Sunday, October 28, 2012

Vic Flick Interview

In London, England in the 1960’s, the recording scene was dominated by a series of hired guns known as session men. For each instrument there was a specialist who would go into the studio and clean up, add to, or create out of thin air a piece of music, to a projected recording. Ultimately, these studio musicians worked on a staggering number of recordings that would eventually be released under a bigger artists name. These unsung heroes of the music industry worked in the shadows and for the most part never received the full credit that they deserved for their contributions.

At the time, there were three guitarists who dominated the scene and had the market cornered on recording sessions in the London Studios. They were Jimmy Page, Big Jim Sullivan, and Vic Flick. To ask Flick how many sessions he has worked on over his career would be a project in futility. Just on the basis of recorded work, he is one of the most prolific guitar players to ever play the instrument. He is most well known for his work on the James Bond films, and the recordings he did with some of the top acts around England in the 1960’s. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Vic Flick about his life, the guitar, and what it really meant to be a session man.

FZ: How did you first get your start as a professional musician?

VF: I started out with a group called the John Barry Seven. I met them when I was in another group that was actually doing the first Paul Anka European tour. It was the first tour he ever did; I think he was 16 years old. That was when I first met John Barry. We kind of became friends on the tour and then I didn’t hear anything from him for six or seven months. One day he called me up and wanted me to join his group because the guitar player in the group couldn’t read music and I could. He had just lost a television series because the guitar player couldn’t read and accompany people. So I got that job and then whatever John Barry did from then on in those days, I was on guitar.

FZ: How did you become a session guitarist?

VF: There was one album that was a breakthrough called Stringbeat and it was basically me playing solo with a bank of string [players]; Sixteen violins, eight violas, four cellos something like that. Most of the string players back then were contractors and once they saw me sitting there playing guitar and reading music, that was it, the phone started ringing and I was doing sessions. This was back in 1959.

FZ: What was it like to work as a session guitarist in the London recording studios in the 1960’s?

VF: It was a little more formal than it is today, but at the same time there was a great camaraderie and everybody knew everybody. I would move from studio to studio with another guitar player and a drummer and maybe another bass player would join us, but it was always somebody kind of from the previous session or you would work with them a couple of times during that week. It was more formal though, people were dressed more formally, in fact, EMI which is now called Abbey Road Studios, the actual tech guys always had white coats on like it was a hospital; it was very strange.

Back…in the sixties, it was an overspill from the fifties inasmuch everybody had to turn up with a bowtie and goodness knows what else. Then in the sixties that was let loose a little bit as one or two of the rhythm section players to let go. I remember working with Jimmy Page quite a bit when he started doing sessions and he was a little more casual in his dress and that kind of affected other people that thought ‘Well if he can turn up with jeans and sport shirt why can’t we?’

FZ: At what point did the more formal atmosphere fall to the wayside?

VF: About 1978 when everybody starting getting their own little bits of studios and the record business was kind of dying a little bit, that’s when it all started getting a bit nasty. Our backs started to get sore from the knives stuck in it [laughs]. The main reason was back in the sixties there were three contractors, or fixers, and they controlled everything. When that broke up and it went to anybody could be a fixer, especially with all these students coming out of university with degrees in production and music arrangement, the whole music business split up. Maybe it was for the good, maybe the bad, I don’t know, but it was kind of sad really. I’m so pleased that I was there in the sixties and seventies because that was a dynamic time for the music business and change.

FZ: What were the criteria for being a session guitarist at that time?

VF: There were kind of three things. You had to play well, you had to look good and you had to turn up on time and that was it. If you qualified for that, and if your face fit in you cracked it. Of course, sometimes I would turn up for a session and there would be a great guitar player there or bass player or whatever but his attitude just didn’t fit. I was always conscious, and all the other guys were conscious, that no matter how good you were, there was always that feeling that there was about twenty guitar players in England or wherever, playing in their front rooms who were much better. They just hadn’t had the chance to go where the working guitar players were.

