Combining strong melodic tunes, glorious choruses, high production values with first class musicianship, The Bruised Romantic Glee Club contains two CD’s. The first disc, entitled ‘Now,’ is set of original material written over the last year by Jakko.

The second CD of this double set, entitled ‘Then,’ features a series of eclectic cover versions of songs including material by Henry Cow, King Crimson and Soft Machine.

The Bruised Romantic Glee Club deploys luscious ballads, mature pop melodies, widescreen dynamic instrumentals and hauntingly beautiful tunes whose lyrical content often borders on the confessional.

It’s not the first time Jakko has ventured into musical autobiography. His Sony Award nominated piece The Road To Ballina (commissioned by BBC Radio 3) explored his upbringing as an adopted child.

With his virtuoso guitar technique and heartfelt, passionate singing voice to the fore, this a poignant and stirring release that will resonate with anyone who has ever loved, lost and danced in 12/8 time.

Jakko is joined by a formidable array of guest contributors to this album.

Reading like a who’s who of the best and most innovative musicians from the UK music scene of the last 30 years they include drummer Gavin Harrison (Porcupine Tree), acoustic bassist Danny Thompson (Pentangle, John Martyn), sax and flute from Mel Collins (King Crimson, Roger Waters) electric bass from Mark King (Level 42) piano & keyboards from Dave Stewart (ex-Hatfield & The North), drummer Ian Wallace (King Crimson, Bob Dylan), Soft Machine bassist, Hugh Hopper, ex-Egg drummer, Clive Brooks and guitarist Robert Fripp (King Crimson). Plus many others.

As well as contributions on two tunes from Robert Fripp, former Crimson Lyricist Pete Sinfield has written a new lyric for Jakko’s Crimson cover of ‘Pictures of a City.’ Now retitled ”Pictures of an Indian City’ it features an Asian re working of the song.

www.jakko.com

Mark King is one of a very select group of bassists that can make slapping fit into a tune without it detracting from the music or sounding like a perpetual solo. In fact, he has it down to the point where you know he is generating a whirlwind of notes and percussion, but somehow it doesn´t clutter. Instead, it just locks the whole song together. He is also one of a very few that can still make it sound fresh and interesting. On top of all the ´fast and furious´, sits this great voice, just made for the radio.

He has brought along the complete band with him on this tour promoting Level 42´s new double CD, The Ultimate Collection.
In this interview he shares his thoughts about that album, ´this not-just-once-more-´round-the-park´ tour, his skills as a bassist and how, in his heart, he finally feels welcome out here in the public eye once again. Oh, and about the curious fact that this man, who has inspired a tremendous number of players, fell into playing bass almost as an afterthought.

It is hard to imagine now that if not for that turn of events we might have never known all the great music and playing this man has provided us with. It also feels a bit odd to think that a bassist of Marks calibre would question whether he and the band were even still welcome out here. But there was a time when he felt the music sounded old, too 80´s, so he pulled the rug on Level 42.

Years rolled by and he felt content to just relax in his small home in Wales, writing tunes. After releasing his second solo album, One Man, he sensed a vacuum out there and thought that perhaps, just maybe, there were people out here who still valued a good voice and a good song.

No bloody kidding Mark!!!

He breezes into the room and picks up the chat as if he had just been in the other room. Totally at ease, he picks things up by talking about his recently completed North American leg of the tour.

Mark King: I think the Canadian people enjoyed the music more than the Americans did. We really went down well there.
I had a great paper review, which is a bit of a rare thing for Level 42. Back when we opened for Steve Winwood in Massey Hall (a venerable old theatre in Toronto, Ontario) and it was just great. We were sort of the young guns then. That was about 1985-86.

Bass Inside: From what we`ve read, you don’t normally have a great rapport with the media. Why so?

Mark King: I´m not wild about the intrusiveness of the media, I have to say. I understand it is a very big part of the job, it´s just a part of the job that I am less comfortable with than writing songs and performing. That was what I thought the deal was in the first place.
That intrusiveness moves to unbelievable degrees, right down to “what´s in your pockets?”, “what sort of shorts do you wear?”, “what do you do on your time off?”.

Particularly at home in the U.K. the press just doesn’t know how low to get. In fact, I quite enjoy touring the continent of Europe, you get into Holland and Belgium and they seem so civilised compared to home these days. Your window on the world becomes things like CNN or BBC World, which I think is a particularly bad channel.

But then when you get your hands back on an English newspaper again…when you are on the road, you always feel a little homesick I think. Just the little things, the familiarity of your surroundings. So then you get a newspaper, you pick it up and you feel embarrassed about the quality of that newspaper and what it´s about.

