Previously Unpublished: A Conversation with Charlie Barrett, Original Bassist for The Fixx
So I’ll start with the back story, shall I?
When I did this interview with Charlie Barrett, the original bassist for The Fixx, it was with the intent of doing an oral history of the band’s debut album, Shuttered Room, in conjunction with the LP’s 30th anniversary.
I can’t quite recall what happened with that plan of action, especially since—based on an offhanded remark in the final moments of my chat with Charlie—I’d apparently gotten the ball rolling toward doing a phoner with keyboardist Rupert Greenall and had been assured by lead singer Cy Curnin that he was up for a chat whenever we could successfully schedule a conversation. I don’t believe I ever talked to Rupert, however, and I think I’d convinced myself to wait on doing any interviews with any of the other band members until I could get Cy on the phone. The problem, I think, was that I was using Facebook DMs as my method for setting up the interview with Cy, and although he was ostensibly agreeable to chatting, actually pinning him down on a date and time was damned near impossible.
In fact, I just checked my Facebook messages, and this was our last exchange:
Me:
Hi, Cy… I know you’re busy, so I just thought I’d follow up and see if you’re still up for a chat.
Cy:
Yup.
I know, I know, I probably should’ve followed up and said, “Great! So when’s good for you?” If I’d done that, then we probably would’ve ended up doing the interview. But I didn’t, and knowing me at the time, I probably thought, “Well, he said, ‘Yup,’ but then he didn’t offer up when a good time might be, and I don’t want to keep annoying him, so I’ll just wait until he replies, and if he doesn’t reply, then I guess I won’t do the oral history.”
Fast-forward a freaking decade, and here we are at the 40th anniversary of Shuttered Room. Seems a little late for me to follow up with Cy now, so I decided I’d just go ahead and transcribe my interview with Charlie. It’s a fun conversation, and I hope you Fixx fans out there really enjoy it.
So I'm doing a piece on the 30th anniversary of Shuttered Room, just to make both of us feel old.
[Laughs.] I saw the guys the other day, actually. We all look terribly old. But it's a long, long, long time ago, isn't it? It's like when your parents used to say... [In a trembling voice.] "It's been 30 years ago..." Anyway, it's extraordinary, really, but there we are: we're still hanging on.
Since it was the debut album for the band, I guess I'll start at the very beginning: how did you first find your way into The Fixx?
Well, it's quite an interesting story. The first time I came across them was for an audition. This is me personally. I'll just tell you my story. I auditioned for a band called The Portraits. That was in 1977. I've written a few of these things down because my brain won't work anymore. [Laughs.] So that was in 1977, and we had a manager called Tom Watkins, who was managing various bands and ended up managing Pet Shop Boys and Bros, amongst others. I don't know if you know them...
I do, actually. I've interviewed Luke Goss a couple of times.
Oh, okay, there we are. Well, at that point, Tom was kind of quite on the way up. Anyway, he was about to sign the band to EMI Publishing - this was in the days when you had a publishing deal and a record deal together - and we duly signed that, and we also signed a deal with a record company called Ariola, which was actually Arista, and that was really the first incarnation of The Fixx. The lineup was basically the Shuttered Room lineup less the guitarist, who was a guy called Tony McGrail then. Anyway, he left, and we auditioned, and Jamie West-Oram came to audition and stood out miles above everyone else, so he joined. That was in '79, I think. And we changed the name to The Fix. With one "X," as you probably know. We then left Tom Watkins as manager and joined a guy named Frank Sansom. He ran a record company called 101 Records, and we were on a couple of sampler albums for his 101 Club.
Now, the other thing I forgot to mention: the Portraits put out a record. A couple of records, actually, or singles as they were in those days. [Laughs.] One was called "Hazards in the Home," and then the other one was called "Little Women," which is somewhere hiding on the internet! We didn't sell many. We sold a few.
But we then moved on to our new incarnation, The Fix, and signed to MCA. But having signed up, we then changed our management again, to a guy called Geoff Jukes. He used to manage Camel in the '70s, and he now manages Bob Geldof and a band called Underworld. So he basically sorted out our business, which... I think we renewed our EMI publishing deal, and we signed up all the MCA stuff. And we went into a studio called Farmyard Studios, which was in the middle of the countryside in Surrey.
