Legendary guitarist revisits the glory days of Fastway
By Peter Lindblad
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| The Comeback Kid: Eddie Clark |
Just as “Fast” Eddie Clarke was getting back on his feet in
1982 and putting the ugliness of his shocking departure from Motorhead behind
him, fate pulled the rug out from under the guitar great. For months, Clarke and Pete Way, who had then recently
walked away from UFO, had been plotting their next move and in doing so, they
recruited a talented crew of rock and roll mercenaries for a potential
supergroup that aimed to shake up the balance of power in heavy metal.
Former Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley was already in the
fold when they discovered a singer from Ireland with the screeching,
switchblade-wielding voice of an angry god in Dave King, who would later go on
to front the Emerald Isle-meets-America punks Flogging Molly. The rehearsals
had been scintillating. Every piece of the puzzle was in place. Then, just as
quickly as it had all come together, something happened that drove the project
dubbed Fastway off the rails.
“I’ll tell you what, man. It was fantastic,” recalls Clarke,
talking about those early Fastway sessions. “Of course, we put so much into it,
and it was fantastic, and then Pete fucking disappeared! We go to fucking
rehearsals, and I’d say, ‘Where’s Pete?’ ‘Well, we don’t know.’ So, I went
around the office and I said, ‘Where’s Pete?’ And they said, ‘We heard he’s
going with Ozzy Osbourne.’ I said, ‘What?’ Apparently, Sharon [Osbourne] had
offered him a job with Ozzy, ‘cause they were doing three [shows at Wembley
Stadium] here in London. And they didn’t have a bass player, or their bass
player couldn’t make it or something. So they asked Pete to do it, and Pete
agreed. I didn’t see him again for seven years.”
As is often the case
in such matters, the original Fastway was undone by record company
entanglements, as Clarke would find out. Years later, the two would reconcile
and rehash what had happened. “I was coming out of my flat in London and who was walking
along the street with his girlfriend? Pete,” recounts Clarke. “I said, ‘Pete.
It’s you.’ And we had a cup of tea and a chat and all that. And I mean he’s
such a lovely bloke.”
As Clarke tells it, he invited Way’s label, Chrysalis, to
the studio to review the demos they’d made. Only Chrysalis never showed. “I
mean, it had been three days, and I said, ‘Well, what’s the problem here?’
recounted Clarke. “I said, ‘Well, okay. Come to a showcase at the rehearsal
room.’ They didn’t show up. But CBS did show up, and my business guy – because
we’d gotten a manager by then, an accountant who was helping me out – he said,
they’ve got Billy Squier’s management and Gary Moore, and he said, ‘Well, what
do you want to do?’ I said, ‘Well, look. Let’s play it this way: The first one
with a check on the table, we’ll take it.’”
Ready to make a deal, Clarke remembers, “I didn’t even care
what the amount was. I said, ‘The first one who puts their money where their
mouth is, they can have the band.’ I thought that was fair, you know. Well, CBS
bikes over a check and within two hours, there’s a check on the table. It’s
just a down payment, but of course, Chrysalis got to raving and said we’re not
going to let Pete go.”
Try as he might to smooth things over, Clarke couldn’t get
Chrysalis to cut Way loose. “I said, ‘How come you’re not going to let this go? I’ve
given you every opportunity to sign the band,’” said Clarke. “They said, ‘No,
no, no. We’re not going to let Pete go.’ I went up to their offices and said
you’ve got to sort this out. But it really upset Pete.” And Clarke believes
that is ultimately why he took the Ozzy offer, “ … and that was that – which
was a tragedy.”
Although Fastway went on to record one of the most
underrated debut albums in metal history, 1983’s hard-charging, bluesy haymaker
Fastway, and produced six more LPs of
varying quality, including 1984’s All
Fired Up, 1986’s Waiting For The Roar
and The World Waits For You, 1987’s Trick Or Treat soundtrack, 1988’s On Target and 1990’s Bad Bad Girls, the band’s star-crossed
first chapter came to an ignominious conclusion as the ‘90s ushered in the era
of grunge. As for Clarke, he often wonders what might have been had Way stayed
on.