FZ: You mentioned you worked alongside Jimmy Page in that era, what was Jimmy like at that time, what was he like as a guitarist?

VF: I mean he was a nice guy. He was really sort of shy and a reticent sort of fellow who played good guitar when he knew what he had to play if you know what I mean. He used to get booked in on sessions and he couldn’t read [music] to save his life, but he had a very very quick ear, very quick music ear and very talented on the guitar. Many times we’d be sitting together in the studio and he’d get something written that he had to play and he’d say, ‘Hey Vic, what’s this? What’s this sound like?’ And I’d play it for him a couple of times and he got it. As long as I sort of gave him a little kick when he had to play he was okay [laughs]. Mostly he was booked for his little riffs and solos and stuff.

I must tell you this, one of the contractors called Charlie Katz came by one day, and I was sitting next to Jimmy and this guy came up to me and he said, ‘Hey, what’s this all about Page, you’re leaving to join some sort of group?” This was around when he was going off to form Led Zeppelin. So Jimmy said, ‘Yes, yes, I won’t be doing any more sessions.’ Charlie said, ‘Foolish boy! You ought to think of your future.’ I can still hear him saying it now and thinking, ‘Dear or dear didn’t somebody ever get it wrong!’
FZ: What are some of the other sessions players that you worked alongside that stick out in your mind?

VF: Well of course there was Jimmy Page and John Baldwin, who is now called John Paul Jones. There was the keyboard player from Yes, Rick Wakeman. All those guys they came through session scene then they formed a group or got involved with a group and made recordings and took off. I made recordings with other guys like Big Jim Sullivan who made recordings but didn't take off in the element in the way Led Zeppelin did or Yes.

FZ: You mentioned Big Jim Sullivan and it seems like you three (Sullivan, Flick and Page) were the great triumvirate of session guitarists at that time. Was there a competitiveness among the three of you, or was there a general camaraderie?

VF: I must say it was wonderful really. There was no ‘you’re better than me’ or ‘I’m better than you’ or jealousy or anything like that. I did what I did and Jim did what he did. We each had our thing and we were known for what we did. Sometimes you got extended a bit, in the mornings there’d be a country-western kind of a thing, in the afternoon it’d be rock and roll, and in the evening session you’d be adding guitar to a symphony orchestra. There was so much work to do. It was friendship and Jim [Sullivan] worked with each other a hell of a lot; we’re still good friends.

FZ: In the early years of your session career you were using a Clifford Essex Paragon Deluxe, would you mind telling us a bit about this guitar?

VF: Yeah, in fact, that guitar was the guitar I did the James Bond Theme on. I was actually given a Stratocaster by Fender who were trying to promote their guitars in England and the outlet for Fender Guitars in England gave me a Fender. So in the beginning of 1962, I think it was March, I had it stolen. I was doing a concert and I put it down to load it into my car then turned around and it was gone. I didn’t have another guitar so I was using this Clifford Essex Paragon Deluxe. It was actually made in 1939 and I bought it off a guitar player named Diz Disley.

So then of course this James Bond Theme came along and that’s the guitar I had and now it’s become sort of famous in itself. At the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. No, I’m playing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and I’ll be using that guitar and then it’s going to be up for auction with an auction house called Profiles in History that specializes in movie memorabilia.
FZ: When is the auction?

VF: They haven’t fixed a date yet, but if you go to www.profilesinhistory.com they’ll give you the dates of when it will be going up for auction.

FZ: Let’s delve into your work with the James Bond. How did you get involved with those films?

VF: Well the guy who wrote the music for the first Bond film, Dr. No, a guy named Monty Norman, wasn’t really a film music writer, but he got commissioned by the Broccolis [the James Bond producers] to do the music. So he went to Jamaica, had a nice time there and came back, but the music that he had written wasn’t powerful enough, or so the Broccolis thought, for a theme tune, so they said, ‘Go off and find something else.’ So he came back with this tune and the editor on James Bond Dr. No, Peter Hunt, suggested John Barry do it because he had used him before on the film Beat Girl and some other stuff; a couple of documentary type things and whatever.