In the U.K. leg of this tour, Mark and Level 42 chose as their opening act Steve Lawson, a solo bassist with two of his own albums out. Steve tours as a single act, using loops and doubling and other technology to present a complete show on his own. He has also worked with Michael Manring and others and is preparing for a tour in California (U.S., of course!).

We asked Mark what he thought of doubling, looping and in general the technology available these days, and what he feels it does for the craft of bass playing.

Mark King : I think that the limitations that are forced on you by looping make it a really tedious style of music, I have to say.
It doesn´t appeal to me. To have it as a tool is one thing, to be quite honest. I began my musical life as a drummer, but I find drum looping to be tedious also.

Now I don’t find it tedious when it is just repeating an eight bar loop in a song. When you loop, when the melody moves on, you can´t. It´s locked in and it does it again and again and again and again. It´s very one-dimensional.

Bass Inside : As you were that drummer originally, do you feel that allows you certain inroads into an understanding of the connection between bass and drums?

Mark King : I think that what it´s done is make me fortunate enough to find and work with good drummers. It means that I know the difference. There´s only been three proper drummers in Level 42. That was Phil Gould, Gary Husband and Gavin Harrison. Now Gavin was just only for the one tour, so Phil and Gary have been really the only two long-term drummers in the band. They are two amazing drummers!

Bass Inside: This is Gary with you this time?

Mark King : Yeah, it´s Gary.

Bass Inside : Is he a writer as well?

Mark King : Yeah, Gary is a good writer, but it was mainly Phil who did the writing with me in the early years. He was in the very first line-up of Level 42. Gary came in in ´87. Gary is such a rounded musician, as a keyboard player too and as a pianist. He is truly a virtuoso, in fact he plays keyboards in Billy Cobham´s band. Truly musical…

Bass Inside : You have been out on this tour for a while now, but as you were preparing, were there any concerns as to whether people would welcome you back again? I know that at one time you felt that Level 42 had somewhat worn out their welcome, that it felt it was time to just call it a day.

Mark King : Well, I feel more relevant now than I did in 1994. That’s exactly true what you just said. I had said that when we stopped in ´94 it was because we were a band from the 1980´s that had enjoyed a lot of success.
It´s funny though, the more success you get the more blind you can become to what the point of it all is. You see, you start playing games, you start shaping yourself, you start hedging your bets to try and maintain the success somehow.

Now that isn´t the best way to be writing music in the first place. We looked ´round and suddenly it´s 1994. I felt that way through ´92 to ´94. We had been working so hard, for 15 years…the will to do it becomes somehow sapped. You need to take a break. Then you take another look ´round and the whole music scene is completely different. There´s no place for virtuoso players, there´s no place for soloists at all in music. There´s no place for improvisation.

The Brit-Pop thing had splattered itself all over the U.K. Now if that´s where you live, that is what you are exposed to. Then there is that arrogance. I am talking about the bigger bands, bands like Oasis and stuff like that. By what criteria were they making these statements? So I got myself disenchanted. I thought, “I don´t want any part of it any more!”. Just like no one wanted us to be any
part of it anymore , so that was fine. But nothing came along. It wasn´t like somebody picked up the bat and ran with it. So the current Brit-Pop thing ran its course, as boring as it was. People kinda realised that.

People started looking around, but there was NOTHING else. Now there´s this insipid thing called R & B, which for me, if ever there was a misnomer! When I think of R&B, I think of Otis Redding, Sam & Dave. Real artists, real Rhythm & Blues, not this fibbing, I just don´t get it anymore, with the way this stuff is.

I was watching Christina Aguilera on MTV. There was this cacophonous noise that was coming out of the Telly. I can´t remember any of it! It just washed all over me. I am standing there watching her shaking her little body. All these people are just jerking around, jerking off really! Now all the young guys who want to play, who want to aspire to be anything at all in music…where are they gonna go and see people like Gary Husband play? To give them something to aspire to…

When I was 14 years of age, I had bands like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever…all these guys that I could try to be like.

Bass Inside : You said once in an interview that “Music by it´s nature moves on and evolves”. Are you writing these days once more, are you moving on as well?

Mark King : I have to say, I haven´t written much at all lately. If the writing process is simply sitting down in the studio (which it largely always was!), it´s a bit like practising you know.

Bass Inside : Do you go the woodshedding route, honing your craft? Is that what brought you the accolades and the skill at playing bass?

I can´t remember a time where I just sat down and practised playing the bass other than just rehearsing with the band. I never sat at home and ´noodled´. You don´t really have to if you are familiar enough with the instrument, you can really do most of it in your head anyway.

