The Buddhist, Environmentalist, Pop Star
by Linda Lee
Dave Wakeling once said, "Ever since I was twelve, I wanted to be in a pop group, work for Greenpeace, and become a Buddhist monk."
Well, after forming one of the most significant bands of the second wave of ska, (The English Beat, and later General Public), working for Greenpeace and becoming a practicing Buddhist, this king of ska has found a way to accomplish all three (monk part aside).
So, what’s left to do, then? Linda Lee tries to find out.
Collaborations
DW: …I was just with the guys from 311, working on a new song – coincidentally, about the rain…
We’re on the phone with Wakeling, who moved years ago from industrial Birmingham, England to sunny California -- but tonight, happens to be standing in the rain. Apparently, record rain, as the state has been hit by winter storms and drenched with more rain in one weekend than it had received all last year.
DW: …we enjoyed touring together with 311 last year and we kept saying how we wanted to write a song together. They were Beat fans, and after watching them live, I was impressed with their music. And now we finally got the chance to get together, before I go out on tour again.
Calendar
LL: February 2008 will be quite busy for you. The English Beat’s greatest hits album "You Just Can’t Beat It: Best of Beat" is being released in the UK on February 4th; it’s your birthday on February 19th; and you’ll be on a cross-country tour beginning in California on February 1st and ending at The Fillmore at Irving Plaza in New York City, on February 29th, Leap Day. How does it feel to be coming back to New York?
DW: I’m very excited to be playing at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza again. That’s one of my favorite venues. My first time in New York City was a bit scary. I realized that you had to stand in the middle of the street in Manhattan in order to see the sky. That was a shock. But now I love it. The RX Bandits, who are quite good, will be opening for us.
Current
LL: You know what would be great? To see Rihanna perform with you, live. Did you see the mashup of her song, "Umbrella," mixed with General Public’s "Tenderness" by Party Ben?
DW: I loved it. I thought it was fantastic. I couldn’t believe how the songs fit seamlessly as they did – like a hand to a glove. For somebody to mash it up with one of our songs is a great honor, I must say.
LL: Did you know that it’s on the compilation "Best of Bootie 2007" (the best mashups of 2007)?
DW: Yes! We called Party Ben’s manager to congratulate him and he supposedly was blown away. We were told that he was like, "I can’t remember the last time someone left a message that it sounded great, instead of calling to say ‘How dare you! This is the name of my lawyer!’"
I wonder what he could do with new acoustic versions of my songs? What mashups could he come up with?
LL: How does one get the rights to use your song in a mashup?
DW: I have absolutely no idea! [laughs] Nobody’s ever asked me! I supposed somebody’s asked somebody…
Cross Appeal
LL: Your songs span four decades, Dave! How did it feel to write hit songs when you were five?
DW: Hey, that’s right! They do!
LL: The 70’s, 80’s, 90’s. and now the 00’s.
DW: I like to tell people we’ve been delivering "top quality ska over two millennia"…four decades and two millennia.
LL: Did you know that your band’s first single "Tears of a Clown" was released on December 8, 1979, one year to the day before John Lennon’s death?
DW: I loved John Lennon. I liked his edge combined with Paul’s syrupy delivery.
Concord
LL: Coincidentally, the age of The English Beat band members ranged from sixteen to fifties, similar to your audience today. How does it feel to have your music still connect with people now?
DW: We were lucky enough to have Lynval Golding from The Specials, who is one of my favorite guitarists, play a few shows with us in the past couple of years. He would sit in with us and play on our songs and then we’d sing a few Specials songs together.
And one night, we were looking at this crowd and it was just like that, sixteen to sixty, all different colors and ethnicities. And he came dancing over to me while the saxophonist was playing a solo, and he said, "Dave!" And I was like, "What?" I thought there was a problem.
He said, "How weird is this? We started this music to bring the races together and by accident we seem to have brought the ages together!"
And I looked into the crowd and saw these two guys in their late forties or fifties and they’re dancing right next to two teenagers. And they’re all dancing in time with each other.
I was moved by it, really. It’s not very often that you see people with thirty or forty years of age difference between them, enjoying the same thing in the same moment. Perhaps also in sports, but it’s still one of the few noticeable things you see.
