Barry Purkis, Folkestone, May 8 2005

H: Henrik
B: Barry
M: Mattias

H: So you became a drummer...
B: Correct
H: Any particular reason?
B: Why? Because my parents decided that they liked their furniture too much. What happened originally was, when I was nine I was collecting for a garage sale for my uncle and somebody threw out a pair of military drumsticks. In school I'd always been interested in music rather than football. So when people had gone out and played football, I was always listening to music and it was always kind of weird stuff, which my parents hated, which was great. The more they hated it, the more I thought "I'm on the right track". So anyway, the drumsticks got thrown out from this guy who said "yes, you can have it for the garage sale" but I kept hold of them and started to destroy all my parents furniture. So they bought me a drumkit. I couldn't stand still; I just kept on doing it all the time. So at the age of nine I got my first drumkit.
M: But you do know how to play other instruments as well?
B: Keyboard
M: And when did that come about?
B: About the same time, really, cause I had a piano in my bedroom at home. For writing I just used keyboards.
M: So your parents didn't say "Stick to the piano" then?
B: That was alright, piano wasn't too bad. There was a band at the time called The Nice, with Keith Emerson, and they used to do a version of "America". When I had my friends over we would kind of do miming re-enactment of The Nice, so I'd do all the bit where Keith Emerson pulled the piano down on top of him and stuck knives in the keyboards and stuff like that. And my mother would walk in and I would be just sticking a kitchen knife in the piano. [laughter] And she'd be looking at me, thinking "what have we given birth to?"
H: So was that how you started playing then? By picking out tunes?
B: No, I think rhythm always interested me. There was an art teacher at school who used to promote everybody to take in music to try and promote creativity whilst you're doing your art. And he would start bringing in stuff like Zappa and... what an education! H: Confusing everyone...
B: So you wouldn't be just sitting there listening to the latest Beatles or the latest Rolling Stones, although they were great, but you'd get this other side of it, which was totally enthralling.
H: So you had an interest in this, sort of, "advanced" music then?
B: Yeah, anything that was like that, King Crimson, early Genesis, Van der Graaf Generator especially and Gong. I love Gong. That came a bit later. But along the side of that I liked everything with a hard edge. As long as something kicked in and gave you a bit of power and pushed you across the room a little bit from the speakers. I wouldn't want anything that was too tame all the time. So there was the other side, the Deep Purples, the Zeppelins, the Uriah Heeps...
H: Did you find that too mainstream?
B: No, the first album by Uriah Heep just blew me away. Unbelievable, loved it! Especially "Gypsy"... The fact that you can get away with two chords and make it sound like it did, so powerful.
H: So did you start playing in bands at the same time that you were learning the drums or?
B: Yeah, the first band I was in was just, you know, normal guys that get together in your bedroom and just jam around and just mess about because you're all learning together. You know, Phil down the road buys a bass, I have a drumkit, Danny's got a guitar, and we're all kind of learning together. We're all crap, but you're learning to try and formulate ideas within a group of people rather than just by yourself. It's a learning curve...
H: So what kind of bands did you play in then? I only know of your brief spell in Iron Maiden.
B: The first band I had was the bedroom band, which was "Phalanx" and we were trying to be, sort of, progressive rock. We would play at schools and colleges and stuff like that. You know, nothing big at all. 90% of the time it was stuff that we put together ourselves, to try and self promote. Then, when I was 17, I left home and I went to Sicily and moved in with a band that had been going since the 60s, a band called "The Primitives". It was a band that had done really well in the 60s and had huge hits in Italy and throughout Italy, Sardinia, Greece and all the Mediterranean area. And the people that were listening to the band didn't really mind who was in it as long as it existed, so we were doing all this stuff in Italian and stuff like that but in between we were doing numbers like "Jumping Jack Flash" and stuff that we were writing as well. I think that that's when I really did learn because I went out as a boy with a lot of young ideas with drums and played with some serious musicians. But prior to that we were doing stuff like free festivals that used to take place over in this country [England] and lasted nine days in Windsor Park. I just found a website with pictures of us on stage at four o'clock in the morning, I've only just come across it, it's amazing. We had good response and we learned a lot from each other, you know. We were four guys that got together and we were moving forward and our techniques were becoming a bit more intricate and you were just learning to do stuff that you hadn't done before. You try it and you think, "Oh, that works"
H: So when is this, is it like mid 70s?
B: '74. 1974 I was in Sicily. I came back, I joined a folk rock band that was like Steeleye Span. They'd never had drums until then, they'd had congas, so I was the first drummer to come in with them and we ended up sounding like Gong, that very weird and wonderful kind of stuff. The band was called "Oz". I then moved on to Iron Maiden. That was it. Now you're talking about late seventies.
H: So you did a lot of gigging with Oz then?
B: Yeah.
H: Was that all around the country or more sort of in a restricted geographical area?
B: No, it was all over the country, but a localised country, we didn't go right up to northern Scotland, it was all the Midlands and that sort of thing.
H: So what kind of audiences did you have back then?
