Graham Parker: Don't Ask Me Questions and other tales by the sea
Ian Malin
It’s Saturday night at the Ropetackle, an arts centre in Shoreham-by-Sea, and Graham Parker is telling us some salty old stories of his remarkable life. England are playing Spain at Wembley and, at about the same time that Harry Kane is putting England ahead, Parker launches into a tale about the song he is about to sing, Turned Up Too Late.
The song, from the 1976 album Heat Treatment, was later recorded by The Pointer Sisters, the Californian trio best known for their Eighties hits Jump and Automatic and for a version of Bruce Springsteen’s Fire. Springsteen was reportedly not best pleased that The Pointer Sisters were given his song that they turned into an enormous turntable hit. Parker seems chuffed. He is on the south coast tonight, not with his band The Rumour but on his own as part of a tour of low-key venues, from Sale to Settle to Shoreham, to mark the 50th anniversary of his first two albums with The Rumour, Howlin’ Wind and Heat Treatment.
For the first half of the show Parker plays acoustic guitar and harmonica and introduces us to his jokey kazoo. For the second half he plays electric guitar and the, mainly seasoned, members of the audience are transported into the late Seventies, the zenith of Graham Parker and The Rumour’s career. For a couple of years the band were an unstoppable force, rarely out of the pages of the NME, and Parker’s soulful voice and attitude suggested Surrey could lay claim to have the new Van Morrison in its midst.
Parker was a petrol pump attendant at the time of his first record deal. He tells the story of how the record company gave him a cheque for £5,000, an unimaginable sum at the time which he took to his local pub to order ‘three pints of lager and a packet of crisps’. The tale is an apt one for Parker and his band were growing up in the age of so-called pub rock, a genre that he admits he is baffled by. ‘The only reason it’s called that is because pubs were the only places that would have us,’ he says honestly.
Appropriately, GPATR played their first gig at the Newlands Tavern, a pub in Nunhead in south-east London in October 1975, a couple of months before they went into the studio to record Howlin’ Wind, produced by Nick Lowe. From that album came the first of two UK single hits, (Hey Lord) Don’t Ask Me Questions. It reached No32 in the spring of 1978. Four years later the long forgotten Temporary Beauty just surfaced at No50.
Don’t Ask Me Questions is the final encore of his solo Shoreham set. The original has a shuffling reggae beat and at the heart of the song was Parker’s angry, shouty voice. He spat out lyrics like Elvis Costello, who at the time was making an appearance on Top of the Pops with his second breakthrough hit, I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea.
Crimson autograph is what we leave behind
Everywhere man set foot
War mongers laughing loud behind a painted face
Throwing titbits to the crowd, then blowing up the place
Don’t Ask Me Questions is an anti-war song with some powerful guitar licks from the best-known Rumour member Brinsley Schwarz. While filling up cars with petrol Parker wasn’t just dreaming of fame. He was composing sharp, radio-friendly songs. The first two albums propelled GPATR into the sort of stardom they had probably not dreamed about. They went on tour to Australia on a festival bill topped by Bob Dylan. Backstage the great man sought them out to tell Parker how much he loved his work.
More GPATR albums followed, including the excellent Squeezing Out Sparks and one of their greatest songs, Passion Is No Ordinary Word. But the band split and Parker’s career took a new turn. He had a big fallout with his record company Mercury, leading to an angry song Mercury Poisoning, but he forged a new role as a cult singer-songwriter.
The Hackney-born Parker published short stories and novels and even played himself in a 2012 romcom This Is 40, written and directed by Judd Apatow, where a group of underperforming artists join a record label run by the record company mogul played by Paul Rudd who thinks GPATR may just be worth reviving. And the band really did get together again after a 32-year hiatus.
Parker enjoyed his Hollywood moment but you can tell he also enjoys working on a small scale. Now 75 and living in New York State he seems happy to be home in the UK. Despite Harry Kane’s goal not being enough for England the night Graham Parker played on the Sussex coast, the Shoreham-by-Sea crowd enjoyed these 90 minutes, contradicting the title of another favourite on the Squeezing Out Sparks album, Saturday Nite is Dead.
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