We always enjoy a chinwag with a bona fide rock or metal legend – and Vardis frontman Steve Zodiac is definitely one of those. So when the Vardis camp reached out to Sentinel Daily with news of a new Instagram-project featuring many -make that MANY – photos n’ bits and pieces from Vardis’ salad years during the height of the NWoBHM, well, you can imagine we didn’t need much of an arm twist… Almost within minutes I was hooked up to a phone line to the Greek island where Steve spends much of his time, ready to find out about what promises to be a rather interesting trip down memory lane..
How are you? “I’m good, very good. Thank you. What time is it there?”
It’s about eight o’clock in the evening. “That’s not too bad”
The clocks changed on Sunday. So it’s it’s much better now, The time difference. “Yeah, yeah”,
With the ice broken, we move on to the reason for our chat. Remind me again Steve – why are we talking? “I’ve just been going through a lot of old videos, and photographs and negatives. It’s amazing how it all comes flooding back, but you sort of forget after all the years, you know?”
Well, I was going to say, I mean, you know, even me looking at the photos you sent took me back in time to being a young Metalhead, you know. In an age now where we photograph our dinner every night and put it on the internet… Actually not too many people did this did they in the old days? They didn’t document very much at all, really. “No. I mean, we were lucky when we played London and we hung out with a lot of the people in the business at that time in the mid to late seventies and yeah, I mean, obviously there were no mobile phone cameras, but photographers were around although that was usually at gigs. So yeah, my wife Irene – and she, you probably do remember was the PR for Motörhead back in the early days. Yes. Motorcycle Irene as she was known then. She went on with that and I WAS managed by the same team is as Motörhead and Hawkwind. She went on to do PR for Vardis just after the 100 MPH album came out, I thought it was love at first sight! We’ve been together ever since! She had a lot of work coming along at the time with photographs et cetera. I mean creatively, I don’t think she got the recognition she deserved, especially after Lemmy got the boot from Hawkwind. They ditched him in the States and he came home in a bit of a mess. Irene was his rock. Lemmy came to all the gigs when we played London, he would always BE there. In fact he came to our first show in London support a band called Lonestar. I don’t know if you remember them”.
I certainly do. Paul Chapman was and is one of my favourite guitarists. “They were playing at the Camden Music Machine. Yeah, a big venue. I got a call. We were living and playing mainly up North, you know, doing Leeds. Manchester, Newcastle. And that was the first time we got the call from London. And that were like, a big thing, you know… in them days, If you didn’t go to London, you didn’t get anywhere, simple as that. Yes, years before the Madchester scene and all that kicked off obviously. So now we went down and played with Lonestar. That’s where we first got clocked by a few record labels. Lemmy was there, came and said hello. And the other guy that were there was Bruce Bruce. Do you remember Bruce Bruce?”
I do. Yeah. He’d have been with Samson at that time. “That’s right, yeah. They all came down, the Samson lads. And that’s how we got introduced to the next level really. Everything evolved from that. We got a record deal and all the rest of it. So, we one of those stardust stories in the sense that you, you make your way to London, and the streets are paved with gold! I wish!”(laughs)
Yeah! So what…as this project progresses what what form is it going to take? Is it just going to stay on Instagram or will it be a broader, multi-platform type of thing? “Well, this is the thing. My son Fred, who is in his early thirties… said ‘you know that you need to start doing something with these photographs. It’s one thing just putting them up on Facebook. Yeah. But without the context, without a little bit of text, yeah, what he’s saying, is asking me to basically say a few words about these photographs and bits of video and what I recall about them. To be honest, I’ve never really done any social media. The only thing I did once was a LinkedIn thing years ago, when I was working working for City and Guilds, the accreditation institution in London, and I was writing some courses for them for Sound Engineering. At that time, I had gone into teaching and was running a sound school at Westminster College. I totally switched off when I left the business in eighty-six – I packed it in and it made a decision… I thought I can’t do this really. I’ve had enough of it all. There was too much bullshit flying around. And I’d done what I wanted to do. I needed to concentrate now on Sound and Music in a different way. I now realise it were painful. It was painful because I’d been a performer since ‘seventy-four, when I left school and really quickly became professional by the late Seventies. But it gets in your blood – it’s adrenaline really, I think. You go on stage every night or every other night and the buzz is tremendous, you know? And I remember when Vardis first started, we did a lot of covers and stuff, but I just kept throwing in the songs I’d been writing. I always write on acoustic guitar; It’s mainly just country blues, as I play it and sing with the guitar. And then when I get in the rehearsal with the lads, get the old amps cranked up and away we go! That turns into rock and eventually to what was eventually termed the New Wave of British heavy metal and all that Malarkey. So what I’m doing is, it think, to answer your question… It’s stimulating in the memories the reasons behind it all. My songs are personal to me and I know why I wrote them. I didn’t do music at school and I wasn’t that interested. I mean I would listen to rock music… but after I saw that movie Woodstock… that was it for me. I’ll ‘ave a bit of this! But it was like, yeah, I suppose growing up as a youngster there was a traumatic