B: Stoned out hippies. [laughter] Without a doubt. The same sort of people that would listen to Hawkwind and Gong. They'd get really wrecked before they go to the gig and some of them would just sit cross legged on the floor, but it didn't mean to say they didn't appreciate it, they were really into what you were doing and they were really getting off on it.
H: So what led you onto the Iron Maiden gig then? Was it an audition, advertising?
B: Yeah, I auditioned.
M: Were you looking for a hard rock situation to play in or was that just the way it turned out?
B: No, by that time I knew that I was good enough to be fully professional and I was getting very frustrated of being semi-professional and having to do work and going out to play weekends and evenings. I just thought, "This is stupid" because in Sicily I had been professional because of the nature of the band. We had a large road crew, in fact, funnily enough, we had a Swedish roadie called Bosse. He was great, a really good guy! And I'd come back to this country expecting to try and fit in to a fully pro band but it didn't happen obviously. But with Iron Maiden the setup seemed to be a lot better. You know, they were getting their own PA, they had their own truck and Steve Harris was very directional with what he wanted. He used to come to my house and we'd sit in the bedroom going over the bass and drum parts and stuff like that. That was it. Then they just phoned me up and said "yeah, you've got the gig" so I started playing with them.
H: So why didn't it work out then?
B: It didn't work out because they, at that stage, were going through a transient stage trying to find themselves, they couldn't find the formula. We had Tony [Moore] on keyboards, Dennis Wilcox, I can't even remember the guitarist's name... H: I think it was one of the Terry's...
B: Terry, yes, Terry Wapram or something like that. It was great, but you could see that Steve had a direction and he was the driving force. Some rehearsals sounded great, absolutely great, I've got some on reel-to-reel at home, they're probably worth a bit. We've got the whole set with Sanctuary, Prowler and Wrathchild, Iron Maiden, all of the early stuff.
H: You wouldn't happen to play any stuff hasn't ended up on Maiden records, like earlier incarnations of songs or things like that?
B: No...
H: As I understand it Steve had a set of songs that he was promoting and playing
B: ...Ready for the first album, yeah... But, as he says on "The Early years", the DVD, he'd lost track. People were coming and going like crazy and the last time around that era that I spoke to Steve, before it all kind of fell apart and I left, he was gonna go back to college because he was going to be a technical drawer. But he didn't.
M: For how long did you play in the band?
B: Iron Maiden? I would say about 8 months, something like that.
H: It sounds like a very long period.
B: It was, cause we rehearsed a lot. We weren't gigging, we rehearsed a lot because Steve wanted to get the band right to put it out.
M: Establish the sound...
B: Yeah. Have you seen the section about me on the DVD?
H & M: Yeah.
B: Right, I'll tell you the story behind that. I was married for eight years and I was having an affair at the time with this beautiful woman who had just told her husband that I was having an affair with her. My wife had just found out. All three were at the gig. I had just bought a brand new drum kit, a Gretsch, and I'd never played it before, not even to rehearse on it. I literally took delivery of it that afternoon of the gig with Iron Maiden. So it took me a little while in the sound check to kind of set it up and try it out. And, yes, I did drop something. It wasn't acid or anything like that, it was a barbiturate, it was a downer, a Valium or something like that. I was so on edge that whole gig, because of the circumstances of my wife standing there, right next to her is my girlfriend that I'm screwing at the time and her husband and my new drum kit... I was used to the other kit and every time I'd go around it there wouldn't be a tom tom there, I would be a gap so hence the reason that that happened.
M: Not an ideal situation.
H: Yeah, but the only thing Steve mentions about your time in the band is that incident of the gig...
M: But what about Thunderburst / The ides of March then? That must have been conceived while you were in the band?
B: Yes, it was. I came up with a drum pattern that did that constant rolling. I would have ideas and Steve would then transpose that, because I don't play guitar. It was the same with Samson... I'm unable to pick a guitar up and show my idea, I have to sit there and go "du-du du-du du, no that's the wrong note" and we'd go through it like that. So that's how it came about. And I had a drum pattern and I was trying to explain the chords to go down on the drum pattern cause the whole thing goes around the drum pattern. I think we played it a couple of times with Iron maiden as an opening track. Just an intro, it was a throwaway thing, not really a track. The story behind that was that after we'd recorded "Head on" and they'd recorded "Killers" Clive Burr went round to Paul's house to listen to the new Samson album and in turn took the new "Killers" album with him. So Paul put on side one and they were "Yeah, it's great stuff", turned it over and up came Thunderburst and Clive nearly fell of his seat and went "Fuck, that's 'The ides of March'". Paul was like "What the hell is he talking about?" So anyway, long story short, I got summoned to EMI and there was Rod Smallwood and Steve Harris sitting there and a lawyer, solicitor, and an EMI representative and just me sitting there. So what was decided in the end was that Steve Harris would share 50-50 the publishing rights on the Samson version of it, but I never got Sweet F.A. on the Iron Maiden version...