Connection
LL: Your fans love you so much, they often ask for you to come back and play right after they’ve just seen your show. They also leave you messages and ask questions on your Web site’s online forum (http://www.davewakeling.com), and sometimes you even answer them back!
DW: There are a lot of things you might get as perks by being a musician or being in a group. You get the fame and fun aspect, and the fortune aspect…
But for someone to come up to you and say, "I’ve been listening to your records for thirty years and I just want to let you know how much these songs have meant to me over the years," or "I was going to kill myself when I was in college when your song ‘Click Click’ put me off," or "We used ‘Tenderness’ when we were having our first baby in the delivery room," or tell you that they used "End of the Party" at a funeral…
…you realize that these life stories are more valuable than the fame, the fortune, the fancy women – all the rest of it. Because it’s something you can’t buy. You can’t pay somebody to come up to you and say how much your songs have meant to them over two or three decades. That’s actually the greatest gift or compliment a musician could have.
You created something that somebody else wove into the tapestry of their life. It makes me feel truly connected, even though when I was writing the songs I was feeling totally introverted and disconnected. [laughs]
What’s most interesting, though, is just how much people enjoy connecting. [in his funny high pitched joking voice] It’s a sign of how alienated and distant we must feel in our everyday lives, [laughs] when we’re actually looking at and talking with real people.
I’ve always thought that we connect, not through the moments of our strengths, but through our mutually confessed weaknesses. It’s when we’re pretending to be big and tough and uncaring, when it’s hard to connect. But when we all gently confess we’re only human, it’s in those moments that you actually connect the best with people.
The only thing you can guarantee in a room full of people is human foible. And so, apart from the song "I Confess," of course, in most of the songs, there’s a theme of confessing this sort of "human weakness."
I try to do it with a laugh and a giggle. Like, "Yes, I fucked up like this. Did you?," and people giggle and go, "Yeah, me, too." And that seems to draw people closer together rather than pretending to be really strong.
LL: Like, in that Tom Hanks movie Castaway in which he’s alone on that island and then creates a friend to connect with – the ball named "Wilson."
DW: Exactly! The connection with others is so important. Anytime we forget that, is when the pain begins. I’m sure of it. They filmed Castaway by my house in Malibu, I was told.
I love Tom Hanks! Someone sent me a clipping from an English newspaper of him going to a premiere of a movie over there – in it, he pulled out an Aston Villa* football team scarf with the name on it and held it above his head like a true football fan. I’ve always liked his acting a great deal.
*Aston Villa is Dave’s favorite football team
Celluloid
LL: Your connection with film has almost been seamless – first, as one of the subjects of the 2-Tone ska documentary Dance Craze and then later writing songs for movies. How did your songs become a part of John Cusack’s movie Grosse Pointe Blank?
DW: I knew that John Cusack was a bit of a fan, and then I got a message that Joe Strummer (The Clash) was putting together the soundtrack to the movie and they wanted to know, could they put "Mirror in the Bathroom" and "Doors of Your Heart" in there?
I know that Joe Strummer had always liked "Mirror in the Bathroom" and I could remember that Mick Jones (The Clash) had told me that "Doors of Your Heart" was his favorite Beat song back in the day.
So I was absolutely thrilled. I’m quite a fan of John Cusack. I heard he was around the Pacific Palisades, but I’ve still never met him. I would love to write a song with him, see if he wants to join in on the lyric writing, or see if we can write a song specifically for a film, like I did with "She’s Having a Baby" with John Hughes.
LL: Your songs were in quite a few of his films: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Weird Science, She’s Having a Baby. How did your collaboration with John Hughes come about?
DW: He came to a few shows. He was particularly a fan of the song "Tenderness." He came back stage, and the first thing he said was, "Anyone who uses a bassoon in a pop song has a lot of balls!"
I didn’t even know that was the name of the instrument, actually. I had asked the producer, "What’s that thing that goes like ‘bop bop bop bop bop bop’?"
He said, "I think that’s a bassoon." We dug up a recording of a bassoon, and I said, "Yes, that’s it!" We got a real bassoon and a real bassoon player to play it.
And John Hughes was very impressed with that. So we became friends for a while. I went to his house. It turned out he had one room – well, you could call it a room, it was more like a hall.
