your roots?
Neil: You mean musically?
RockLine: Yes.
Neil: I was born in Lisbon and as a kid I grew up on my mom’s record collection. Then came the move to Canada. I became a pacifist,… Well, my interest in music was first caught by Elvis Presley, and the first record I bought with my own money was Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders Form Mars by David Bowie. That was in the second half of the eighties. Back then the music on the radio wasn’t really my thing. With my love of music I was always in the seventies. The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, T.Rex, and I didn’t care for anything from the eighties, right up until Guns N’ Roses put out their first album. And from reading interviews with them, from Izzy Stradlin’s words, I learned, you know, I have more of a bookish way of memorizing things, that’s how I got to know Hanoi Rocks, New York Dolls, and so on… So from reading interviews with musicians I love. Yeah, basically I grew up on retro music. In the nineties I listened to a fair bit of Britpop like Suede, Manic Street Preachers… Otherwise I was always drawn to older bands like MC5, Iggy Pop, The Stooges, and that shows not only when you listen to my music but also at the shows, in the stage performance…
RockLine: So it’s quite natural for you, as a Canadian, to aim for connections in the music business with Europe. For some time now you’ve been actively and successfully working with the band The Ghosts from Denmark and the like…
Neil: Actually The Ghosts are from Sweden
RockLine: Oh, sorry…
Neil: No worries. Once in Stockholm, at a show by The Mission, I was talking with a girl who swore up and down that Copenhagen is the capital of Sweden. Anyway, it’s true. I feel much more at home in Europe than anywhere else. In Canada the market is dominated by the big labels, it’s very hard for an independent band (an indie rock band, editor’s note) to break through in Canada, while at the same time the market in Europe is still much more open to different musical challenges, although that differs from country to country in Europe too. But generally speaking, there’s a chance for independent bands to break through in Europe, which isn’t possible in Canada. Breaking through in the sense that you’re the one setting the rules of the game.
RockLine: So you’re never tempted by a rich contract offer. You stay modest, earn just enough to get by and that’s it?
Neil: Yes. Like I said. The trick is doing what you want to do. By the way, taxes in London are astronomical, so let’s not go on about money…. At the same time, the music industry will put money into, say, recording songs for a film or a TV show, which would bring you enough to have a whole year’s living costs in London paid for, but I turn that down. It’s insane. Where does all that money go, while people elsewhere in the world are starving.
RockLine: As a musician, where are you headed next, is there anything you’d still like to achieve that you haven’t yet?
Neil: Heh, I feel like I’ve only just started my career. I’ve been in the music business for 10 years. I spent the first five years in Canada, in a band. We were known in local circles. But when our story ended and I started my solo career, that meant a completely new beginning for me. I’d like to be on tour constantly, play live as much as possible, finish the new record, a new rock n’ roll record, I’m also helping produce other artists’ albums, I’m planning to release covers of Lee Hazlewood’s acoustic material,… That’s more just for my own enjoyment. But generally I want to play as much as I can and stay on tour.
RockLine: Are you happy with these two comrades sitting next to you right now?
Neil: I’m very, very, very happy.
RockLine: They’ve been completely silent this whole conversation. Don’t they want to say anything?
Neil: You know, honestly, I feel kind of blessed, not in a religious sense, how should I put it…happy, that as a solo artist from Canada I came into contact with both Chris and Tommie, kept that contact, and that I work this way with the other guys too, who constantly back me at shows. Both Tommie, who plays with the band in Sweden – The Ghosts, and Chris with the London outfit White Russians, are accomplished musicians. And it just so happened that these guys are roaming around on tour with me. I’m honored, but at the same time sometimes I can’t quite wrap my head around it all, that I got such a lucky turn of circumstances. They actually want to be here, now, they enjoy the work, everything between us is going great.
Chris: Neil is a lovely guy. I didn’t decide to go on tour with him in the sense of, okay, somebody’s going on tour, I’ll go along to spice up my life, and so on… but because I truly love the music Neil writes. I’m happy too, to be part of this, to be able to play Neil’s songs live.
Neil: This is barely Chris’s fourth show with us. This current tour is also the first of my career that we’re doing as a trio. With The Ghosts there are usually six or four of us in the lineup on stage. It’s our first time as a trio and my fingers are shaking a little at the thought that I’ll have to pick up a guitar again before the show, because usually I just sing. That’s a big challenge for me again right now.
RockLine: What can we expect from Neil Leyton at tonight’s show?
Neil:Above all spontaneity and expression in a completely different sonic way compared to the studio material on the albums. On stage something unpredictable generally always happens, which is just as it should be, because that way the whole thing veers off in its own direction. It’s about sharp, honest communication between us, where we constantly feed off each other’s ideas.
RockLine: How much does the audience of the old continent differ from the American one?
Neil: A lot. I love playing around Europe, because people here are open to different musical genres, while America, in that respect, is sadly far too limited. In Europe people don’t care about the whole media circus that increasingly seems like a necessary companion to every performer, since people mostly appreciate good music. And above all they hear it with their hearts!
RockLine: So the rest of the year is going to be properly hot, European-style?
Neil:Definitely! Italy, Germany, the Netherlands are waiting for us, even a short stop in Stockholm, and in November a visit to Varaždin in Croatia too. Until Christmas we’ll be working on production of the new record, which means it comes out sometime early next year. And then quickly off on another world tour (laughs)!
RockLine: One last message to RockLine readers?
Neil:Watch out for Americanization. Today I quickly visited one of your shopping centers on the edge of Ljubljana, and the sight of the flood of big-capital corporations sadly reminded me strongly of the situation in the West.
Tommie: In Sweden it’s sadly not much better!
Neil:People, be who you are, don’t let yourselves be led.
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