H: I don't know if copyright works the same way in England as it does in Sweden, but if you've written the lyrics for a song you get 50%, so is that the reason why there are lyrics for Thunderburst in the album?
B: Are there???
H: Yeah, it just says "Aaaa Aaaa".
B: That's me! That's just me going "Aaaaaa", just me doing the singing mask.
H: Yeah, because "The ides of March" obviously hasn't got any lyrics and it's got neither Thunderstick, nor Barry in the credits.
B: It's just that I wanted to put some backing vocals behind it. It was actually going to be credited on the sleeve as "the singing mask".
H: So how did you work in Samson then, making the music?
B: Paul and I had met each other a long time ago when we were both in different bands and we rehearsed in a farm that literally was in the middle of nowhere in a field. It had one power point and they used to store potatoes and vegetables in the corner. I was with one guy that I went to school with, and I would be coming in with him to rehearse and Paul would be leaving with his band or vice versa. Their gear would be going out, ours would be coming in. "Hello how are you doing?" and all that kind of thing. And then we sort of bumped into each other locally to where we were living as well and it was like "What are you doing?" "Well, I'm still playing. Are you still playing?" "Yeah, I'm still playing" so when I walked in on the audition... cause it said "professional band " and I though "OK, this is what I'm after" I nearly fell over. Cause I walked in and "Oh on, not you". What was strange about it was that the first audition had Chris Aylmer on bass and then I got a second phone call to come back and audition again and that time it was John McCoy from Gillan. We did "Six foot under" which was on the first album and McCoy literally stood two foot away from my face just to bum me out, just to look at me and throwing all these off beats in just to see if I could keep up with it. He had a big fur coat on, cause it was in the middle of the winter, bally great big fur coat. Then they phoned me up afterwards and said, "Yeah, you're in".
M: But, as Henrik was saying, how...
B: How did we work together..? Very well, I would play drums the way a guitarist would play and so what happened was that we found an anchorman with Chris. I won't say he was "basic" because that's an insult, but he tied it all down, put it on the floor, just the same as John McCoy does, except John McCoy does it with a little more finesse. But Chris would hammer the whole thing to the floor, which enabled Paul and I to take off in much the same way as The Who and bands like that. So Paul was able to go on all these little runs, which was his style by then, because the Hendrix influence and people that we were listening to. So it was a perfect mixture, it was like Cream but without the bass going crazy. The bass would hold it. So I would play my gig more to Paul than I would to Chris. On stage I would have Paul coming through my monitor whereas Chris I wouldn't. Chris would be loud enough by the side of me, I would hear his bass and I'd feel it as well obviously, but it was Paul I was playing the gig to. As soon as he would do something that was off the cuff and hit off-beats and all that kind of thing I'd leave it for a couple of bars and then follow it, just do it, you know, and so it was all planked. So we wrote that way, we would get into these long and crazy jams and we liked a bit of puff and it promoted it a bit, in fact a hell of a lot.
M: Did you write any actual chord progressions and things like that?
B: Oh God, yeah!
M: On the piano then?
B: No, by coming up with ideas and relaying them the same was as I said with Steve Harris. My forte would be I'd come up with a counter melody. Paul would come up with the riff type stuff for the songs but then I would come up with the counter melodies that went over the top of it and in between. So we learned from each other. I was learning how to put really good riffs together whereas Paul was learning how to put the counter melody stuff together because of the difference in the bands we were listening to. He'd be listening to Grand Funk, Mountain, all those kind of bands, and I'd be listening to the likes of Gong so there was this really weird mish-mash. And then Bruce came in and it was Deep Purple and Deep Purple and Deep Purple and Deep Purple... The unfortunate thing with Paul was that he always wanted to move on all the time, he never wanted to stagnate which is great, but at the same time there is another side to the coin. There's an English saying that says "If it's not broken, don't try and repair it" whereas Paul was always trying to repair it. That's why he went through so many line-ups, the Nicky Moore line-ups and then the 80s bouffant hair style line-ups and the Refugee type of line-ups and stuff like that. But there was only one definitive Samson line-up that people used to remember. When we played Wacken in 2000 we had people coming up to us saying "I've been waiting 20 years to see this" and they didn't actually seem disappointed that it was Nicky up at the front rather than Bruce, it was just because it was Paul, Chris and I. Samson were at the forefront of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, we had the first management that had a lot of money so they were able to put the tours together. We were the first band to have the first NWOBHM album out, "Survivors", because up until then record companies had only been promoting and signing punk. We had the first big major press thing in Sounds with all the fireworks and all that. We weren't trying to emulate Kiss at all but we had a roadie that was a pyromaniac, so it was that. He wanted to blow people up, so we just let him get on with it.
H: But you must have had your fair share in the image bit as well?