My memory is that it was an extraordinarily posh place, and we were all on the dole, with absolutely no money, and we were then plunked into this hyper-luxurious studio with a desk about as long as a runway at Heathrow with a producer called Rupert Hine and an engineer. It's a residential studio, and my memories of it are that it was a sort of luxurious place. We each had our own beautiful room in the country in this restored manor house, and we had a dining room with food continually piled into mountains around the edge of the table, and in the fridges, cold meats and beer. And we just kind of scarfed a lot, you know? As much as we could. And as quick as we scarfed it, it was replaced. But that was a great, fantastic welcome to the world of people with lots of money paying for us to do things. [Laughs.]
We spent... Oh, I can't remember, maybe two or three, four weeks recording there, in the days when it was all done in old style. You know, you bring the drums down, and we'd take a day, maybe two days to get the drums down, and then sort of a day on the bass, a day on the guitar. I can't remember exactly how it went, other than we played a lot of Space Invaders, I know that. [Laughs.] We had a machine in the studio, and I think most of the time we were sitting waiting for someone to put their part down, the rest of us were playing that! And sure enough, the album was released in '82. But I think we all got on alright. We didn't take too many drugs, and we worked hard because we sort didn't realize that we didn't necessarily have to work hard. You know, we were all very fresh-faced and keen. And it went very well. We all got on with each other. Not too many arguments. So that's sort of my memory of the whole thing. It was a long time ago!
Well, I've got a few blanks that maybe you can help fill in. For one, do you recall why Tony McGrail ended up leaving as guitarist? Was it by choice?
It was just by choice, yeah. He left because he wasn't happy. I think he wasn't happy with the character of the band. He didn't sort of storm off. He just felt he wasn't quite right for the band in some way or other. And I think a couple of the guys in the band didn't think he was the right kind of player. He was a rocker. [Laughs.[ In the Les-Paul-and-Marshall sort of vein. So I think that was the reason for that. But it was an amicable kind of split, really.
Although there was a strange sort of incident when...we used to use this disused factory to rehearse, and we'd have a generator in there. I think we owed the landlord some money - I think it was only ten pounds a week or something like that. It was very, very little. But we ended up not paying, as you do at that age, and we came in one day and half the gear was gone! So they took their money like that. We were a bit pissed off, to say the least. That was right around the time Tony left. Right after. He'd had enough, so he ended up leaving.
As you mentioned, you guys started out as The Fix and then eventually switched things up and added the second "X" to your name. The report has always been that MCA was worried about the drug implications of "fix."
That's right, yeah. To get the name in the first place, we literally all sat around - I think it was with our then-manager Frank Sansom - and we all put names in a hat. We couldn't think of a name, so it was a random choice, The Fix, but we thought it was quite good. I don't even know who thought of it. It wasn't me, anyway! But the record company, they didn't like it at all. They thought it was too much of a negative connotation toward the drug scene, so they wanted us to change it. We couldn't have cared less, really, so we just went along with it.
When the time came to tour behind the album... I know you left before the second album was recorded, but were you on the Shuttered Rooms tour?
We did the European tour. I didn't do the American stuff. But we started off in Europe. The "Stand or Fall" single was released, and that got quite heavy airplay. It got good airplay, and we charted in various European countries, and we played gigs in France and Belgium and Holland...and Germany, too, I think. That was the first kind of go we had at touring. Oh, and we did some TV shows in France. But that was kind of it, really. That took us on our first leg of promotion, and then after that I left the band.
Were you just not up for the hassle?
Well, it was kind of musical differences, I suppose you might call it. Again, it was a bit of a strange case of history repeating itself, since that's why Tony McGrail left as well. But Cy [Curnin] and...Adam [Woods], I think it was, thought I wasn't right in some way. I'm not quite sure why. But they just decided that they didn't want me anymore! [Laughs.] I think I was a bit too nippy, on the cranky side. If you know the albums well, then you probably notice a big change from the first album. The first album was full of soul, which is my kind of thing, and I was constantly stopping and making them change key and kind of bossing them around a bit, I think. The second is much more kind of...riff-oriented. That's the expression that I think is probably the right one. So that was that, really. I was on to other things.
