An Audience With Wreckless Eric: “I was prone to getting in trouble”

Wreckless Eric’s Leisureland is a concept album of sorts about a stagnant English seaside town where “Asbo supermarkets” are opened by inane local radio DJs and “methane gas seeps silent to the breeze”. Having grown up in Newhaven, Eric Goulden knows the territory, though it feels like he’s spent most of his life trying to escape it. Following stints in London, France and Germany, he’s spent the last 11 years living in upstate New York with his American partner, the singer-songwriter Amy Rigby.

It’s therefore a surprise to discover that he’s in the process of moving back to an English seaside town – Cromer to be precise. “We’ve always liked it,” says Goulden, cheerily. “It’s one of the few bits of the Norfolk Coast that isn’t completely spoiled. There’s a place further along called Burnham Market and they call it Chelsea-on-Sea, you just want to walk around keying people’s cars. There’s nowhere ideal in this world to live, and some people in the UK say, ‘You’re crazy to come back here.’ But we’re crazy staying in America…”

Goulden will reacquaint himself with smalltown Britain on his upcoming tour, which deliberately takes the road less travelled. “I love places that aren’t meant to be venues. They’re exciting because everything’s a bit makeshift – there sometimes isn’t a stage and the lighting is two anglepoise lamps. My music always seems to sound good in those kinds of places,” he decides. “It’s visceral, I suppose.”

Has surviving a near-fatal heart attack during Covid given you a new perspective on life and music?
Sean Browne, Dublin

It’s not anything as overt as a new perspective, but I think about dying a lot more. When it was going on, I wasn’t actually scared – I found it interesting. They’re plugging all this stuff into you and there’s all machinery beeping on and off, and I’m going, ‘Cor, what’s that?’ I was quite surprised afterwards that I’d come so close to dying and I was quite calm about it. It’s made me think about the whole business of dying. I wish we could talk about it more, because it’s the one thing we’re all gonna do.

On your new album you sing about “Listening to Southern Rock in South-East England in 1971/ Dreaming about Memphis, Tennessee and the California sun”. Who specifically were you listening to, and did these places live up to your dreams when you finally got there?
Russ McAteer, Northumberland

I listened to so much stuff: Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Little Feat, Allman Brothers. I would listen to Duane Allman when he was doing the Muscle Shoals sessions and playing on Wilson Pickett records. I didn’t have any boundaries. Later on, punk came along and lines were drawn – I had to keep very quiet! When I say I was dreaming about Memphis, it was “Long distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee”. I’m thinking, ‘Wow, that place must be so cool.’ But by the time I went there, it was a complete dump. I played at the Hi-Tone, where Elvis used to do karate, and the audience talking was louder than I was. I’m going, ‘So much great music came out of Memphis, like Stax and Sun Records and Alex Chilton, so you know about music – except I don’t think you fucking know about music because you’re so busy talking, you don’t fucking listen to it!’ When I play in Memphis now, no-one dares talk…

Who gave you the Wreckless nickname and why?
Sharon Thompson, via email

There was a new name every couple of weeks really in those days, because I was on the dole. You never did anything under your real name because the DHSS would come knocking on your door. Why Wreckless? My behaviour was erratic, I was impetuous, I was prone to getting in trouble. I had an immense drinking problem. But I feel quite well-balanced these days.

What was so inspiring about seeing Ian Dury live in the early days? And how did he end up as your drummer on the first Stiff tour?
John Lindeman, Swindon

He was really inspiring to me when he was in Kilburn & The High Roads. They looked like an institution that had been let out for the day, though Ian had this incredible charisma. He’d be going, ‘This one’s for the girls around the toilets.’ There was this love of rock’n’roll, but he sang in English, he didn’t try and adopt an American accent. His girlfriend was a woman called Denise Roudette, who was learning to play the bass. At some point, Denise came to stay with me and my girlfriend in Wandsworth and eventually we started playing stuff together. One day, Ian came over. He was a bit scary – it took me ages to realise that he thought we were having an affair! But of course we weren’t, so Ian said, ‘You need a drummer’. And he ordered us about and found a washing-up tub and a couple of knitting needles and played along. He came back the next week with a fire-damaged Olympic drum kit that he’d liberated from a secondhand shop. And he was great drummer, he had fantastic rhythm. He always said, ‘It’s a bit silly wanting to be a drummer when ’alf yer body don’t work.’ His hi-hat was tight but his snare was very offhand, a bit late, so it had this great tension to it.