B: Yeah, it was insane. It was absolutely insane. There would be times where you just have to live it. Because Thunderstick was a very insular character. I wouldn't be able to talk to you like this if I was Thunderstick, and I went through a period when Thunderstick was really famous and was becoming the spear point of the band. I lived the life of Thunderstick which was really strange, because before you got into a town where you where playing or doing an interview I would garb up put all the gear on, much like Kiss, so nobody saw you. I would go through periods of time where I wouldn't talk and the rest of the band would say "He's on a weird one at the moment, he's not talking, he's decided for the next three weeks that he's not gonna say anything to cleanse his soul" and stuff like that. So I would do an interview with a guy, fully garbed up with the mask and all that and just look at him, just stare at him all the way through. They'd be asking me questions and I'd be going "...". It is very disconcerting I can assure you, it really is, but it's also just as disconcerting to be on the other side of the mask because you can't talk and you can't laugh. If somebody from the rest of the band makes a witty comment and you wanna laugh, you can't do it. You just gotta sit there. We used to have support bands that came out on tour with us and at the end of the tour they'd have people asking "What does Thunderstick really look like?" and they'd say "I haven't got a clue, I never saw him". And you'd do your soundcheck and then go backstage and all the rest of the band would go "Right, we're going for something to eat now, see ya" and I'd be sitting there with the mask on... You know, it was very strange. But it was great. You go into hotels like it, you do radio interviews like it. I had room service come up once with a tray of coffee everything that I'd ordered. She knocked on the door, I answered the door and she dropped the lot! It's quite amusing. And we went to a motorway café at a service station. You know they have these conveyor belts where they put the cutlery and it goes into the kitchen. I was fully garbed up with the mask on and I laid on it, went straight into the kitchen and this woman's just taking the cutlery and going "aaaarrrrrr". [laughter]
M: In an NME interview from 1980 or something Bruce tells a story about you chatting up a lady by just grunting, is that true?
B: It's true. She wanted to fuck me with the mask on, basically. I pulled her, I fucked her and just sent her out of the window and that was it. Yes it is true. There are people out there like that, let's face it... At the end of the first re-release of "Head on" Bruce does an interview talking about me setting fire to a young girl's nightgown and throwing her out of the window. It was a ground floor window, it was alright, it wasn't very high. [laughter]. Nothing serious. That's the kind of life it was. Strange. And I've been asked to do a little section for a book about Reading festival. It was quite amusing because it was just absolutely boiling and I was in this full boiler suit, like Slipknot do today really, Thunderstick mask an all that backstage all day long. And the sweat was just... I must have lost a stone that day. And the funny thing is, there was a thing on the radio, Danny Baker on radio2, and he was saying "I remember the drummer Thunderstick being there with the full garb on but the stupid thing about it was, if he hadn't have had it on, nobody would have recognised him anyway". [laughter] But that's not the point, the point was "Thunderstick's there!", that's it, just the same as Kiss and the way that Slipknot do it now.
M: Were you in the band aware of the fact that somewhere bands like Iron maiden and perhaps Saxon, had another sort of management. Because when we look back historically, no one can deny that you were one of the leaders, but in the end you somehow lost, because of legal issues. Was this something you discussed back then, or is it just in hindsight?
B: No, we discussed it, we decided to leave the management company. The management company were unfortunately fond of the old drink and at that time we had CBS (now Sony) coming and seeing us, wanting to sign us. But when they were asking for the manager the manager was passed out on the stairs. They said "Well, we're not talking to anybody from the band, we're gonna talk to the manager but it looks like we can't talk to him so see you later" so that was it. So we decided to leave it. At the time Ian Gillan's manager was going to take us over, but that all changed and it turned around and it didn't happen. It all went very sour, they pulled all the money on us, we went to court, I nearly lost my house over it and all kinds of shit. So yes, everybody's got a story to tell, it's just one of those unfortunate things that happen, there's so many bands out there that have the same thing. You just have to be very careful. My daughter is 9 and she's showing a good interest in music so I want her to do a degree in accountancy, I want her to do a degree in law and then become a musician. [laughter] That way you hold on to your money, you know. But Bruce was lucky, because Iron Maiden had the money to buy him out of the management contract, to settle the debt and that's how they gained all the rights to the all Samson material because we signed away the future rights to stuff we were gonna write. And it's just one of those things.
M: But you left before Bruce did...
B: Yeah.
M: And what was the reason behind all that?
B: Thunderstick. Bruce and Paul were quite emphatic at the time that it was to become more of a blues "we are serious" Blackfoot type of band. I was into heroes that I'm still into now, like Alice Cooper. I love the Tubes, anybody that put a lot of money back into the show and gave the audience what they wanted rather than standing up there going "yeah, we're a shit kicking band". Look at Iron Maiden, people go to see the shows when they go to se Iron Maiden, they wanna see the Eddie and they wanna see the this and the that whereas Paul was dead against that at that time. Other bands were gaining on us at the time and overtaking us he thought that it was probably due to the fact that Thunderstick was holding it back, basically. Rather than being a motif for the band and a selling point for the band, it was actually holding it back so we decided to part company and I went starting up Thunderstick.
M: So it wasn't really a musical issue then?
