Shakin’ Stevens interview: ‘I was quite wild in those days – Johnny Rotten was a fan’

From Shirley Bassey to PJ Proby, The Rolling Stones to The Who, John Peel to Johnny Rotten, Culture Club to Richard Madeley: over 50 years in music, Shakin’ Stevens has interacted, worked or indeed wrestled with a mind-bogglingly diverse cast of pop-culture figures. But only one of them really got his goat. And it wasn’t the singer with the Sex Pistols.

“This is my first takeaway coffee since February!” a grateful Shakin’ Stevens, all teeth and tinted sunglasses, tells me. “I am more vulnerable than other people, definitely, but I’m fine now. But put it this way: we won’t be seeing any of the family at Christmas.”

It’s a bright autumn afternoon and we’re sat, at a diagonal distance, across a bench in a park in Maidenhead. Shaky – which is what everyone calls him, even his manager-wife – lives in nearby Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where he’s been shielding since March.

It’s clearly done him the world of good: the man born Michael Barratt in Cardiff 72 years ago looks fantastic, which is all the more remarkable given his near-fatal heart attack 10 years ago. In a black corduroy greatcoat, natty scarf, smart shoes and chestnut-black sweep of hair, he looks every bit the rock’n’roller he was in his Eighties pomp, when he was the UK’s best-selling singles artist across the decade.

But now Shaky is venturing out to promote a new three-CD singles collection. It’s accompanied by a career-spanning anthology that runs to a hefty 19 discs, a number which gives you some sense of the many and remarkable musical lives of Shakin’ Stevens.

The earliest of those occurred at home. “There were 13 of us, and I came on the back end,” says Shaky, whose builder dad, Jack, born in 1897, had served in World War 1 as a teenager. “When I came along there were only eight left in the home.”

Underlining the fact that this was very much a different era is the revelation that one of those siblings, Aileen, was friends with a teenage Shirley Bassey. He remembers the 83-year-old Dame, who’s just released what she’s calling her final album, coming to his house.

“I was only small, but I do remember her sitting in the chair there. To me she was just Shirley, just another woman. They were like that,” he says, entwining his fingers. “And they used to come in late as well – they’d be on a night out, and Aileen would climb in the window, very quietly, to get back in the house.”

Fired up by his dad’s pre-War ’78s and his elder siblings’ Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Bobby Darin discs, young Mike left school, aged 15, in 1963, during the first bloom of Beatlemania. “All I wanted to do was sing,” he says in a lilting Welsh accent that swims in and out of focus.

When I mention the talents of Shaky’s grandson, 13-year-old actor Billy Barratt, the east Londoner who recently won an Emmy for his sensational work in last year’s BBC drama Responsible Child, he nods. “He’s very good. I think he was born to be on the stage, really. I was born to be on the stage as well, there’s no doubt about that.”

Juggling day jobs as a warehouseman, milkman and window cleaner, teenage Shaky was immediately in a band, “and we had several names. We were The Denims, uncannily, because I wore the denims in the Eighties, but I didn’t then.”

Gigging as Shakin’ Stevens and The Sunsets, they plied the Sixties coffee bar and club circuit. Eventually, by sheer hard work and managerial wiles, they secured the gigs – two of them – of a lifetime: supporting The Rolling Stones in London in December 1969.

“It was reported in Melody Maker or New Musical Express that John Lennon was performing in Toronto in this white suit,” says Shaky, reaching for the specifics of long-ago memory that, understandably, are sometimes, well, shaky. “And our manager said in one of the magazines: ‘Well, if John Lennon wants to come over to the UK and do a gig with us, we’ll show him how to rock’n’roll.’”

This managerial boast about the frontman credentials of the bequiffed Welsh belter rippled through the music industry “and people’s ears went up: ‘Who are these guys, Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets?’ The next thing we know, the representatives of The Rolling Stones made contact – they wanted us to support them.

“So it was great thing to travel to London in your van, and arrive at the Saville Theatre, and The Rolling Stones – I kid you not – were doing rock’n’roll numbers: ‘Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!’” he sings, “‘Now whether they were doing this to roll out the red carpet and make us comfortable, I don’t know.”

The following year, the band also caught the ear of John Peel. The champion of all things hippie, prog and alternative signed the Sunsets to his label Dandelion. What did he see in them? “I don’t know,” Shaky says with a cheerful shrug, “but he came to a lot of gigs. And John liked what he saw. I was quite wild in those days. It would be nothing for me to climb up the speaker stacks."

The Sunsets recorded tracks for an album with Dandelion, but it never saw the light of day. So the band pushed on into the Seventies, making six albums in all. Commercial success eluded them but Shaky himself continually attracted attention across the board.

One came from Johnny Rotten. “I think the story goes that he was doing this interview – and they didn’t hold back with their French, did they, the Pistols?” he marvels, demurely. “And he said: ‘How long’s this f_____’ interview going on for? I want to go down and check out Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets!’ So I guess he was a fan.”

Around the same time, the singer also blipped on the radar of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, managers of The Who. In early 1977 they signed Shaky to their label Track Records, onetime home of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Thunderclap Newman. But again, it was close but no cigar: Shaky’s self-titled debut solo album had the misfortune of being released just as Track went bust.

Luckily, that same year he secured a role in the musical Elvis!, which opened in London’s West End just three months after the death of The King. In a show featuring three actors playing Presley at different points in his life, Shaky had the plum role, playing Peak Elvis, not Young Hick Elvis or Fat Vegas Elvis.