Anyway, John Barry got the job and called me in and asked, ‘what do we do, how should we do this and all that’. So we worked on it together as an arrangement and we had about eight days to do it, work it, fix the guys, and do the recording. Interesting enough, the Broccolis were down to their last half-cent. They’d used it all and were very worried because they hadn’t gotten a distributor yet, so there was a lot of panic going on in the control room when you went in there to listen to the playbacks. So I think it kind of saved the day and then they got picked up by a distributor in England and played the film to packed houses.

So that’s how it happened really, and things developed from there. John Barry got the next film, From Russia with Love and then got the next five, six or seven films and I worked on most of them. The last Bond film I did was License to Kill with Michael Kamen in 1989.

FZ: Can you describe to us how that famous James Bond Theme riff came about?

VF: The actual tune that Monty Norman wrote it was like [hums slowed down jazzy version of riff], so we just bruted it up, mattered it up. We put it on the low strings and changed it so it was more energetic, more dynamic, more sort of spy music-y. That’s how it came about really. It was part of the arrangement and featured the guitar. Most of the stuff John Barry did was me playing solo guitar with backing so it should have been the Vic Flick Seven instead of the John Barry Seven [laughs]. We won’t go into that [laughs]. It was just a matter of the arrangement, the interpretation, and they way I played it and here we are fifty years later. It’s fantastic really.
FZ: You worked alongside Eric Clapton for the soundtrack for the Bond film License to Kill, what was that like, and had you known or worked with Clapton prior to that?

VF: I hadn’t worked with him before, but he was on the soundtrack. He was just on this theme tune, which the Broccolis tuned down; they thought, no, they wanted a pop song. They’d been having some success with pop songs, which is how Gladys Knight and the Pips got to do the song. I did know Eric before though, there is this music paper called the New Music Express and they held concerts every year at Wembley Stadium and we always used to go there and there would be The Shadows and all the groups, Cream and stuff.

So Clapton was there and we sort of knew each other and we would talk over cups of tea or whatever was going then. So when I did License to Kill it was good to see him again and we sort of talked about old times. He was a real nice guy, a proper gent as they say in England. Nice guy, good to work with, didn’t steal the show or want to be King Kong; he just went along with what we had to do. You know, once you get into a studio setting with people who know what they’re doing everybody is kind of equal.

FZ: Besides the Bond films, you worked on a myriad of other films as well including The Beatles’ A Hard Days Night. How did you get involved with that?

VF: I got this call from Uncle George – Sir George Martin – asking me if I would do this session for a song he had called “Ringo’s Theme” because he wanted a similar sort of feel and expression that I had put into the Bond films and other sort of low guitar solos. So I said, ‘Yeah of course’. So I just turned up and did it and that’s been quite profitable in a small way for me over the years. It was just a case of George happened to hear me and know me. I knew him well because I worked a lot at EMI Studios where he was an A&R man.

FZ: How was George Martin as a Producer?

VF: Very good, very musically knowledgeable. A little aloof, he always thought he was a little above everything if you know what I mean. He always had that sort of aloof attitude but he knew what he was doing. He was a good arranger, a good writer and in fact wrote the scores to one of the Bond films. He was a very accomplished musician but just a little bit aloof.

I remember driving up to London one day to do some sessions and he was being interviewed on the radio. It was the big time when groups were using session musicians like I played, whether it was the group playing, it was me playing on the recording and then they would go out and do the shows and stuff. So they asked on the radio, ‘Do you use session musicians?’ and he said, ‘No, I never use session musicians. They don’t know what’s happening and you have to tell them what to do every second of the time.’ He was so big time, and putting us all down.