B: "Musical differences"? No, not really. I think, with Thunderstick I was starting writing stuff... The first lot of stuff I wrote was a lash back against Samson, I was writing more stuff like "Missing Persons" with Terry Bozzio, Zappa's drummer. I was starting to write more stuff like that... It wasn't pop rock, but it was more direct, more accessible. The riffs weren't quite so heavy, the choruses were more sing-along and that sort of stuff. And I deliberately put a female vocalist at the front to counter out the Thunderstick image because of the trouble I'd had from this country with women's lib and what have you.
H: But you still decided to remain as "Thunderstick"? It wasn't Barry starting a new band?
B: No, because... What's the point in making all that ground only to just trash it? It might have been a disappointment to people because they were expecting Samson Mk II or Kiss Mk II or Alice Cooper Mk II, I don't know... That's maybe what they were expecting but they didn't get that. They got me in the mask as Thunderstick, four guys all wearing grease paint and looking a bit weird... But there's so many bands now, you pick up so many magazines now and there's loads of them. Page after page after page of "don't we look vicious", you know. And "Oh, I've found a new way of putting a bit of grease paint on", you know. Twenty years ago this was. And then when Slipknot came out I just laughed and thought "I love 'em!". I've got the albums and all that kind of thing, but the press were writing about it as if it was something really new. "They all wear masks on stage! And you don't know who they are!" [laughter] It's been around for a long time. There was a band called The Residents in America. Nobody knew who they were, they used to do themselves up in bandages. But, with Thunderstick I was very serious about what I did. I was very serious about the music, I put the thing together, I financed it, I ran it, I wrote all of the material, I attended all the meetings. But somewhere along the line I kind of disappeared up my own backside because I was so busy attending meetings that when we actually did get together and rehearse and I sat on a drum stool I though "this is what I do, I forgot about that. I actually play drums!". And it would be the same with the albums. I would wanna get my drumtracks out of the way as quickly as possible so that I could then sit down and concentrate on what was going on top of it, which is a weird kind of position to be in. I've always regarded myself more as a musician than a drummer. You've got to think like a musician, you don't think like a drummer.
M: Instrumentalists tend to be not that interesting...
B: That's right, they're boring, they talk about what sticks you use and thickness of drum skins and so on... We used to get that after gigs, people would come backstage and "what was it that bit you did in that song?"...
M: The technical stuff can be interesting in some perspective...
B: If it's a technical magazine...
M: ...but as a member of a band and if you're working as a song writer or an artist it really doesn't matter...
B: Yeah, I would rather hear somebody turn around and say "When you played so and so it sent shivers up my back" and that says it all. Or I'd have somebody come to me and say "This on this piece of plastic is very significant of a time of my life and it represents a big chunk of my life, and thank you for it". You think "Yeah, it's great", it makes it all worthwhile. I'd like the money as well, but... [laughter]
H: Did you listen especially to drummers or did you just listen to music?
B: I listen to music.
H: Because I feel there's a huge chunk of Guy Evans' [Van der Graaf Generator] drumming in your idiom.
B: There is... My main influences were Pierre Moerlen from Gong who went to Strasbourg to study drums, Guy Evans from Van der Graaf Generator, I would say to a certain extent Ian Paice and most of all I think Pierre Moerlen from Gong was probably the greatest and also Prairie Prince from the Tubes. They were the four that I would just sit there and listen to with open mouth.
M: Because your style of playing is...
B: ...Insane. If you listen to "Head on"... You see, with "Shock Tactics" I was clamped right down and that was Tony Platt, he was like "don't to that, don't do that bit there"... If you listen to early recordings of songs that we ultimately put out on "Shock tactics" they're a hundred miles away from there, they really are. They're so different. With "Head on" we all had a free reign of being able to do what we wanted. It's a shame that the next album didn't go that way but with a good producer that was willing to sit down and listen to that and nurture it.
H: So you feel "Shock Tactics" lacks a bit in the adventurous area?
B: Yeah, yeah.
H: It feels very "produced"...
B: It is, my proudest album definitely is "Head on" but if it had had good production. If somebody got a hold of the master tapes and took them into a studio and modernised it completely it would be an album that would be a classic, I'm sure of it.
H: I think it IS a classic!
B: Yeah, well...
M: Yeah, I mean, it went down a storm when it came out, it got top reviews... It feels like nowadays Samson tends to not be mentioned as one of the main bands...
B: It hurts. I've got scrap books and as you said there are rave reviews that "this band wonderful, it's what we need it's a kick up the arse of anything before. It's got the energy of punk and the unpredictability". That was always nice about it. When you went on stage you didn't know what was gonna happen that night whereas with Iron Maiden you know exactly what's gonna happen, at the beginning, in the middle and the end and all points in between. With Samson you never knew what was going to happen, it was on the edge of it all the time.
H: That's something Bruce has mentioned that he really liked about Samson, the unpredictability.
B: Really? He actually likes something about Samson?
H: He really liked the excitement that it did bring to it...
B: Yeah, it did. Even in jams, it would come out when we were jamming and we would just stick a tape recorder on and just play. Some of the jams were amazing, they really were. Maybe because we all smoked a lot, you know. At the end of the day it was very much like the Jimi Hendrix thing. They used to go into the studio all times of the day and have joint after joint and go and "come on, let's just go and jam for a little while" and you just didn't know where it was gonna go, you'd kind of take off somewhere...