“I never really got over Pete leaving, ‘cause you know, it
was our thing,” said Clarke. “And so Pete leaving was … I never really
recovered to be honest. I never recovered.”
Redemption Songs
In April, Clarke and a revamped Fastway, including
vocalist/bassist Toby Jepson, released Eat
Dog Eat, a tasty, satisfying dish of meat-and-potatoes, no frills hard rock
that’s a welcome return to form for a band that’s been away far too long.
Harkening back to the street-tough blues rock, razor-sharp guitars and thumping
rhythms of Fastway’s eponymous debut album, Eat
Dog Eat emphasizes a back-to-basics approach that targets and hits the
erogenous zones of anyone who fancies old-school, early ‘70s metal dressed up
in frayed denim and leather.
For Clarke, recording Eat
Dog Eat was a chance to right two wrongs – namely 1988’s On Target and 1990’s Bad, Bad Girls, the two records that
sullied Fastway’s reputation and discouraged Clarke so thoroughly that he
avoided stepping foot in a formal recording studio for two decades.
About recording Eat
Dog Eat, Clarke said, “We went to a studio I used in the late ‘80s. There
were a couple of dodgy Fastway records at the end there, On Target and Bad, Bad Girls,
which actually didn’t have much to do with me, but they were done at this
studio in Lincolnshire – it’s an old chapel. So I revisited that, and I’d
forgotten how great it was to set up in the chapel live. And we just started
jamming, and I’d just forgotten what a blast it was to be in the studio, to be
backed by big monitors and all that. For me, it was the memory of how great
recording can be and listening back to it and saying, ‘This is great, man’ and
playing a solo and thinking, ‘Wow, wow. I’ve done it. I love it. That’ll do
it.’ I enjoyed every minute of it, and I can only say, it was the best money
I’ve ever spent in my life.”
Feeling vindicated by the lean, mean sonic quality and
hard-hitting nature of Eat Dog Eat,
Clarke had long been troubled by how he’d left things with Fastway all those
years ago. “Well, in the ‘90s, or really the end of the ‘80s, I was
messed up, you know,” said Clarke. “The last two, the On Target and Bad, Bad Girls
albums, I wasn’t on ‘em really. I did a little bit of help with them, but that
was it, because I was in a bit of a state. And the guy [Lea Hart, who replaced
original Fastway vocalist Dave King] that took over by then – ‘cause I’d lost
track of it before and I lost track of it again – he kind of took over and sort
of just angled it the way he wanted it to go, with keyboards and all that. Of
course, for the second album, Bad Bad
Girls, I was actually in the hospital most of the time, in rehab ‘cause I
was really ill. I got really ill. I was close to death, and I was really
tanking it with the old booze. So I was in rehab for five weeks, and they let
me out for one weekend to go up and have a listen to what was going on. But you
know, I got back to the old hospital and the album was kind of done without me.
And so, when I hit the ‘90s, I stopped drinking and I had to stop drinking
because I was in such a mess, and that takes a little bit of a while to get
over.”
In recovery, after doing a solo album in 1993 – which
featured Lemmy singing on one of the tracks – that fizzled thanks to the rise of
Brit-pop in the U.K., Clarke retreated from the public eye, buying a little
house in the west of England where he “… just hung out there, just played a bit
and just did a little bit of recording at home … and generally just wasted my
time.” A call from Lemmy drew him out.
“What happened was, Lemmy called me in about 1999 and we
were talking,” said Clarke. “And he invited me down to the 25th
anniversary of Motorhead and he said, ‘Well look, why don’t you come down?’ And
I said, ‘Okay, I will.’ He said, ‘Come to the sound check. We’ll work out what
we’re going to do and all that.’ I was really chuffed that Lemmy phoned me, so
I went down there and I did that, and it kind of started me back up a bit.”