It was just a huge record library and he knew where every record was in these massive shelves going up to the ceiling, all the way around, this huge room.
That’s what he was – he was a huge music buff and had always fancied being in a group but never quite did it and ended up making films by default, he said. He did a pretty good job at it.
LL: Did you have a musical background? Because it takes a pretty good ear to know that you want a bassoon for a part of a song.
DW: I always loved music. But I didn’t have a musical background, at all. I always liked singing. And I started writing poems when I was twelve or in my early teens. And I was in the school choir.
That gave me a chance to be in the Birmingham Cathedral Choir. And everybody was really excited for me. But then you had to practice three nights a week and then practice again Saturday and then three services on Sunday. And I was like, "I don’t like it that much." Then I fell out of it.
I was very reluctant to be taught music in school because I didn’t see the world the same way they saw it. I didn’t want them telling me how music went, either.
In some ways it was a shame because I never learned to read or write music, but in some ways it was better because I think all I would have ended up with was to read and write music the way they said it should be read and written.
And so, I ended up just following my own style. I would just sit and play whatever made all the nerves in my body jangle. And hope to put enough of those beats together so that other people listening to the song would have the same effect.
In a way, I was a primitive, consciously primitive, because I didn’t want to learn the forms.
It was weird, because later I would have friends who were quite accomplished classical musicians. But if you made them close the book and asked them to play one of their own tunes, they were stuck. They looked at you as if you were talking in a foreign language.
"Play one of your own!"
And they were like, "Whaddya mean? Do you mean, what I’ve been working on?"
I was like, "No, just play anything. Play whatever you’re feeling."
They’d go, "Oh well, I am due to start improvisational classes, but I don’t really do that."
I couldn’t believe it. She could play the shit out of the piano, but couldn’t close her eyes and play a tune. It just seemed very odd to me. When I heard that, I thought, "Wow, stroke of luck I didn’t read or write music. I would have been completely stumped then."
LL: Going back to "Tenderness" – where is it? Seriously? It’s in one of the most popular scenes of the movie Clueless, but not on the soundtrack!
DW: Well, there was quite a story behind this. The record company had given them the rights to use the song without asking us for our permission, and had done the deal and everything.
I only found out about it in the oddest of ways: the wardrobe mistress on the movie knew my wife and she said "Oh, they’re using one of Dave’s songs in this film I’m working on." My wife told me this and I checked with the managers who checked with the film company and it turned out yes, they were using "Tenderness."
So, the record company had never asked us for our approval. And it turned out they grabbed all the money for it and weren’t going to tell us. And they had already made the film. And had actually made copies for distribution. So, it would have cost an absolute fortune and then they would have lost the release date of the film, if we didn’t approve the song. So we kind of had the record company at our mercy. We made them give us all the money instead of them keeping their share, or applying it to our bill at the time, you know, if we had any advances on the cut. So we made them pay us, directly. But I think the film company got so scared of dealing with the record company that they didn’t bother putting it on the soundtrack because they didn’t want anymore trouble.
LL: Well, people really miss that song on the soundtrack – like a missing tooth, it seems.
DW: We named that song on purpose to make people yearn to hear it on the soundtrack album – [high pitched voice] "Where’s the ‘Tenderness?’! [laughs] Life imitating art.
LL: So, if an independent filmmaker wanted to use your music for their film, what would they have to do?
DW: There are different ways it can be done – They can request new songs and deal directly with me. Or they can use new versions of original songs and deal with the publishers, since they still own the copyright for the songs. Or they can use the original versions and work with our friends at Warner Bros. who have proven to be very realistic and reasonable, in fact.
Composers
LL: Who are your favorite film composers?
DW: I like John Cale from The Velvet Underground. And I thought Eddie Vedder did a great job for Into The Wild. I thought he should have been nominated for an Oscar.
LL: Would you be interested in scoring films?
DW: Oh yes, but I tend to prefer song-based music, rather than traditional scores for films. Sometimes I’ll watch a film with my wife and know exactly what’s going to happen in the next scene just based on the music. "Oh, here comes a minor chord. The character in the movie is going to die." My wife thinks I’m Nostradamus. [laughs] I’m not psychic; just musical.