M: That was one of the things Bruce said about when he joined Iron Maiden it was very scheduled and strict whilst in Samson nobody was really knowing what was happening but great stuff came out of it.
B: [laughter] That's right, because we were stoned most of the time, we never knew what the hell was happening.
H: And in an interview we did with Bruce he said he was even amazed he remembers recording "Head on"...
B: I remember recording it, I did the vocals with him. And when we say drugs, we're talking about marijuana and hash, we're not talking heroin or the Guns 'n' Roses situation or we're not talking Mötley Crüe having to pull people back from the dead. We're talking about four guys sitting down over two or three joints before they start rehearsals, you know, that's all. And it was just strange. Bruce was really playful at that time and he wanted to get on. You could see he wanted to be somewhere and go somewhere. There's a lot of things that have been said from Bruce. They don't upset me, they don't anger me anymore, I just think it's sad that you should have to think that way. He's made his money, he's made his name and if that is really what he thinks about the early days being in Samson, the band that actually brought him to the fore... Because if it hadn't been for Samson, Rod Smallwood wouldn't have been standing there talking to him. It's just a bit sad.
M: Yeah, but as I understand it Rod was against Bruce coming into Maiden because he was in Samson...
B: Yeah, he had a grudge against us. Rod even says it on that DVD that he has a grudge against Samson, because there were all kinds of different things that happened, the Thunderburst / Ides of March thing. And they completely omit from the story is that when Doug Sampson left around Christmas after we'd finished the Metal Crusade tour with Iron Maiden supporting, and we were just about to go in and record "Head on" with Samson, two days before Christmas Eve Steve Harris asked me if I wanted to rejoin the band. They just dismiss that completely, it doesn't even exist in the story. And the fact that I spent my whole Christmas deliberating Thunderstick and Samson, or Barry Purkis, Barry Graham, whatever you want, in Iron Maiden. What do I do? And I went and played with them the day after Boxing day and Rod Smallwood sat there and we were just about to do 'Running Free' and there was Dennis Stratton there and I remember Rod sitting there and saying to me "This band's gonna be bigger than Led Zeppelin". I thought "it's really nice to be able to believe in your band to that extent" but at that time, you know, "Bigger than Zeppelin???". Here we are 2005 and he's probably right. But, you know, that was it, we sat down and we played. I was still kind of committed to Samson because of the Thunderstick thing and the way that was taking off and I'd just got front cover of Sounds which was the topical magazine of the time, and they were looking for Barry Graham. They were also looking for somebody that was more like a solid player, because I was still playing within that "Head on" type of era, Neil Peart type of stuff. As soon as there was a break I'd go crazy on the drums and Steve Harris would go "?" so it was like "Thank you, but No". We all agreed. It wasn't just saying "Oh, I'm not joining Iron Maiden" and it wasn't Steve saying "Sorry Barry, we phoned you up, it was a mistake, it didn't work", we agreed that I was going somewhere as Thunderstick. We were just about to start the second Samson album and they wanted somebody else. We were in the studio doing the second Samson album and John McCoy phoned up and went "You'll never guess who just got the Iron maiden gig" and I went "Who?" and he went "Clive Burr" and Clive Burr was Samson's original drummer. In fact, it got to a stage where I was gigging with Samson with "Iron Maiden" written all over my drum cases and Clive was vice versa, he had "Samson" all over his and he was in Iron Maiden. It's kind of weird. Then when they did the tours it was like stuff about riders where they nicked all our food one time and we went mad and trashed their dressing room and stuff like that and Rod Smallwood is like an elephant, he doesn't forget those things... It's a bit unfortunate. [laughter]
H: Well, there's all this stuff going on on the "inside" isn't it. That the fans never get to hear or see.
B: Well, yeah, and it's... I'll tell you what's so horrible, when you've actually been on the inside and you hear the outpouring of bullshit that comes from various people, that's when it's really frustrating.
H: Yeah, and the more you get to hear from different sources the more you sort of realise that the immortalised versions require a great deal of editing before they're close to "the truth"
B: Well it's like when Bruce was gonna rejoin us when we reformed [in 1999]. We were talking genuinely and regularly to Bruce on the phone and he was getting a bit disillusioned with his own solo project and we'd written some new material, in fact the material that's around now that hasn't been released [yet]. Paul sent it to him and he said "Yeah, I love it, I've got some ideas for it" and all that kind of thing. And he did a gig at the Astoria, we went up and saw him and we were sitting talking to him and it was actually getting really quite serious. We said "look, we've got this gig in New Jersey coming up, how about if you do it with us?" and he said "Yeah, alright, ok". And about two weeks later it was in the papers that he'd rejoined Iron Maiden, and you just say "you two-faced fuckin' bastard..."
M: Would you like to have a get-together with Bruce and sort things out?