Just sit down and think, you can play things in your head. You don´t have to physically have to have the instrument on. So you might start writing musical ideas in your head that will build up sort of a head of steam, and then finally you do get to sit down, which I do hope will be January or February, when I will make some time to just get the next album under way.

Bass Inside : Will that be a Level 42 album?

Mark King : Yeah, an L42 album.

Bass Inside : What would you say was the most notable thing for you this past year?

At the Queens Jubilee…Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. He had put a band together and worked through a few of his songs. Not so much the ´Acne Faced Hits´, but still the most beautiful songs you ever heard. Those that he had written years and years ago. I just thought, “that guys is truly a genius”.

Obviously a bit of a casualty though, you can see that. Perhaps a victim of that very genius. Often with the truly gifted, there is a price to pay for that genius. When that level of intelligence and awareness is forced through one human body, something has got to give.

It was really moving watching him. But nonetheless, you still couldn´t ignore that fact that he was still calling the shots, he held that band together. Hunkered down into the piano, like he does, but he was watching all around, all the guys in the band. He almost looked like an Evangelical Bible thumper with some sort of funny look on his face.

But the guys in the band just knew he was watching and listening.

Bass Inside : It was great! I have no idea how we got onto that?!

It´s great when things go in directions you never plan upon. The benefits of a live interview…One of things that surprised me was that after all the hit songs that you had written, when you retired Level 42 before, you were a bit concerned that people would accept your own songs. You had some doubt as to whether you could find someone who would want them?

Mark King : Some ideas that come out, it´s really funny, when you are making music, what you really want to do is just throw the reins off and go with it.

But when you present it to people, they can look really shocked sometimes. I am almost offended. You´ve gone down the path, the trip of creating the music, so you´re up to speed with it. But the fact that you started here and ended up right over there, when you play it to people, they are way over here still. So you say, “Listen, what you think of this?”

This had happened a lot with past managers, not so much past members, but other people that you do want to get it. Worst of all are the record company people. You play it for them and suddenly they just freeze. You can´t help but think, “Oh, no!”.

You know this better than I, more often than not these record label people don’t even own an instrument, yet they are making decisions on the lives and careers of those that have made music their whole world. It is an unbalanced situation.

That is the real tragedy and the travesty of it all…you have got to go through them to get this out…(he pauses) or you used to have to! I realise that I don’t have to do that anymore.

Bass Inside : But you danced with Polydor for this newest release?

Mark King : Well, I helped them out because it helps me to help them out and it keeps the whole thing going. It was a truly symbiotic thing. I wanted to get out there with Level 42 again.

If I go out there by myself, I still play Level 42 songs, but nobody comes to see just Mark King. More people come to see Level 42. The (Level 42) U.K. tours were a sell-out, the Dutch shows were a sell-out, Germany has picked up really well.

Bass Inside : Over the years you have been told you are an exceptional bassist many times. How do you first view yourself, as a singer, a songwriter or as a bassist?

Mark King : This wasn´t part of any great plan, everything has evolved very nicely. When Level 42 began in 1980, I just wanted to be a drummer in a band. But it just didn´t work that way. Phil had the drums. I had gone out and joined a disastrous band in Austria on the understanding that when the tour was over they would give me a ticket back home to the U.K.
They kept my gear as collateral to pay them back for that trip home. That took months and months to pay back. So they kept all my drums, I had nothing. So I borrowed a bass guitar. In fact, the first record we cut, Love Making Love, was using the borrowed studio bass. It was a Shergold Modulator actually.

It had no pickup screws in the neck position actually. It was the oddest thing, when you leaned forward it would go ´buoomp´ and stick itself to the strings. Now I didn’t know what the hell gaffer tape was back then (which of course now I know, Rock and Roll runs on gaffer tape!), so I had to do the whole thing leaning back in my chair! That was on the first track, but it was all borrowed equipment. Phil was the only guy who had his own instrument.

Bass Inside : Even in those early days, did anyone say to you, “Hey guy, you may just have a knack for this!”?

Mark King : How it happened was that the guy who got us into the studio for the first one, who owned All Ears Records in North London, he came along and heard us at rehearsal. We were all jamming on different instruments. We were hopping around. I would do a bit on guitar, a little bit on bass, have a go on drums while Phil played keyboards. So we all were hopping around.

So during Love Meeting Love I was on the bass at that time and he said, “I like that one! I don’t think much of the other tracks, but I quite like that one! If you can get a guy to sing it, I will record it for you”.

And that’s what started it all. The guy said, “That’s the way you have to record this band”. It´s all really odd, isn´t it?

Bass Inside : It truly is, a lot of people figured that you just gravitated towards the bass as a new-found home.