Which of Stiff’s other artists did you bond with most?
Martin Wright, Solihull

I really did like The Damned, and Nick Lowe I thought was fantastic. But I didn’t bond with Elvis Costello. I mean, I was in awe of those people because they seemed so driven and so capable. I was ashamed of being driven, but they seemed to be able to carry it off with an element of cool. So I didn’t bond with anybody, apart from maybe Larry Wallis. He was this brick shithouse of a man with dark fuzzy hair, mirrored shades and a leather jacket. When I first met him he came hulking over to us and we were terrified, I even saw Ian [Dury] shrinking back, and this little voice came out and said, ‘Are you Eric? I’m Larry.’ His music had a real hardness about it – he was in Motörhead! – but it’s actually lyrical and poetic. So there was a dichotomy. He did my first album and there was a track called “Personal Hygiene”. He said, ‘I want it to sound like Walt Disney, like Bambi.’ And this is coming from a guy who’s just drunk a bottle of vodka and looks like the Furry Freak Brothers personified. He was a strange character.

What was it like to know that Elton John fancied you?
Steven McCourt, via email

It was very flattering. I thought he was absolutely lovely, he was the nicest man – he still is. When I met him, he was so shy, he was almost trying to melt into the wall. I didn’t know what to say and he didn’t know what to say. And then I had to get on the tourbus. He said to me later, ‘That tourbus saved your life! You dodged such a bullet there.’ I was a huge fan, but I didn’t see the hero, I just saw this lovely person.

What are your best memories of the ‘Medway scene’ in the mid-’80s?
Jim Curtis, Barnes, London

The Medway was the centre of its own little universe. I can remember looking out the window and seeing this guy in a cream raincoat walking past, he looked like he was in one of those kitchen sink black-and-white British films. And that was Bruce Brand from The Milkshakes. Then there was Russ Wilkins who worked in the electrical shop. Eventually we started playing together in the Len Bright Combo and that was quite thrilling at the beginning, it was a welcome relief from the po-faced musicality of the ’80s. They could play great but they wouldn’t acknowledge that they could, so it sounded savage. But I can see now that it was musically stunting. There were so many rules about what you couldn’t do.

“Tell me it’s God’s will when you’re taking it up the arse”. Discuss!
Lachlan Moore, via email

We have a Christian far-right here in America who would like us to live by the tenets of the Old Testament. They are at work trying to diminish women’s rights, to basically turn women into kind of breeding receptacles. Occasionally they come round and say, ‘We have a message for you from God!’ Let’s face it, if God had an important message for me, do you think he would entrust it to a couple of jerks like you? The line is from a song called “Creepy People (In The Middle Of The Night)”. I wrote it in 2018 during the Trump presidency. I don’t usually write angry songs, but I think this one is. God isn’t God in the line, it’s a metaphor for Trump, the Trump regime and the Christian far-right. It’s amazing to me to see so many people vote for and support something that so clearly runs contrary to their best interests and their quality of life.

What’s your favourite cover version of “Whole Wide World”?
Rob Fennelly, Coalville

Probably The Proclaimers, because they made it into their own song. I like the Cage The Elephant version, because it’s kind of like my version, but it’s bigger and wider and more heroic. I never like to hear cover versions just slavishly doing the original. I wish someone would do “Whole Wide World” as a trip-hop record or something.

Have you still got the amazing velvet suit you wore on the cover of your debut album?
Leo, via email

It wasn’t velvet, it was some sort of uber-polyester material that gave me electric shocks as I was wearing it. My daughter found a whole load of clothes in her mother’s attic and the suit was there. And it’s tiny! I’m sure it must’ve shrunk… When I’m really famous one day, I’ll auction it off.

This article originally appeared in Uncut Take 319 (December 2023)