Ready to get back in the saddle, Clarke set about restoring
his legacy. The way he went about it speaks to the man’s preference for that
which is simple and uncomplicated. “So the next few years – I've got a little studio built down
here – I started to try to get new equipment in,” said Clarke. “And then about
2005, I’m starting to write a bit of material, I’m working on new stuff. Then
the record company asked me if I’d put an anthology together, so I put an
anthology together in 2006. And then 2007 came along, and there was the offer
of doing some Fastway shows. I mean, I kind of got Lemmy to thank for that
because he got me back into believing in myself.”
Still, Clarke wondered if anybody still cared about him or
Fastway. Was anybody clamoring for their return? As it turned out, the answer
was a resounding “yes.” “If you’re gone too long away, you tend to think that
everybody’s forgotten about you and nobody gives a sh*t,” said Clarke. “But
when I got down with Motorhead in Brixton, the crowd went absolutely ape-sh*t.
They really did, and I was really chuffed. And I thought, ‘Well, hang on, maybe
I should be doing some more here’ … and that made me realize that there were
people out there who didn’t want me to drop dead just yet.”
Turning the Ignition
Back in 1982, however, Clarke’s career, though, was on life
support when he split from Motorhead. Upon returning to the U.K. after the
divorce, the realization of just how dire his situation was hit Clarke full
force.
“It was, “Oh, f**k. What am I going to do now?’” said
Clarke. “I was heartbroken to be honest. We had a bit of a set-to, but I never
ever imagined that I wouldn’t be in Motorhead. I thought we were there for
life. And it’s funny how circumstances … they rally against you. Suddenly,
you’ve got all these things going on that dictate the way things are going, and
you just couldn’t even imagine that it would go that way. It wasn’t even on the
menu, me leaving the band. But, one row and then another and they didn’t want
me in the band anymore, and when I said, ‘Look, let’s carry on.’ They told me
to f**k off. You know, ‘We don’t want you anymore,’ and I came back to England
on the next plane over. And I remember tottering down the streets with half a
bottle of vodka in me pocket, thinking, ‘What am I going to do now?’”
Complicating matters was the fact that Clarke and the rest
of Motorhead lived in the same house in England. So, he had to move out. With
no place to live and none of his equipment, which was still with the band in
America, Clarke felt a bit lost. He also had no money to speak of. “I’ve got no money, because we never got any money in those
days,” said Clarke. “We never really got paid, you know. A couple hundred well,
you know, $250 a week, but … well, you don’t really need a lot when you’re on
the road and everything’s paid for. You don’t kick up a stink. So I was poor,
and they were very difficult times. And of course, we were huge here. We were
Motorhead. So, it was a bit weird really. We had #1 albums and songs out … no
money of course, because managers don’t like giving you money (laughs). They
keep you under the yolk, you know.”
There was someone who understood all too well what was
happening to Clarke. It was Way, who was undergoing a separation from his band,
UFO. Somebody decided to play matchmaker. “I got a call from somebody at the Motorhead office in
London, somebody who obviously felt a bit sorry for me or whatever,” said
Clarke. “And it came out of the blue, and I said, ‘What’s this? I didn’t expect
to hear from you.’ They said, ‘We just thought we’d let you know that Pete Way
has left UFO and would you like to get together with him?’ And I thought, ‘Hey,
I’ve got nothing going on here.’ I said, ‘Yeah, cool.’”
Previously, the only contact Clarke and Way had ever had was
in the pubs. “I mean, I knew Pete a little bit, but only from being drunk
together in the Marquee [the venerable London concert venue],” said Clarke.
“We’d never had much to say, but … ‘Hey, do you wanna have a drink?’
‘Fantastic.’ (laughs) So, I didn’t really know Pete. I knew he was a nice guy,
but that was all. But we got together, and we hit it off right away because we
both liked to drink. I had a drinking problem. He had a drinking problem. We
had our drinking problems together, and it was a lot of fun. I think we were
both relieved that we found someone who was in the same position.”
With Clarke on guitar and Way on bass, the budding
partnership began laying the foundation for what would become Fastway by
finding a rehearsal space … and a new friend. “That’s when we met Topper,” said
Clarke, referring to Topper Headon, drummer for punk heroes The Clash.