About four weeks later we turned up, and it was about four or five of us, and it was a George Martin session. We were all pissed off that he’d been saying this and putting us down so we kind of decided when he put the music out we’d play exactly what he’d written. See what happens is like on the guitar parts you’d just get like E, dash, dash, dash; D, dash, dash, dash; G, dash, dash, dash; E-seventh, dash, dash dash, and you were supposed to make up something for whatever the tune is. So anyway when he counted it in, instead of just doing it we went chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk. He went, ‘Yeah, okay. I know what the beef is, I was taken out of context.’ Like all the politicians say, ‘I misspoke; I didn’t mean that,’ and all that crap. But anyway, George Martin was good to work with, and I always enjoyed working with him because he knew what he was doing.
FZ: Did you ever happen to run into any of The Beatles?

VF: Yeah, when I was working at EMI, they would be there all the time. We used to go into the tearoom, the place where you could get coffee, tea, food and everything, they’d be there and we used to chat. I used to chat with Ringo, well, not so much Ringo, him being a drummer [laughs], but George and McCartney. I actually mixed with McCartney a bit when he did this album called Thrillington (1977), which he produced. They were all nice guys; spoke a bit funny, being from Liverpool [laughs], but good guys, very friendly. I think they were as surprised as anybody at their success, but they enjoyed it and didn’t tear the ass out of it too much like The Who and all those people who took liberties with their fame.
FZ: What are some of the acts that stand out in your mind as being especially enjoyable to work with in the studio?

VF: Well, it comes down to more producers more than acts. I mean, people like say Petula Clark she was very professional and knew what was happening. Shirley Bassey was great. Tom Jones was of course was good. Englebert Humperdinck, Nancy Sinatra came over and did some stuff and I was on her London album; she was very good. Peter Noone and Herman’s Hermits. There were various other groups that I was attached to or went in and added electric guitar on or acoustic guitar. Once they got into a studio environment any kind of big-timeness left them because they realized they were amongst their peers and as they started getting big-time, as a couple of them did, they were soon told to cool it. Some people have over-estimations of what they can do and who they are

FZ: You mentioned that it was the producer who was more important, what were some of the more standout producers to you in that time?

VF: George [Martin] of course and Mickie Most, Shel Talmy. There were other people who were the heads of A&R for Phillips and Pye and EMI Records and Decca like Peter Sullivan who used to do the Tom Jones stuff; all good guys who knew what they wanted. It was a time of when nobody was really that special and everybody sort of worked together as a team. It’s not like now when it seems like everybody wants to be the soloist you know?

FZ: What was Mickie Most like?

VF: Mickie was great. Him and his brothers used to do the circuits singing and doing shows and stuff. He knew the business so you couldn’t put anything past him and he knew what he wanted. You would do about three or four takes for him and he’d go, ‘That’s it guys, that’s it. Great.’ And that WAS it. Some people could never finish up. In fact there was one guy, I can’t remember his name, anyway, Pye Studios was down in the basement of this great big building and you had to go up two flights of stairs to the street. So this producer, he would do a couple of takes then disappear. He would run up the stairs, get in his car, play the tape in his car so that he could hear what it sounded like in his car before he would say yes to a take. I remember he would go up and down these steps like a monkey up a tree. It was fantastic really. They all had their little quirks.

FZ: What have you been up to lately?

VF: Not a lot really. I write music and take it easy. I live in Vegas so I like to do a bit of blackjack. Anyway, I write background music with a fellow name Les Hurdle who was the bass player on all the Donna Summer hits. He started the disco bass you know? I write with him, work with him and a couple of other people, and that’s about it really.

FZ: Well I really appreciate you being so forthcoming about everything. It was a real pleasure to speak with you

VF: Oh, no problem. Thanks again, and take care of yourself.

FZ: Thank you, and I’ll be pulling for you to come up big at the blackjack tables.

VF: [Laughs] That’s my guy. Take care now.

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