Mathew Priest, Dodgy's drummer talks to eFestivals

eFestivals rang up Mathew Priest drummer with reformed favouritesDodgy to speak to him about the trio reforming, that youTube Ringo Starr skit, writing new songs with Zeitgeist, playing GuilFest and more.

Is it true that you all liked playing festivals so much, you decided to reform Dodgy to play festivals again?
Well, when Dodgy were going in the mid-nineties there were only four major festivals, Phoenix – which has since been shut down, Glastonbury, Reading, and T in the Park. Since we split up in 1997/8 loads of festivals have sprung up. So, we're missing out on the action there. There's so many festivals now it's ridiculous, we always used to love a good festival, Glastonbury was always our heartland, the place where we cut our teeth, we played there six or seven times in the nineties.

But, that's not the main reason at all, but we do love playing festivals, and that's one of the benefits of being back together.

You did a YouTube response to Ringo's statement have you had much tat?



(laughs) What I didn't do was put my address on there, but I've had quite a few messages from people saying give us your address and I'll send you some tat.

That's bizarre that thing, because I understand completely where he's coming from. He's had forty five years of being one of the most famous people in the world, and it's not normal people who come up to you in the street. The normal people give you a wide berth, it's usually the people who are a bit annoying, and a couple of the nutters, and the people who are a bit delusional, those are the people that tend to come up to you when you're famous. When you've had forty five years of that, I think you get a bit fed up. I think one of the other things with Ringo, is that he's had this reputation since The Beatles of being this jovial joker. So whenever you see him being serious, it's always such a shock.

But he didn't do it the best way possible, all that peace and love nonsense. But at the end of the day, he's in his sixties, he's had enough, he wants a quiet life. But, then again he did have an album out earlier in the year that he wanted to promote, you can't have it both ways.

I'd never done it (YouTube) before, I saw it in the morning, it came to me that I'd do something, and it was uploaded in 15 minutes from me doing it, to being on you tube. Within 24 hours, over 400 people had viewed it. I thought, 'bloody hell, this is great, it's better than getting a song out there.' Now, it's over 3,000 people have seen it, it's just ridiculous, I think now if we want to get a song out we need to get a little clip on YouTube.

What's the band up to now?
We've been touring, since the tour that we did in March, we realised, that the chemistry was still there for the three of us, and we had a lot of unfinished business. Everyone was rather shocked when we did split up 10 years ago. Everyone thought, hang on they're at their peak here, they're writing better stuff. We took a 10 year break and found that the buzz and the chemistry were still there so we carried on writing throughout the summer.

We did some recording in September, and we've got these two new songs, the first fruits of our reunion, 'Down In The Flood' and 'Forgive Me', they're both phenomenal tracks, we're quite surprised how good they are. 'Down In The Flood' has been getting radio play and it hasn't even got a release date yet.

Was 'Down In The Flood' based on the weather last summer?
Bizarrely, Nigel lives near Evesham, in Worcestershire, and in the flooding around spring earlier this year, around Tewkesbury, he was actually cut off from his family and his home for a night. He had to stay in some village hall somewhere because he was cut off, and Nigel, being the way he is a songwriter, started thinking and came up with the title. Then we got together and started writing it.

It's taken on bigger proportions now, in the sense that it's about all of us, stuck in this flood of the credit crunch, in this horrible situation that's not our doing, and everyone's got to club together, and work together if we're going to get out of it. Some of the choruses we sing towards the end, like “It always takes the bad times to bring out the good” all bizarrely pre-empted the whole Obama thing.

Sometimes you can write a song that's a nice little happy song, and sometimes you can write a song that's got Zeitgeist, and we fell this song has Zeitgeist, it's hitting the button.

More bizarre still, the other Sunday, Nigel got caught in the flood again, he was driving home, and the fire service had to drag his car out of a flooded road, whilst he was sat on the roof. He was sat on the roof for an hour and a half, it actually hit the BBC news. I have told him one is bad luck, two is stupid, so I think he should move.