Covers
LL: Speaking of Eddie Vedder, his band, Pearl Jam, plays a medley of their song "Better Man" mixed in with "Save It For Later" during their live shows.
DW: I was just honored. I like Pearl Jam a lot. I had become friends with Eddie during my Greenpeace years and liked him a great deal.
We actually recorded "Better Man" for my Greenpeace Alternative NRG album and Chrissie Hynde was going to sing it, but she dropped out at the end, so we never got to use the track. And so Pearl Jam brought it out themselves, afterwards.
LL: Pete Townshend also covered "Save It For Later" live. His is almost like a meditative version.
DW: He plays it beautifully. I wrote it in a particular tuning and he plays it in a regular tuning. The way he manages to spread his fingers all over the neck of the guitar -- I mean he makes the fingers sing.
I still dream to play with him one day, but I haven’t done it yet. I’ve gone to watch him play it in Los Angeles and he gave me props from the stage. And everybody clapped. It was so beautiful. It wasn’t so much that I was crying, but tears just rolled down my face. I didn’t have to push; they just rolled.
I was very moved. His music meant a great deal to me when I was a pre-teen going into a teenager, which was an emotional time. So, to have him come back and give me props for a song I’d written after being influenced by his passion was stunning.
LL: It turns out that "Save It For Later" was Johnny Marr’s (The Smiths, Modest Mouse) favorite song in the 80’s, as well, according to Mojo Magazine last year.
DW: Yes! I wrote to thank him. We’ve become email buddies. So there’s a chance he’s going to play some guitar on some new songs, and we’ll write some songs together when our touring schedules give us the opportunity.
I was stunned again that "Save It For Later" was his favorite song of the 80’s, because he and Mick Jones were my fav guitarists in the 80’s. I got to work with Mick Jones on "Tenderness," and now I might get a chance to work with Johnny Marr, as well.
I truly am the luckiest guy. And it’s just one song! [laughs] And it all started as a dirty joke!
"Save it, fellator*!" [laughs] That was the start of it. I had this tune. And I had this "oh, that’s funny – fellator!" It was a just a dirty schoolboy joke. And then it was played on the radio all over the world.
* fellator: one and especially a man who performs fellatio – Merriam-Webster
Credits
LL: In addition to having your songs covered by great musicians, your white, Vox, left-handed teardrop guitar was recently inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
DW: Yes! Someone told me that it was displayed in between Jimi Hendrix’s and Kurt Cobain’s guitars, which I thought was fabulous.
LL: They were both left-handed players, too. I think Kurt’s birthday was the day after yours, as well.
DW: Well, then someone came up to me and said to be careful of going to Seattle, since both Hendrix and Cobain were from there, and were also left-handed guitarists, and were no longer with us.
LL: [gasp] How morbid. Well, thank god, you’re originally from Birmingham, then? Okay, moving on…
Causes
LL: Your dedication to the environment and social causes have been well documented, including the album created for Greenpeace, but you’ve also worked with Mike Peters (The Alarm) and his Love Hope Strength Foundation and The Smile Train.
DW: Yes, we played at the top of the Empire State Building for Love Hope Strength (http://www.lovehopestrength.org/), raising funds and awareness for helping cancer patients and research. We were also asked to go to Mt. Everest with them on a twelve-day trip, but because of scheduling conflicts, had to reconsider when it grew into twenty-eight days.
LL: How are you involved with The Smile Train?
DW: The Smile Train (http://www.smiletrain.org) is a charity that performs surgeries on children in developing countries with cleft lips and palates and fixes them up and gives them a chance to smile, with a new face, and speak properly.
It struck me as the most wonderfully appropriate charity for the times we find ourselves in; for such a small amount of money, $250, you can totally revolutionize someone’s life, who would have spent their life at an enormous disadvantage and disability, otherwise.
I had seen too many people sink so much money into developing the notion of fear and isolation in America. In contrast, this was just a simple action that you could do that spoke volumes.
I thought that being able to try and work something like The Smile Train into our performance would be a way of gently creating connectedness and compassion without having to make some political statement. We ask people to throw money at us on stage when we sing the song "Tenderness." We do a bit of a speech, about how in the next five minutes they could change someone’s life forever.