B: If I really had to..... [laughter] No, I've got nothing against Bruce other than the fact that he didn't look after Samson. He has made a lot of money and I'm not envious of the money he's got, it doesn't worry me how much bloody money he's got or whether he flies his own plane... What does worry me and upsets me is that he never ever gave the recognition to Samson. He bought the rights to the Samson albums and the packaging [of the Airraid 1999 reissues] was disgusting and the pressing was disgusting. They even spelt the name wrong and put "Samsom" with an M! And that's Bruce's input, thank you very much! We've never been accounted to properly and yet you find Samson albums all over the world. And the more that Iron Maiden are doing the more that people understand that once upon a time Bruce Dickinson was with this band called Samson and they buy the material and yet we've never had any money of it ever since they own it and they owned it back in '81. We don't get accounted to or anything. And it's just a really sad story. I'm not expecting to be a millionaire out of it but just even if there'd been a few grand, you know. We worked it out once upon a time that it was roughly £60000 we were owed between the three of us.
M: I see. The thing is, when we meet and talk to Bruce about Samson and the musical influences we always tend to end up talking about Van der Graaf and that sort of thing...
B: And Arthur Brown...
M: Yeah
B: See, that's the other thing, Bruce and I had such a similarity in singers that we loved. Paul would pooh-pooh these, he would hate them, he would go "What a bunch of wankers! You like them??, What are you talking about?" and Bruce and I would be talking about people like Daevid Allen from Gong and Peter Hammill and the wonderful Arthur Brown and the vocal range that Arthur Brown has. He's out there gigging now... Have you ever heard Arthur Brown's stuff? Not the Crazy World...
H: Yeah, I have the "Journey" album...
B: Yeah, "Journey", that's just some stuff. "Galactic Zoo Dossier" is probably the best, if you ever come across that, get it. And I loved all those vocalists, people that really put something into it, something that was a bit quirky. I even used to like David Byron because there was nobody else singing like him, he had that falsetto. It was different at the time. So I had a lot of common with Bruce. But it's just, I wouldn't say ill feeling, just dismissive and I think that's painful and it hurts. And given the nature of the way that Samson ended, that Paul is now dead, Chris has had throat cancer and all that kind of thing, and I'm the head case, it's just insane... And the fact that Paul nurtured so many musicians through that band.
H: Yeah. So anyway, what happened after Thunderstick, the band? Did you decide to fold that thing or what happened?
B: I started the band, had three singers, female vocalists to try and counteract the adverse publicity I'd got from women in this country because at the time there was a guy that was raping women in their own bedrooms wearing a mast with "rapist" written on top of it.
H: A bit unfortunate...
B: Yeah, a bit unfortunate... But the press would give me an award of "Rock music's best dressed Cambridge rapist"-award, you know, stuff like that, you just couldn't get away from it. And in this country it was quite a volatile time going with that kind of thing, you know. Political correctness... So anyway, I thought "I'd got my band together, female vocalist, it counteracts the image, beauty and the beast". I told the rest of the band "No fraternisation amongst the band", I don't want any screwing going on. First singer was great at gigs but not so good recorded, the second singer was great recorded, terrible live 'cause when we were rehearsing for live work her voice went completely and I thought "Oh shit". We were two weeks away from doing out first tour so I auditioned a third singer, which was Jodee Valentine. She came in, I fell in love with her and married her. So after doing the albums we were a close-knit thing, it became our band, the other three just felt left out of it. It was very much Jodee and I. We did everything, all the meetings all this and that, she was the front woman, I was the image, I wrote the lyrics, and she would deliver them. We had a moderate kind of success. There were people who came along and saw us and loved us, there were people that hated us. The first gig we did we sold out at the Marquee. But I don't know, I don't know what they were expecting, they were probably expecting a Slipknot of its time, something totally crazy and out there but they didn't get that. I carried on as a recording band, I then became a sound engineer. I then went to the States and did a tiny bit of work with Ace Frehley cause, at the time, he was in Frehley's comet and he'd lost his drummer to David Letterman's show, the house band, so I did a bit with him. Another guy called Al Romano who'd been working with Joey Belladonna, stuff like that. I then came back and it was just odds and ends, did a bit of work with Bernie Torme, recorded my own stuff, did and album, joined Queen's management and did an album with a guy called Mack, who produced Queen and Electric Light Orchestra and all those sort of bands. I then started doing session work, became a session sound engineer, both in the studio and live, went on tour with Chicken Shack, Stevie Marriott, Screaming Lord Sutch (he's dead now unfortunately) and then bit by bit it kind of just... When Jodee left and we split up and we got divorced and she went back to America that kind of was it, and I started losing interest in it. Then we started having the Samson reformations, we got together for a jam and I think that's the best thing that I've ever got of Samson, believe it or not. It was on Good Friday, Easter 1990 I think, 1989, and it's just out of this world. The three of us played like demons, I've got it on tape at home and it's my prized possession, you know. It's never got released, nobody's ever heard it except for immediate people and it's just great! We were just picking numbers. Paul would pick a song, I'd pick a song, Chris would pick a song and we'd go through them. The fire that was there was just outrageous. So, bit by bit, it just kind of faded away and we did the Japanese reformations, we did the Wacken festival and we wrote the new album and then Paul started getting ill and you know the rest. That's kind of basically it, really. Rob [Grain] does my website, I want to put an album out because I've got a finished album that's never been released with Thunderstick and it's a proper 24-track, it's mixed down and ready to go. I'd like to put that out on my website and that's it.