“And I had the best tracks, Don’t Be Cruel and all that stuff. But it was a steep learning curve. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, two shows Friday, two shows Saturday, then Sunday – collapse.”

Running for 19 months, Elvis! was the talk of the town. Shaky recalls the attendance of Susan George and Diana Dors, David Bowie popping backstage (“but that night I’d gone by then”) and the patronage, one evening, of Carl Perkins. He could vouch for the accuracy of Shaky’s impersonation of his old friend: “Listen, Elvis did that, he did that – but there’s a couple of things you were doing there, he never did that!” One of which might have been Shaky’s nightly habit of jumping off the stage into the crowd, “which was not part of the script”.

Playing the elder Elvis, meanwhile, was PJ Proby, who was reportedly fired for getting drunk before going onstage and addressing the audience directly. How was it acting alongside the American showman best known, still, for two British trouser-splitting incidents in 1965?

“Well, you know, PJ is PJ!” begins the ever-polite Shaky. “He’s very unpredictable. I had these white shoes, chukka boots they were, with buckles on the ankle. And PJ liked his pop,” he adds, where “pop” is not Wham! but booze. “And he a funny guy,” he notes – where, I think, “funny” is more “peculiar” than “ha ha”.

“And he said: ‘I’m sure you’ve got a pair of magic shoes.’ This was because I went up on my toes,” he says, doing a seated version of Elvis’s knee-knocking dance moves. So Proby demanded a go at Shakey’s shoes. “And he put them on, tried the move and went arse over tit! But a lovely guy. Very unpredictable. Yeah, he liked his pop. Too much, really. But everybody used to have a tittle then.”

And all of this happened before he was one of the biggest British pop stars of the Eighties. When solo fame finally hit, with 1981 Number One single This Ole House, Shakin’ Stevens had just turned 33. His age and experience stood him in good stead, especially as it sounds like the Eighties’ pop aristocracy were far from welcoming to the defiantly retro Welsh rock’n’roller.

When I ask whether the New Romantics, the Durans and Spandaus, looked down their nose at him, he replies: “Ah, possibly. They were doing one sound and I was doing another. We had nothing in common, really. We’d kind of nod at each other and that would be it; there would be no conversation.”

Cool or uncool, it didn’t slow his Top 40 progress. A hit run of deathless singles like Green Door, Oh Julie and Lipstick Powder and Paint resulted in Shaky becoming the first artist to notch up 50 performances on Top of the Pops. In fact, Eighties Shaky was so influential he was also breaking records, in the other sense of the phrase, when he wasn’t appearing.

“There was a time I couldn’t make the show in 1982 – I was ill with the cold or something. So Culture Club got that slot,” he says of the band’s October ’82 performance of Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?, their debut appearance on the show. “They got in there, and that struck the match for them.”

And yet, the knocks persisted. Shaky wasn’t invited to perform on either Band Aid or Live Aid. Of the former he says: “I was coming back to the UK from somewhere on the same plane with Duran Duran. And I said: ‘Where are you off to next?’ ‘Oh, we’re going to this studio in London to record this Band Aid single.’ Well, I wasn’t! That was the first I’d heard of it!”

Then there was the infamous occasion when Shaky took umbrage at a young Richard Madeley, on Yorkshire TV’s Calendar Goes Pop show, describing him as an “act”. The Welshman launched yourself, Emu-on-Parky style, at the interviewer, almost knocking him over the back of the couch. Then he got a very rattled Madeley in a headlock. Fellow guests Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt were thoroughly out-rocked.

Shaky laughs. “He was shouting: ‘Watch my watch, watch my watch!’ But he just wouldn’t listen. I don’t think he’d done his research. He asked what it was like to be a revivalist. He was insinuating that was all I did. And of course the Status Quo guys are naughty, ’cause all they’re doing is giggling away.

“And I said to him: ‘It’s a good job you didn’t have bloody Jerry Lee Lewis on the chair next to you, ’cause he’d have thrown a piano at you!’ Then two years later, I was offered a spot on this other show, and he was on the same show, and he said: ‘I’m not having that man on here.’ I thought it was very childish.”

In the end, he says, Madeley did the right thing. “There was a third time, another year later, and he must have grown up a bit more. He said: ‘Actually, let’s clear the air – I was out of order.’ And I said: ‘Thank you for that.’”

In the darkening park in Maidenhead, it’s getting to that time of day, but Shaky's day isn't over – he has to go home and record messages for radio stations in Australia and northern Europe, territories in which he would, right now, in another time, be touring to promote his new compilation.

Before he goes, I point out it’s also getting to that time of year when his 1985 Number One Merry Christmas Everyone starts being played. How would he describe his relationship now with that 35-year-old stalwart?

“I’m very proud of it. I would say, without my blowing my trumpet because I’m not that kind of person, that it’s up there with the best Christmas songs. It’s given a lot of people joy. Of course you get your humbugs out there who hate Christmas.”

How much does he make from it each year? “The guy that makes the money is the writer. I was talking to him a couple of weeks back and he had a nice little cheque from America.” But still, “it’s nice a little financial boost every year. And it’s a nice boost to be in the charts again.”

Next year, vaccines permitting, Shaky will be back in the saddle. He’s started a new album already, and is eyeing a return to touring. “I still love being on the road. I’ve been doing it since I left school. It’s in my blood, it’s in my bones. I don’t jump around like I used to, but the voice is still there. But I need to have a bit of dignity – so if I need a walking stick, I’ll think again. But,” he concludes with his pop star smile, “I’ve got a lot more to give yet.”

The three-CD Singled Out and 19-disc Fire In The Blood compilations (BMG) are released on November 27