Mark King : Originally that wasn’t where I was gonna be parking myself. So back to your question, the bass has been a really good vehicle for me to get my musical ideas out there and to make a statement. I had made my ´mark´ out there and that’s a tough thing to do.

Bass Inside : A lot of people assign a lot of ego to their playing, so with all the positive response you have received on your playing over the years, did you fall for that at any time?

Mark King : Ego is the very thing that gets you out there. I have noticed with all musicians, well, I don’t know any musician that isn´t all fired up about what they do. I mean, the way that I came into bass was a rather circuitous route, but when I got there and people started responding to what I was doing, I realised that I could really run with this thing!

Bass Inside : So making it in the ´biz´ requires that one is a bit of the primadonna?

Mark King : When you start, well, I was proclaiming myself within three weeks of cutting this record, journalists would ask, “What what is so special about this band?” ´Cos we had nothing. So they were saying “Impress us with something!” So I said, “Well, for starters, I am the greatest bass player in the world!” And the guy went, “Oh, okay”, and he wrote this down…and I said, “And another thing” and on and on…

Then it came out in print! So then, next time we did an interview, the journalists say, “So we read that you´re the best bassplayer in the world”. Then they start taking it as part of your bio! So I said, “Yeah, absolutely”. Then you sit back and realise, “Oh shit!!! Maybe I took in a bit too much territory!”

Bass Inside : Well, many believe you rose to the occasion. So you still don’t endorse any companies in particular? Why is that?

Mark King : Well, because if I fancy using another bass or strings, that is entirely up to me. I have endorsed loads of things because I am using them at that time! And if the guys want me to do that, then that’s fine. I have never ever signed a contract with anyone. It has to be that if I change my mind in three weeks time, then that’s just the way it goes.

Bass Inside : So the endorsee best runs with it while it lasts, tossing out ads to make those sales as quick as the endorsement is accurate ?

Mark King : That’s right, ´cos I might not be there later. Right now, I think Gibson pulled the plug on them, but I am still using Trace Elliot gear, because that’s what I like to use! I could go to Eden or Glockenklang or SWR, or the Ashdown dudes (they are sort of friends of mine), and say “Yeah, fit me up with some big rig or something”. But I can´t load myself down too much, because right now with this tour, I need that 80´s sound.

Bass Inside : So are you back to Alembic´s then?

Mark King : No, actually what I have done is gone the pre-Alembic route. I am using some basses that I co-designed with Rob Green of Status Graphite called the King Bass. (At that point Mark flies out the room and returns with two basses. He points to the nut end of the neck, where between the nut itself and the string lock there is a hollowed out and extended area.) It´s called a ´Bend Well´. (He hits a string and indents the string. The pitch climbs about two full tones. As well, the machine heads are at the other end.)

Bass Inside : But is it good for staying in pitch?

Mark King : Oh, it´s great! It allows me to tune while I´m working. You don’t always have the luxury, when fronting a band, to stop and reach down to the headstock and tune it up. So you want something that is really stable. It has a graphite through-neck as well. (He hands it to me…the action is incredibly low with no perceptible fret rattle.) It´s still very light and very lively, isn´t it?

Bass Inside : Do you ever just head into a music instrument shop, just to see what they have got in stock?

Mark King : No, I haven´t really. I guess I have just been really spoiled, with having the Alembics, the Jay Dees and the Status´ basses there just sort of always there in the house.

Bass Inside : On this bass here, can you tell me a bit about the artwork?

Mark King : Well, that’s the Princess, the logo from the very first Level 42 album. Rob (Green) asked me what I would like to do to one of the three basses he gave me that would make it personal.

Bass Inside : There is a magazine out there whose title consists of one alphabetic letter. Note my effort to circumvent revenge here! That mag can be brilliant, but in one particular way it is a One Trick Pony in that it seems hell-bent on making the artist look the fool at some point in the interview…they have not been kind to you in the past…

Mark King : Absolutely not!

Bass Inside : If they were to ask to talk to you, would you talk to them?

Mark King : Oh, I will always talk to anybody. On the off-hand chance that one day they might get it right, you know! But I don’t think I have to prove it to any of these guys, in fact, bring it on! I think I might get worried if they started saying, “He´s really a nice guy!”. I would think, “Something´ s up here”!!!

Bass Inside : The Volkshaus is a middle-sized concert house or auditorium in Zurich, Switzerland. The main floor was filled to the walls with those who knew Mark and the band still had it. Level 42 filled the room with yesterday and the people just ate it up. Yet somehow it didn’t seem like a trip down memory lane, perhaps because the band played like it was their first time through. As they left the stage, Mark promised they would be back next year to tour the new Level 42 album.

We´re looking forward to it!