By way of explanation, Clarke related how he and Way went to
find the guy who ran the place where Motorhead once jammed. “Motorhead used to
rehearse at this lovely place, a big old house in Notting Hill. We said, ‘Why
don’t we go there and see if we can strike a deal with the guy?’ So we went
around there to see the guy and said, ‘Can you sign us up for a few rehearsals?
I can’t pay you immediately, but I can when things pick up.’ He said, ‘Yeah, no
problem.’ And who was there? Topper Headon from The Clash, the drummer! And we
all got chatting and we had a laugh, and he said, ‘My drums are here. Why don’t
we have a rehearsal?’ So, the next day, we all picked up and borrowed a couple
of amps that were out the back there, plugged in and off we went. But we had a
couple of weeks, and playing with Topper, it was brilliant. It really was fun.
We’d all laugh and get pissed and then go back and make some noise.”
Though word was getting around that a new supergroup was
taking shape, Headon did not sign up for Fastway. He had other obligations.
“So, then, of course, Topper did have a few problems with The Clash, and he had
a few problems anyway, one thing and another,” said Clarke. “So, he said, ‘Look
guys, I’d love to do it, but I can’t really. I’m just not well enough really.’”
No matter, Way and Clarke weren’t through taking
applications. “By this time, we were doing a few interviews in newspapers and
people had gotten wind of it, that this could be the first heavy metal
supergroup, with members from UFO and Motorhead,” remembered Clarke. “And
that’s when we sort of decided to advertise; in these interviews, we’d
advertise we were looking for drummers. So we used to get all these tapes every
day. We’d have about 50 tapes coming in every day … well, maybe not 50, maybe
20 or 30 in like a carrier bag, you know. Every day these tapes would fly in
and Pete and I would listen to them, and all that.”
Serendipity would strike again with news of a certain
drummer’s unexpected availability. “Then, a friend of Pete’s said, ‘You know,
Jerry Shirley’s in town’ – Jerry, from Humble Pie,” said Clarke, who still
sings Shirley’s praises, saying he’s right up there with Led Zeppelin’s John
Bonham and that “ … he used to hit [his drums] like canons.”
Continuing with the story, Clarke added, “And I said, ‘If we
could get Jerry Shirley, wouldn’t that just be the biscuit.’ He said, ‘Well,
I’ll get you the number.’ So we got his number and we made a phone call, and he
was about 25 miles out west this way. And we heard he was painting and
decorating. So we made the meet with him, and we went down to see him after
work. And he comes in the pub all covered in paint, you know. He said, ‘Hi
guys. Why don’t I buy you a drink?’ And we said, ‘Sure.’ (laughs) We sat down
and started drinking. We got chatting and he said, ‘Well, guys, my drums are in
hock at the moment.’ I said, ‘No problem, we’ll get them out. Do you fancy the
idea?’ He says, ‘I love it.’ So we sorted his drums out.”
Astounded at their luck, Way and Clarke went back to sorting
through the tapes to find a singer. Way found two diamonds in the rough.
“Pete comes round my door one morning. He’s got a beer in
his hand. It is 11 o’clock in the morning and a beer in his hand, you know,”
said Clarke. “He said, ‘I’ve got two singers who are fantastic, two Robert
Plants.’ And I said, ‘Oh.’ So we go down and we put the tapes on, and one of
‘em did ‘Communication Breakdown’ and it was out of this world. But he was in
Australia, this guy. So that’s how big this got. People were sending us tapes
from all over the world, wanting to be in the band. And then he played Dave
[King]. And I said, ‘Oh, I like this guy,’ ‘cause he didn’t sound so Robert
Plant-y. And you could just tell. I said, ‘Man, this is the guy.’ And Pete
said, ‘Yeah, he’s good, isn’t he?’ I said, ‘Yeah, let’s call him.’”