And by them doing that, it makes them feel connected; it makes them remember the strength of compassion. That not only draws the audience and the band closer together, whilst we’re doing it, but it leaves everybody with a sense of connectedness and the warmth of compassion, as they’re leaving the concert, and as they’re going to enjoy the rest of the night or the rest of the week.
On many levels, it’s a good thing to do. We’ve raised about $30,000 since March 2007. That’s like 120 kids smiling around the world.
But also, I get messages from people that they were so moved by it. One husband and wife had bought each other Christmas presents and sent $500 buying each other a smile each, and then weeks afterwards, they were still smiling about it. It was the most valuable gift they’d enjoyed over the holidays.
So people give them as Christmas gifts, birthday gifts, they send their friends a smile in their name – buy a smile in this person’s name. It seems to have a really heart warming effect on people.
I thought that was nice thing to do, especially in these times of disassociation and fear. There’s a lot of money in fear, you know. So let’s do something good with our money instead.
Creed
LL: You mentioned connectedness and compassion: two thoughts from Buddhism. Are you a practicing Buddhist? DW: I kind of am. I follow Buddhism. I still practice on being a Buddhist. It means a lot to me. [laughs] Whenever I’m in trouble, I become more of a Buddhist. I’ve found that through all of the different religions that I’ve tried in my life, the basic sense of Buddhism has been more effective in my life, than any other. I’ve sort of been keen on it since I was a kid. It means a great to deal me, lately.
Cycle
LL: The Dalai Lama once wrote that the purpose of life is to be happy and this is through compassion. Your songs are like that – they make people happy.
DW: I know! [laughs] How weird is that? I only starting writing songs because I felt socially maladjusted - to the point of talking a lot but still feeling introverted and never feeling totally comfortable, socially.
And so I started writing songs to try and sort it out in my head, how I felt about things
And then slowly, I’d be singing the songs with somebody else playing the guitar as well, we’d be playing and then somebody would walk by and say, "Oh, that’s good!"
And that developed into being in a group.
It’s kind of bizarre - "Mirror in the Bathroom" was written about not wanting to go to work on a construction site in the snow, and just wanting to stay in the bathroom where it was warm. And it ended up being a song about isolation, narcissism and self-involvement.
Like we were talking about earlier - that sense of feeling disconnected. It was a song about that and thinking that if those feelings were to become more and more magnified over the years, it would drive you crazy.
So it was my first song about skirting with the notion of a nervous breakdown.
[high pitched voice] And now a quarter of a century later, we’re playing the song and people’s faces light up into a huge smile and they’re singing along, "Mirror in the bathroom! I love it!" And they’re so happy and their eyes are shining and singing along. And sometimes I take a quick look and think, "Oh no, excuse me, I’m singing about my first nervous breakdown, please." [laughs]
Contradictions
LL: What’s so interesting about your songs is that the words are sometimes quite serious, whereas the music can sound quite happy.
DW: I was very lucky in that respect by coming into my songs at the same time as the punky/ reggae party. We wanted the energy of punk and the kind of sensuality of reggae. By definition, the music sounds upbeat. I kind of liked the contradiction or ambiguity of it.
It seemed to me, that in my life and the lives of other people I was observing, you were never really fully happy or fully sad. There was always a delicate moving balance between the two.
And I thought that was kind of good because then you could have a hopeful spirit in the music which piqued the spirits in the hearts and minds, and in that circumstance and you could sing about it with a harder edge, but do it in a way that doesn’t scare people off, but rather, invite them in.
It worked very well – I have to say, really, it was an accident – a lovely accident, I suppose, how it all came about.
Once I got the hang of it, then it was something I could use in my songwriting. And if there was something really harsh I wanted to say, then you could just press a button and make the music go happy at that point.
Confessions
LL: Your song, "I Confess," is quite upbeat and happy sounding, but it’s really about a man who cheated – and isn’t even sorry about it!
DW: I know! [laughs] Well, there are two confessions in the song: One was that he didn’t really care until he got caught.
Just out of spite
I confess I've ruined three lives
Now don't sleep so tight
Because I didn't care till I found out that one of them was mine
The other confession was, when I noticed people were falling out of relationships, they usually got into a series of arguments about how the other person didn’t love them as much as they loved them.
It was like a contest about who loved each other the most. The confession in the middle of it is, you know, "If it’s all the same to you, I’ll stay indifferent."