I last saw you at GuilFest when you played the main stage, and the Unison tent, what made you decide to play the Unison tent?
Oh yeah, yeah, we were asked. We've always been very strong with our beliefs, we've never hidden away from saying what we feel. Right from the start we were heavily involved with the dockers in Liverpool. There's a classic story that when 'Good Enough' our biggest hit, entered the charts at number four, instead of hanging around in England to bask in the glory of a top five hit, we decided to go to Bosnia, and do some work over there, playing some gigs for free.

We've always tried to support causes that we believe in, we strongly feel that it's a bit of our responsibility to do that. Unison, not to get too strongly into the strikes or anything like that, we just think the health care workers and people who work in hospitals and all those kind of people, they're the people who get shat on a lot of time. Any way that we can support the nurses, and people like that, a lot of whom are on the minimum wage, then we'll stand up and do what we can.

It's always been part of the music we love, whether it be folk music, or Crosby, Stills, and Nash or Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, or The Clash, protest and standing up for your rights has always been something that we loved in the artists that we appreciate, and we're happy to do the same.

What are the band's plans for 2009?
Well, we've got these new songs, and we're desperate to keep writing. We've got this advantage in that Nigel's got a studio. We'll be going back there, we've written loads, it's just a case of recording them, and we've got to work out a way in which we can release them. The 'Down In The Flood' track is available for free, right now, from our website, which is www.dodgyology.com. You get the track for free, and you can do whatever you want with it, give it to your mates or whatever, and that's great.

When Nigel and I first started talking about writing some new songs, we were very much of the opinion, let's just get it to people, let's disregard the music industry. Let's just disregard this whole thing of having to do a single, having to do an album. We're written a song and we really like it, and it's important and it works now, then let's get it out. That's what we're able to do, to mix the track, and get it out on the internet the next day, for free.

People were listening to it now, if we had to go through the whole process normally back in the nineties, we would produce a track, and say we want to release it. They would say okay well write some more tracks and put it on an album, we need three months run up to be able to sell it to radio, and people wouldn't be hearing it until the following summer. Just because of the way the whole process works, and how slow it is. We're like 'no, sod that. We've written this song we think it's really good, we think it's relevant. Let's get it out now!'

We've got this little map which shows us where people are downloading it from, and there's people in Alaska, Japan, China, New Zealand, Argentina, all around Europe, three people in Finland, which is nice because the Finnish girls are lovely. All these people from all around the world are downloading our track, and we're really excited by that. The fact that we can by pass the industry, and get it out really quickly, who knows what we going to do. Maybe we'll give the album out for free, I don't know at the moment, but we're together, and we're writing songs, we've got fifteen new songs and I'm sure more will come out, as long as we can keep writing songs then we will stay together.

Any plans for more live dates?
Yeah, we're getting asked at the moment to do festivals for next summer. We've got requests coming in and a few enquiries about what we want to. As I said there's so many festivals around right now. The obvious bands that are big now tend to do all the Reading, and T in the Park kind of stuff. We'd like to build ourselves back up to that, but there are loads of other festivals like GuilFest, Summer Sundae, Wickerman, which we played last year and loads of other medium sized festivals that are perfect for Dodgy. We'll see what happens, we'd love to play as often as we can next year. There's nothing confirmed, but we are taking bookings for next summer.

You've also played with quite a few other bands over the years. What's been your favourite guest appearance?
They've all been special, I've loved all of them. The one that really sticks out, is when I played with the Lightning Seeds, and I played at the Hillsborough Justice gig which was at Anfield which was for the 96 people who died at Hillsborough to raise money for their families. There were some big bands playing, Manic Street Preachers, Beautiful South, and Lightning Seeds, but none of them wanted to headline because it wasn't that kind of day. They said a band from Liverpool should headline, and the band that's got the footie song. So the Lightning Seeds headlined, and it was the first time I'd ever played with the Lightning Seeds after four days of rehearsal. I was absolutely shitting myself, and it was an incredibly emotional day, it was very weird. Playing at Anfield in front of 50,000 scousers (as a Liverpool fan), it was one of my most favourite and poignant gigs of all time.