And call him they did, even going so far as to propose
sending him a plane ticket to fetch him from his home in Ireland. “So we called
him and said, ‘Look, can you come over,’” said Clarke. “So we sorted it out and
said, ‘Look, Davey, we’ll get a plane ticket to you and you can come over.’ And
he said, ‘Oh, I’ll pay for my own ticket,’ and all that. He was real
independent. He was only about 20. And the rest is history. We picked him up
from the airport, took him to the rehearsal room and said, ‘Well, here are a
couple of the ideas we got.’ And he’s singing ‘em straight away. And it was
like, ‘Oh, this is brilliant.’ I mean, Jerry, he was an old soldier, and he
said, ‘Man, this is really going somewhere now.’ And it really was. It was like
a light came … we saw the light.”
A New Way
Ah, but that light dimmed considerably with Way’s
confounding exit. Still, Fastway soldiered on, tabbing Charlie McCracken,
formerly of Taste, as Way’s permanent replacement on bass, although they used
session player Mick Feat during the recording of Fastway.
On the strength of the snaky, biting single “Say What You
Will,” Fastway won over critics and
fans with its tough, no-nonsense attitude and ballsy rock ‘n roll songs that
sounded like back-alley knife fights, such as the menacing “Heft!” and the
thrilling, nitro-burning opener “Easy Livin’” that brackets Fastway with the seductive,
Zeppelin-like closer “Far Far from Home,” a separate promotional single
attached to the first vinyl issue of the LP. These days, Clarke is feeling a
bit of déjà vu when it comes to “Say What You Will,” a song that coalesced in
much the same way as Eat Dog Eat’s
“Leave the Light On.”
A swaggering bit of raucous, riff-heavy hard rock that packs
a punch and delves deeply into spiritual matters, “Leave the Light on” [for
more on the songs from Eat Dog Eat,
please read “’Fast’ Eddie Clarke talks Fastway’s new record, Eat Dog Eat”] was largely unfinished,
but the record company wanted 11 tracks, not 10 for Eat Dog Eat. “Funny thing is, the first Fastway album, if we’d had
11 songs, the one we would have left off would have been … ‘Say What You Will.’
Yeah, can you believe that?” exclaimed Clarke.
Hard to believe, though true, the story of how “Say What You
Will” almost didn’t make Fastway is
not so unusual in rock history. “Jerry and I, in those days, we didn’t like really like ‘Say
What You Will,’” said Clarke. “We had nine tunes, and we had to write one more.
And it was like, ‘Oh, bloody hell.’ We just didn’t have too many ideas in our
heads, so we said, ‘Why don’t do this.’ Jerry had a bit of a riff and I got a
hold of that, and I said, ‘We can’t use that. It’s moving around a bit.’ So we
sort of transformed the riff, and then it was like, ‘Okay Dave, well look, I’ll
tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll start playing here and you start singing.’
(laughs) And then Jerry and the bass player, you keep playing, and then we did
it like that. I think it was the simplicity of it that made it such a killer
track. But of course, because it had been written like that, we didn’t think
much of it, because you know what musicians are like. You’ve got to have it all
complicated and it’s got to be fancy and all that. So we didn’t think much of it.
But, of course, to our amazement, it became the biggest track on the radio that
year. And like I said, we would have left it off. Of course, we don’t know
anything. We’re musicians. We really are daft, you know.”
Off and running again, Fastway embarked on a tour that would
see McCracken come aboard. Not long after coming off the road, Fastway went
right back in the studio to record All
Fired Up. And though it was deemed a success, both critically and
commercially, Clarke knew something was missing. “It’s got some good spirit on it, but it wasn’t really like
the first one,” said Clarke. “It didn’t have the spirit of the first one. To
me, albums are all about spirit, and that’s why [Eat Dog Eat] is so nice. It’s got that spirit, you know – that sort
of thing where you can’t put your finger on what it is.”
The lack of proper rest may have had something to do with
it. Clarke’s troubled personal life also, perhaps, contributed to the flagging
energy of All Fired Up. “I think the expectation was very high, because the first
album had done so well, which always puts you on the back foot,” said Clarke.