Fair enough. Well, the only other thing I wanted to do was just kind of run through the titles of the songs from Shuttered Room, and any specific memory that leaps to mind, just let me have it.
Yeah! Go on, then...
“Some People”
Right, well, I remember that one was recorded for the album, and it was more or less exactly as the demo was, actually. What used to happen in the studio with demos was that Cy used to write his own vocal parts, and it was...much more lavishly vocalized, if you like, with big three-part harmonies in the chorus. But that was all taken out by the producer for a much simpler kind of thing. I don't know what that did chart-wise, but I know it was released as a single. I know it didn't do much, anyway!
“Stand or Fall”
Ah, right, now that was an interesting song, because when we were recording that, we did a demo for EMI, and they liked it, and as we were recording it, it felt like kind of a hit. You know, we did quite a lot of stuff in the studio, but as it evolved, we kind of looked at each other and went, "Hmmm, I think we've got something here." It seemed to be the right thing at the right time, and it just felt more than a little bit traditional in its roots." Like "Red Skies," it's about nuclear war, I suppose, as far as I remember. I couldn't understand most of what Cy wrote, actually. [Laughs.] But I think that's what it was about!
“Cameras in Paris”
Now that one... Again, we demoed that, but we never actually finished the demo! The thing about that one that I remember is that when we recorded it, we used a grand piano, and we struck the strings inside the piano rather than playing the actual piano itself. We had the top open, and we hit the strings with a plectrum. Which was sort of a strange one, but there we are, that's what we did. [Laughs.] I remember it used to have a different lyric in it. It used to go, "Total exposure is automatic / The agent's name is Harris." Which I thought was much better, actually! But the producer wanted to change it, so that was that.
“Shuttered Room”
Yeah, I think the idea of that was that it was a bit of a nod to what was happening in the English charts. It was quite a frenetic, riff-y song, full of synth effects and so on. It wasn't one of my favorites, honestly. I don't think it was ever released as a single, ironically. But I wasn't very happy with it anyway.
“The Fool”
Oh, yeah, of course! That's a funny one. Well, that was one that sort of evolved in rehearsal. I think we just played the riff over and over again, and I think Cy just kept thinking up things to put in it. And it got weirder and weirder. I think we demoed it in the rehearsal room. There was an old pub, and we used to rehearse in the back of it and just leave our stuff set up there. Actually, no, it wasn't a pub. It was a strip club, actually! [Laughs.] And for some reason, the whole club was closed down, so we just had this club to rehearse in. I don't know how we managed not to disturb anybody! Anyway, that was written on the fly, really. We just played the riff and Cy just adlibbed, and it eventually settled into a song. But it was our only song to be recorded without click tracks. It was in the days before we did that, so getting the timing bang on was important on that one. I think it took quite a long time to do, though, because we kept adding things and taking them off because we didn't like them. Yeah, that was an interesting song to do...
“Lost Planes”
Yep, that was the first song we did, and that was actually a single. In England, anyway. We played that one on a program called The Old Grey Whistle Test, which at the time was kind of the biggest rock show. So that was interesting. I don't think it really worked, though. It didn't do anything on the charts, as far as I know. Not much, anyway. I'm trying to muster something else, but...I can't remember much else about it, really!
“I Live”
Right, now this is an interesting one. I thought this was going to be a big hit. I thought it had all the ingredients. I thought it was a great song. It's kind of a middle-of-the-road, old-fashioned song. But they decided not to release it as a single. I thought it would've made a good single myself. But, again, I don't remember much about recording it!
What we had done was, we'd played these songs, we'd done lots and lots of gigs, we'd demoed them, and by the time we came in to the album, it was really just putting them down the way we played them live and, you know, obviously reconstructing them while doing overdubs and whatnot. But the studio experience... It wasn't a writing-in-the-studio type of thing at all. We had way more songs than we did for the album, so it really was just the A&R people at MCA and our manager and us deciding what we'd put on. But we had at least twice as many songs as ended up on the album. And we knew them so well we could play them all backwards. So it was really just running them down.