You also manage a few bands how do you find that?
Love it, actually. I'm also keeping my eyes on the Dodgy affairs, Dodgy don't really have a manager right now, so I'm kind of looking after Dodgy's stuff as well. I love it though, I love getting stuck in and organising stuff. I'm not very good at chilling out, I don't play computer games, or sit down staring at the walls. I'm much happier getting involved in doing stuff, and getting stuff done. I hate when things are organised badly, or something has been done badly, I think I could have done that, and I could have done it so much better. Myself and my partner who I manage have this mantra that constantly proves itself to be true, 'If you want something doing well, you do it yourself.' It always proves to be right unfortunately. There are some people we can trust but generally a lot of people are useless, especially in the music industry, so you have to do it yourself, and that's what got me into management in the first place.

Oasis were often said to be knicking your sound, how do you feel about this?
Well, that's an accusation that's been levelled at Oasis from the start. There have been a couple of tunes that have been very, very similar, at the start. People have said that there are other songs, but I would never ever, ever say Oasis knicked our stuff at all. It's just that it all comes from the same place The Beatles, The Kinks, The Small Faces, and people like that. You can't take anything off Noel Gallagher, I went to see him recently, and I heard the new album, it sounds really great, there's some good tunes on there, and they're plugging away, good luck to them.

I think where it started was the Dodgy kind of pre-empted Britpop because we did a pop album that was sixties inspired back in 1993 when Nirvana and all that horrible grunge stuff was still happening. We released this album that was very British pop inspired, and then a year later Blur released 'Park Life', and Oasis came out and the whole Britpop scene kicked off.

Then we got sucked up into all that Britpop stuff which we always vehemently hated to be called 'Britpop' because it's always such a throw away word. It's hard to have your whole musical life summed up with such a throw away word. You whole life gets summed up by something someone else has said you are a part of. You can't get angry with it though, it's out there, and it's a way of describing music from the mid-nineties, people will always use it.

Pulp are described as Britpop, the amount of bands that are lumped into that bracket, a lot of these bands weren't actually sounding the same at all. We were there thinking, hang on, we're not, we didn't decide to call ourselves Britpop, we didn't want to Britpop, we didn't even know what Britpop was.

I'd rather we weren't called Britpop. The thing is you look at all the bands around at the moment from Razorlight, through to Arctic Monkeys, The Kooks, and all these kind of bands, they haven't been called anything collectively, have they? But, it's exactly the same, it's all these bands from all different parts of the UK, yet back then suddenly we were called Britpop.

What is your festival song?
Maybe with festivals coming up it'll be 'Down In The Flood' and also we've got a tune called 'UK RIP' which was written about the state of the country, and fact the kingdom is not united any more. It's kind of a forward thinking song that we wrote at the time about the United Kingdom. We were playing that at festivals over the summer and it went down really, really well. And 'Staying Out For The Summer' tends to go down really, really well.

We had some magic moments at the festivals this summer. We were playing the Wickerman and it was pissing down with rain, real torrential, and we went on stage, started playing 'Staying Out For The Summer' and the sun came out. A similar thing happened at Summer Sundae as well. The weather was really bad and we played 'Good Enough' and the sun came out. Dodgy have the power to change the weather.

There was a brilliant quote from Billy Bragg once, we played Reading in 1996, Billy Bragg was on before us on the main stage, and we were further up the bill, again it was raining a fair bit, we were getting on well with Billy Bragg, and he knew we were rehearsing back stage, singing and getting our voices tuned up. I was watching from the side of the stage, and Billy Bragg was playing and suddenly the sun came out, and god bless him, he said, “No, that sun is nothing to do with me, that's Dodgy practising backstage.” Which I thought was a very sweet thing for him to do.

The weather was shocking this summer, if more people book Dodgy for shows this summer coming, then you're guaranteed some good weather.

How do you intend to spend Christmas?
I usually spend it with my folks down in Cornwall, I'm not from Cornwall but they live down there, but this year they've decided to go away. For the first time, I'm going to be at home, which is going to be great actually. I'm looking forward to it, where you have that time to spend with as many friends as you can. So, we'll be doing a bit of travelling to see friends up and down the country.

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