But for some unknown reason, I can’t think 100 per cent what went wrong, but you know when you get that thing when they say “phone me next Tuesday”, then when you phone he has to go off to America… so it never quite materialised, I never really got to meet him. So they said, “Let’s get Joe Meek to record that,” you know, it was his kind of style. What happened was we recorded a demo for Pye and they decided that they thought the slow song I’d written, Nightmares, was better than the A-side, Last Train To Memphis.
Yeah, that was a nearly! I didn’t meet him, or work with him. Don’t forget, we were only 12, 13 at the time, so you’re only doing places like pubs, little bits and pieces like that, no major gigs, but you gradually got to the major gigs as you got older. There was no real big names, you just played around. The Cravats, Jesse Hector Band, things like that. What were the early bands that you were in? Then I saw a picture of Elvis and then it was off, that whole thing was what I wanted to do. I heard his Rock Island Line and that started me off. Well, skiffle was around in ’56, ’57, ’58, Lonnie Donegan. When did you move from skiffle to rock’n’roll? Gradually I played bigger gigs, coming up to the 60s, and I started to have old tape recorders, and record things, and I happened to get records made at that time. And then I managed to get into the 2i’s quite young, which was brilliant, you know. Then, aged about nine or 10 I was in a skiffle band, a school thing, and I played quite a few pubs. So I played all around, playing all sorts of music, whatever I could listen to, what I could hear. Then I done a swap with the family’s boy I used to go to school with him. And I learnt to play the guitar by going in there. A family moved in next door, a black family from America, and they had guitars and everything. I started when I was a very young kid, about six or seven years of age.
Jesse is currently in the public eye as Cherry Red have just released an album, Running Wild, of his single tracks recorded in the 90s, which comes with the excellent Jesse Hector DVD documentary film, A Message To The World.Ĭould you tell us about your early years?
Indeed, words and ideas flow from the man in a torrent as he warms to each new theme. But he remains unrepentant, happy and enthusiastic. He’s also a great character, whose refusal to make any career move that didn’t suit him, while admirable, may well have hampered his progress toward that elusive big hit. Probably best known for his time leading proto-punk outfit Hammersmith Gorillas, Jesse has also known and worked with a veritable who’s who of the UK rock and pop scene. J esse Hector has had a remarkable career, stretching from his early days as a precocious young skiffler, through rock’n’roll, mod, pop, psychedelia, punk and beyond.
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