“We had started it in March or so. My mother had died that Christmas, which
didn’t help and really put a downer on everything. And then of course we’d only
gotten back from America on Dec. 15. We needed a bit of time. What record
companies didn’t seem to understand back then was that you need a bit of space
to come back from a six-month tour. You need some time off to re-energize
yourself to start writing tunes again. Of course, we went straight into the
rehearsal room. The same thing happened with Motorhead with the Iron Fist album. They threw us straight
into it. They said, ‘We need an album next week,’ you know. So, you’re trying
to write songs, but of course, you’re trying too hard.”
Making matters worse, Clarke feels producer Eddie Kramer,
lauded for his work with Jimi Hendrix and other rock legends, didn’t give his
all in the making of All Fired Up,
after his excellent work on Fastway.
“Then, of course, Eddie Kramer, he didn’t come up with the
goods the second time with the sounds on the album,” Clarke opined. “I thought
the sound on the first one was brilliant. I thought the sound on All Fired Up was left wanting a bit. I
thought Eddie Kramer sold us short on that one. We used the same band, the same
studios … it should have sounded exactly the same as the first one. But it
wasn’t, you know. It wasn’t. He was in a hurry to get back to America. He said,
‘Oh man, I can save you some money if we can cut this short by a whole week.’
We said, ‘Why would we want to do that?’”
Following Kramer’s advice, Fastway took the short cut. “And
then of course, what happened was, we did the album,” continued Clarke. “He
hurried back to America. Then the record company called me up. I was down
fishing in Cornwall. I thought I’d get a bit of fishing in and hang out down
there. I got this phone call in the middle of nowhere saying, ‘You’ve got to go
back to the U.S. to remix half the album.’ And it kind of summed up my feeling
about All Fired Up. Eddie Kramer sold
us short on it. It’s just one of those things. And that’s why I never used
Eddie again. I wouldn’t touch him, because I thought he really let us down. You
know, when we remixed the album, I think we went to the Record Plant. And it
was fun being in New York, but you know, it had gone down on tape wrong.
Whatever we tried to do, I could hear that we weren’t actually doing anything
to make it any better really.”
Whatever his feelings about the record were, the genie was
already out of the bottle. All Fired Up
was a fait accompli, and Clarke couldn’t scrap it and start over. “That wasn’t an option,” said Clarke. “The record company
and management were leaning so heavily on us that that wasn’t an option. They
never gave us that option. And of course, the record company, they don’t
f**king know. ‘Oh, it sounds all right to us.’ Of course it didn’t sound right.
If you thought it did, you wouldn’t have dragged me over here to remix half of
it. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, but …’ It was all that. And we got off to a bad start.”
In support of All
Fired Up, Fastway were road warriors, but scattershot planning killed any
possible momentum. After backing Iron Maiden and Saxon after the first album,
Fastway toured with AC/DC for three months, “ … which was fantastic and they
really know how to do it.” With All Fired
Up, however, Fastway did a couple of weeks with the Scorpions, a couple of
weeks with Rush and a few gigs with Billy Squier and then Ratt. “It was all
broken up,” said Clarke. “So it was very hard to get any continuity going.”
According to Clarke, everybody in Fastway was unsatisfied
with All Fired Up.
“I think we all thought we’d failed with the second record,”
said Clarke. “And then the sh*t really hit the fan. Jerry went his way. I said
I’d never work with Eddie again and that caused problems with Jerry. And one
thing led to another, and Dave went back to Ireland then and started playing
with his Irish band. And that’s when he said, ‘Look, why don’t you come over
here and play with this band?’ And like an idiot, I said, ‘Okay.’ That was
another mistake. That’s where the third record came from.”