event in my life that made me start to write words and I suppose you’d call it… Poetry, really. Just analysing things and writing words and I’d always liked people like Bob Dylan and Marc Bolan and all that stuff, David Bowie, for the lyrical content that they had when we were kids. Yeah, well, you know, the pop charts were like unbelievable. I mean, talk about quality of the artists and the creatives. The early seventies… I mean, yeah, we all know about the fifties and sixties but it goes under the radar a bit, the level of talent that broke through from like 1969 to 77 or something. And it’s just in the pop charts, I’m talking about, yeah, not even like punk or metal or rock or heavy rock of course. We all know the Sabbaths and Zeppelins and all the rest of it but I’m talking about Alice Cooper doing Schools Out on Top of The Pops! Yeah, you know, Slade, T-Rex, fantastic rock and roll that these guys were pumping out. I don’t know how old you are, Scott, but I always say that if you are in your sixties now then you had the best of a musical upbringing for sure, because rock was pop then! Now what was the actual question again? I’ve gone off on a tangent. You’ll have to reign me in!”(more laughter)
Let me rephrase it a little – So what do you think me might see from this moving forward? Do you see a book coming out of it? “Yeah. I think so. My son is a writer.He does a lot screenplays for TV and stuff. When my kids were growing up. I never spoke about any of it – my music career – to anybody. Yeah. I basically turned it off to protect myself, really. Because I knew that I couldn’t go off half cocked, I didn’t want to ‘sort of’ stop. I didn’t. I’ve always written songs and I’ve always played acoustic guitar and I continued doing that. I didn’t want to leave any legacy – It was finished and I didn’t want to know. Therefore to protect myself from feeling bad and bitter about certain aspects I thought ‘we’ll just move on and not talk about it’, not think about it. And in fact, my wife, she felt the same really – enough was enough. We had gone through the wringer little bit; There were some other was some management problems with copyright and stuff that I wasn’t too happy about but I’m not even going to talk about that shit because it just basically leaves a bitter taste. You know, it’s not nice when I look back. That wasn’t the reason I stopped. I always had ambition, I always knew that because the songs were personal to me and that I could walk away. But I knew that it wasn’t the be all and end all”
You don’t want to be that that bloke at end of the bar, do you, saying ‘I could have been a contender”? “You got me mate, you got me… And obviously, I was lucky because I had that pseudonym which gave me protection, a Shield because no one could really track me down. Until eventually through Linkedin and eventually I, you know, Gary actually, the guy that got hold of me… I said to Irene, and this was twenty thirteen or fourteen, these guys in Germany want us to go and play this festival and this and that, and the next thing and the Brofest guys in Newcastle want us, and I can’t see anybody turning up wanting to see us! I had no idea because I didn’t look at, you know, Facebook and all that – I didn’t do it. And Irene really didn’t either back then. So at the end of the day, it was a case of, I don’t know.. Alan (Selway) the original bassman had moved to New Zealand. So he was out of the loop. I said to this Gary, ‘is Terry (Horbury, bass) around?’, does he want to jam? I said, we’ll have a jam and see how it goes. We went into the rehearsal and it was shit, basically. I was twenty Stone and I’d never really played electric guitar for thirty years. I never sold any of my guitars, I kept them all in a lockup… I always played acoustic but I never touched the electrics. It just brought up the emotion when I thought about it. The point is it was really shit and then right at the end of the rehearsal Terry said ‘let’s play Let’s Go‘. And we played it fucking note perfect. And it felt like we were eighteen again. And I just looked at him and I said, let’s do another rehearsal. Playing that song really made me think ‘Shit. The chemistry is still there”. Terry had always been a professional musician, he never stopped playing the game. And it was then, that’s when I started to see that that period in history of Music was very important and I think in a way it made me think”.
In what way? “I was shocked and humbled really when we played Brofest and Keep It True – we’ve got a massive fan base in Germany and I just couldn’t believe it. You know like a these kids have got our old records and they trade them second-hand which was unbelievable. And in a way I knew then that if I carried on with this it’s something that I need to talk about properly and document probably at some point; I had a big flight case full of stuff and Irene had all her press releases. Yeah, Everything from the seventies and early eighties was in this huge flight case at my Mum’s house. We started going through it and reading bits… the recall in the memory is just so powerful when when you look at these things, things you’ve not seen for twenty or thirty years and that’s when Fred said you need to start writing stuff down. Because it’s one thing, you know, a journalist like yourself asking me a question or whatever and me answering but it’s another thing me actually expressing my feelings as I see something for the first time in twenty years. And that is what people are wanting. And as a writer, Fred wants me to build this document up as an insight that he can then pull together at some point in the future and maybe look at it as some kind of book. I’m going to, you know, look at all sorts of stuff that we got up to back in those days and and how the business ran a little bit maybe as well how they all came together, each photograph will hopefully give me some trigger points to try and express myrself in a few words, I don’t want to, you know… I want it to be fun. We were lucky. It was the best era for music”
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