At least, in your teens and twenties, I suppose, the hardest thing to admit is that you don’t care. It’s always an argument about how who cares the most, or you don’t care as much as I care, or you know, that sort of thing.
LL: When you hear the songs now, do you think back about what you wrote?
DW: I’m lucky in a way, because I always used to make half of the songs semi-autobiographical,
and then the other half of the song, I would draw upon things that I was reading or things I observed in other people. And I would tell other people’s stories and just get into it – which person I wanted to be.
You could be writing a song entirely about somebody else, but then I would sing it in the first person, "I, I, I" - so it was as if you were singing about yourself.
And other songs, that were very much about myself and were totally autobiographical, I would then change that to the third person, like in "Best Friend" for example.
I just found out the name of your best friend;
You’ve been talking about your best friend again
That was actually me singing the songs to myself in the mirror. I sang it to myself in the third person. I didn’t nail myself to a cross that I would have to bear too heavily for the rest of my life, by playing those sort of literary games with it, you know. It wasn’t like I was putting any lies in there. [laughs] Or sometimes I would put it in the third person, because you could be more confessional if you were pretending it was somebody else.
Change
LL: You mentioned that you felt disconnected and isolated when you first started writing – when did that change?
DW: It never changed, really. I’m just more used to it now. [laughs] I suppose when you grow up as a kid, you’re an altruist, and you think that the world is going to be as wonderful as it looks in your first few years. But slowly there’s an awful realization that’s it’s not.
Like Virginia Woolf once wrote, "The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."
You can pick a perfect rose, but the only thing that’s guaranteed is that the petals are going to wilt and fall off.
The more beautiful something is, the more painful it is, when you realize that it’s not immortal. And that could be a friend dying, a parent dying, a child being injured, a dream being dashed, a hope being smashed.
Sometimes the pain becomes such that people become cruel because they can’t cope. And then, are you going to start acting cruel, as well, in retaliation? Or are you going to try to remain an altruist and be eaten alive? That sort of thing can make you feel disconnected.
But now, I suppose I’m more used to the pain in the world. I’m not so surprised by it, or let down by it, as I was initially. Now, I accept that it’s a part of it.
And in some ways, the fact that things aren’t forever, is what makes something beautiful in the first place.
Like, if a rose lasted forever, then would its delicate beauty be as appreciated in the moment, as opposed to being able to look at it in a few days’ time when it would still look good?
Impermanence is one of the things that forces the issue on beauty, so that it touches you and moves you.
I didn’t know that when I was younger, so I felt disconnected by it. I wanted beauty in the world to last forever. It wasn’t until I appreciated the benefits of impermanence that I understood that although life is tragic, it still is beautiful. And in some ways, that beauty is heightened because of the tragedy.
Conclusion
LL: You once said that every song should be about something, but not necessarily have a message – if your life were a song or movie, what would it be about? What would your song or movie be?
DW: Frank Sinatra’s "High Hopes (Oops! There goes another rubber tree plant!)" mixed with Wings of Desire!
LL: That’s one of my favorite movies! I love Peter Falk!
DW: I actually met him, once. We were playing a benefit show at a country club for the elementary school my kids went to, and I noticed Peter Falk at the registration. We chatted for a bit and I told him that Wings of Desire was my favorite film ever. We shook hands and as I was leaving, I turned around and said, "Oh, just one more thing…"
And he said, "Oh no, you don’t." [laughs]
And with that, Dave remarks, "Oh, it’s just stopped raining here, and there’s this lovely rainbow that’s come out in the sky. Would you look at that."
Lovely, indeed.
Dave Wakeling and The English Beat perform at The Fillmore at Irving Plaza on February 29, 2008, in New York City.
LinksDave Wakeling |
Music in MoviesSky High(2005) "Twist and Crawl" |
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50 First Dates (2004) |
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200 Cigarettes (1999) |
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The Gypsy Years (2000) |
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Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) |
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Kingpin (1996) |
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Clueless(1995) |
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Threesome(1994) |
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Crossing Delancey (1988) |
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She's Having a Baby (1988) |
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Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) |
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Weird Science (1985) |
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Head Office (1985) |
Copyright 2008 Linda Lee. All rights reserved.