That band included musicians from King's first group
Stillwood. But with Waiting for the Roar,
fans waited but the roar would never come. A chance for redemption, however,
came to fruition in the form of a soundtrack for the horror movie “Trick or
Treat.” It was to be King’s last dance with Fastway. “That was brilliant, because the third album had failed and
Dave was already on his way out,” said Clarke. “Him and his Irish band, they
wanted to go off and do something that was more Irish sounding group thing than
heavy rock. He had started to complain, ‘I’m sick of every rock band. I’m sick
of every rock thing.’ So we had our differences. But when I was off with ‘Trick
or Treat,’ I said, ‘I’d love to do it.’ So I spoke to the director Charles
Martin Smith [who also has acted in ‘American Graffiti’ and ‘The
Untouchables’], and he was really up for it. And I said to Dave, ‘Well, let’s
do this.’”
King, however, was reluctant, but Clarke was convincing. “I said, ‘Look man, you’re going to have to do it.’ I said,
‘Let’s do it as our swan song,’ our last thing together, because I discovered
the guy for f**k’s sake. You know, I wanted to end on a high, rather than the
other f**king thing, Waiting for the Roar.
So we finally agreed. It was hard going, but it’s a bit like the track I was
telling you about, ‘Leave the Light On’ or ‘Say What You Will,’ because it was
a little bit strange. It was a little simpler, do you know what I mean? It was
a little simpler and of course, I was being directed by Charles Martin Smith.
He’d phone me up and say, ‘Look, we need a track for this thing,’ or ‘We need a
track for this thing and such and such and such and such – something in that
groove, you know that tempo.’ So I listened, just to get the groove and the
tempo. And then I got an idea or would sit down and write something. But of
course it was all simple because Dave wasn’t really into embellishing too much.
It was all done pretty straightforward. And I thought the album came out
fantastic. I really did with Trick or
Treat.
King, on the other hand, didn’t. “Dave hated it. Oh yeah,
yeah, yeah. He hated it. Oh man, I’m sitting there, we’re on our last day of
mixing, and I didn’t see him after that. He was gone. It was sad really,
because I always thought he was me younger brother, you know. We had 10 years
between us. I thought we’d been through a lot together, you know. I don’t know.
I’ll never understand this f**king business and singers are very f**king hard
work, man.”
New Beginnings
At ground zero again after King took almost everybody but
Clarke who was left in Fastway and went on to form Q.E.D., Clarke picked up the
pieces and teamed up with Hart. By then, however, Clarke’s drug and alcohol
addictions had taken their toll, and Clarke was incapable of working much. Hart
assumed the reins of Fastway and the result was On Target and Bad Bad Girls.
Fast forward to 2012 and Fastway is back, reloaded with
Jepson and drummer Matt E. Eat Dog Eat
has, at least to Clarke’s ears, erased some of the bad memories of the
diminished states both Fastway and Clarke were in near the end. Tracks like the
brooding “Fade Out,” which blooms into something more sprawling in the
supernova choruses, and “Deliver Me,” with its sonic crunch, prove that Clarke
is on to something, as do the dark acoustic meditation “Dead and Gone” and the
driving “Sick as a Dog.”
As for what’s ahead with Fastway, Clarke is hopeful that the
band will make a return to U.S. shores, provided that America will welcome them
back.
“At the moment, we’ve just got to see … the album’s got to
do a bit of business before we put any shows on for it,” said Clarke. “I’m
hoping to get some feedback from America, maybe some offers, maybe we can do a
few gigs here or there … I mean, I’ve got the guitar. I’m ready to go. I’m
waiting, I’m keeping me powder dry at the moment, just going to wait and see
what happens … and we’ll see if we get some good news and some positive signs.
Though he admits he’s had his day in the sun, Clarke would
like Fastway to take off again so Jepson and Matt E. can experience the kind of
wide acclaim he once did. That said, one last tour of America would be the
icing on the cake for Clarke.
“Hey man, my dream is to strap on the guitar and take it to
America one more time,” said Clarke. “It meant a lot to me when we were there
with Fastway, because we did Fastway in England and we died here. Because of
the Motorhead connection, a lot of the fans didn’t turn up. And I did think
with the end of the tour here … well my career is over. Then we got a call from
America saying, ‘Hey man, get over here. F**k, everybody’s playing ‘Say What
You Will’ and you’re big.’ American fans saved my life, so I owe it to them …
I’d love to do it one more time and play in America.”