As far as thinking of ideas in the studio... We spent quite a lot of time trying to get new sounds. We had a thing called a Prophet 5, which was the first polyphonic synth, which we bought from the States. That was a big thing. With Rupert being a keyboard player, he was doing a lot of experimentation with that. And it was the early days of when studios were really starting to get lots of interesting gadgets, so there was a lot of fiddling about with different gadgets and putting things through other things and trying to make weird noises. [Laughs.] So I think that's what we did on that. The middle eight, we did some weird bits on that. So at least I've remembered that!
“Red Skies at Night”
Right! Okay, well, this was our favorite. I think everyone thought this was going to be the one. I certainly did. And it turned out to be the band's signature tune! Again, it was really sparse. I think we did two takes. In the days when you were doing it with 2" tape, you couldn't do lots and lots and lots of takes. Well, you couldn't keep them, anyway. I think we did two versions of it. But it just kind of felt like a big song, and it turned out to be our biggest seller of the lot off that album. We spent a lot of time at the mix stage of that one, getting all the sounds right. And we did a 12" version of it as well, kind of an extended mix. I think I like it because it features the bass a lot. It kind of anchored the thing. So I felt like I really came into my own on that one. [Laughs.] But even so, it was our favorite song, all of us.
Okay, so those are all the songs that are on both the American and British versions of the album, but I know the UK version of the album had "Sinking Island" and "Time in a Glass," both of which were dropped from the US version in favor of "I Found You" and "The Strain."
Yeah, now that's interesting. "The Strain" was something that... I would say that the interpretation was not good. The original demo, which I have a copy of, is much, much slower and much more kind of grandiose and much more atmospheric, and for some reason they kind of... [Hesitates.] Actually, I think it was us that kind of speeded it up by mistake. We somehow did it too fast, and the engineer and producer thought it was great. But it was an older style of rock and roll. It was the '80s. Everyone was using synths and big, heavy guitars or nothing at all, unfortunately. The original version was a personal favorite of mine. It also used to have bigger harmonies.
Do you have particular memories about any of those other tracks?
"I Found You," we used to start the show with that. Because it was a bit of an up-tempo thing, and it had kind of a bass guitar and bass synth doubling up, it was quite an effective starting number.
I think "Sinking Island" was written... [Hesitates.] I remember demoing it in EMI Studios, but I can't remember much about the actual recording of it! I think the recording... I haven't really got any anecdotes about it. Most of it was done in the same kind of way, which was to record the backing track and replace some of it. The drums, we'd probably keep most of them. And then we'd our parts one by one. But I can't remember much about that one in particular.
"Time in a Glass," I can't remember much about that one, either, except for that I was very pleased with my bass parts. I remember thinking they were quite effective.
And "Sinking Island," yeah, that was written in about a minute. [Laughs.] I just sort of played it, and we went, "Okay, that's good," and we just did it, and that was it. So I don't even know why that was even included. I don't think it was very good, actually!
Lastly, we just kind of touched on the fact that he produced the album, but what do you remember about the experience of working with Rupert Hine?
Oh, Rupert Hine was great! In fact, I saw him recently down in the studio I own, in the rehearsal complex. He comes in occasionally. He was a great guy. He was a very gentle character who more or less translate what we'd done. He wasn't a particularly creative producer, he just had a way with sounds. The demos and the final versions of what we did were actually very similar, but he's very, very good at getting exactly the right sound and changing the cheap-sounding sounds to expensive-sounding sounds. [Laughs.] As you'd imagine in a decent studio!
But he was very encouraging and a very nice guy. Normally he was no drinks or drugs, only cups of tea. He was very civilized. He'd stop for dinner, and we'd all sit around the dinner table. It was all very genteel, actually. We used to work basically from about midday til 6 pm, then take two or three hours off and sit around and have a good, decent meal with all the engineers and everybody who ran the complex. And then we'd stagger back in and try to do some other stuff, which normally ended up in failure because we'd had a couple of glasses of wine. [Laughs.] But it was a very civilized situation. Unfortunately, I had to go back to reality after about three or four weeks and return to my tiny hovel, a small flat. But as I said, it was a very nice taste of that side of things, and it was a very, very enjoyable experience all around.