H: But you still have your drums?
B: Yeah
H: Do you have them set up so you can play or are they tucked away in the loft?
B: They're tucked away now because my daughter's taking over the bedroom, but I still play. I've got friends in local bands that I just go and have a jam with every now and then. I wouldn't say I'm fluent, but I still play, I'm not match fit. If I wanted to do a gig next week I could quite easily do it but I'd have to take a couple of days out to go and rehearse and do it properly. [laughter]
M: But you're not interested in starting up a band and writing songs?
B: I love writing songs... It's money more than anything else. To start a band and do it properly... I'm too much of a lazy bastard to go and rehearse two or three times a week in a local rehearsal studio and get local musicians together and say "hey, let's start a band, boys". To me, I have no interest in that. If I was to do it, I would wanna do it properly and to do it properly you've gotta lay out a lot of money or find somebody that's willing to invest. The trouble with me is, I'm a bit lazy at times because I don't jump on the bandwagon, I don't monopolise on things where I should do. Like this drummers poll that came out in Classic Rock the other week. I should immediately have got together with Rob and say "Right, we're gonna put something on the website to that extent, and I'm interested now in putting the new album out and doing this and doing that" because you've gotta take every little bit of advantage of anything that you get, but I'm too lazy. [laughter]
H: So what do you wanna do with the album then? Do you just want to get it out and get people to hear it, or is it something that you'd like to invest in and start spreading the name again?
B: Yeah, It's just a case of to see what happens. You put it out, and if you do, if you find it starts selling on the website... I get quite a few visitors on the website, it's nice. I really would like to update it cause it's looking a bit dated now. There's certain news clips that say 1993 on them... [laughter] I don't know, you don't know what's around the corner, do you? That's it. I don't sit by the phone waiting for a phone call, let's put it that way.
H: You have other stuff to do...
B: Yeah, but at the same time; I'm me and Thunderstick's Thunderstick. As to whether Thunderstick still exists I don't know. All the time I get people writing to me on the website from different parts of the world saying "we really like what you did, or what you are, or etc etc" and then, yeah, Thunderstick exists. But it's been far surpassed by, for the fiftieth time, by Slipknot. Because that's what is NOW... And what a drummer that guy is! Amazing drummer. That's what got me into them, not the masks or anything like that, just to hear Joey Jordison. But [that's] totally different from me cause I never used a double bass drum. But the modern stuff that I like now is all kinds of different stuff. I still like retro stuff, I still buy retro stuff, I've got me ticket to go and see Alice Cooper in November. But at the same time I buy Audioslave, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, American Headcharge, I even buy Insane Clown Posse, you know, people like that. There's still a diverse range of music that I listen to, I don't just listen to stuff that's heavy metal.
M: If you were to put together a band today, what sort of music would you be playing?
B: That would be very interesting, I don't know. I haven't got a clue.
H: Would you go for a traditional line-up?
B: That I don't know either. I don't think so. I wouldn't exactly be Ritchie Blackmore's Night. I don't like the pointed slippers and sitting on the floor with a mandolin, that's not me. The skipping amongst the daisies, no. [laughter] But what you ask is very interesting because the way that technology has moved on now... I love the fact that modern bands Blink 182, Green Day, Bowling for Soup, you know, to me they are a modern version of Cheap Trick and people like that. And it's just nice to see that there are bands out there doing the traditional stuff because we lived through the 80s and the 80s was just shit. I mean, in music terms, it was shit. You couldn't be a drummer. That's the other thing that killed me off as a drummer in the 80s; every producer that you ever came across, if you did a fast drum roll he'd go "oh, don't do that" because he'd put that much reverb on it and it would just go "woaahhhhhhh" and he'd go "no no, I just want the solid 'aw'"
H: And it was often done with a click or a metronome...
B: Yeah, which we never did with Samson. I did with Thunderstick, I must admit I did, but we never played to a click track with Samson. We thought, if it actually moves in a solo and it progresses against just that little bit faster and it pulls back after the solo or "the mad bit" so be it. It moved up a gear, so what? Listen to early ZZ Top compared to the later ZZ top when they stared putting on the "Eliminator" type of...
M: It's a different band...
B: Yeah. You listen to "La Grange" and stuff like that, that's ZZ Top, Tush you know, and all those kind of things...

At this stage the planned part of the interview had sort of ended and Barry was anxious to get home and we had a 90 mine car ride to London ahead of us. We said our thanks, took pictures and took off.

Many thanks to Rob Grain for making this interview possible!

Visit the Official Thunderstick site at www.thunderstick.co.uk/
Visit the Official Paul Samson site at www.paulsamson.co.uk