It's too late to stop the music now

It's a long way from the sweaty 1970s London pub-rock scene to the serenity of New York State, but Graham Parker's songwriting has aged well, writes Tony Clayton-Lea

We have no choice except to ask the following question: what in the name of the Sex Pistols is a former petrol-pump attendant from London doing in the Catskills in Upper New York State?

"Well, it's a beautiful part of the country, and when I came to the US first in 1976 we spent a lot of time touring - it was my first introduction to the country. And then I spent time recording in New York State, and somehow I visited the Catskill Mountains, and it's stunningly beautiful. There is such a variety of life here, and so much to do. I'm a bit of a nature freak - I saw a blue heron this morning on my pond. You can live here in a pretty decent sized house on 10 acres of land - and that would be slightly more expensive in Surrey. It's over two hours from New York City, and it's handy for my gigging area, which tends to be the East Coast. A five-hour drive isn't much over here, no big deal. A lot of my work is around three hours away - New Jersey, New York areas, so everything fits together quite well these days.

"And I have a lot of time off - the downhill skiing here is amazing. And there's a fairly decent over-30s soccer team as well. I admit it's pushing it a bit for me at the age of 56, but I scored a hat trick the other night, so they're not going to put me on the subs' bench just yet."

Graham Parker has come a long way from the sweaty, beery, smoky days of performing at the Hope & Anchor and other London dives where the pub-rock music scene was born in or around 1974. Way back then, Parker - a man full of vim and ego eager to prove his worth - was a refugee from the aspiring London soul group scene. His sense of ambition was justified with two albums released in 1976 - Howlin' Wind and Heat Treatment, each a fervid blend of Van Morrison, Bob Dylan and aggressive R&B arrangements, imbued with a runt-of-the-litter equals top-dog attitude. Parker and his band The Rumour might not have had the iconic influence of his London-based punk-rock contemporaries, but he had more than a notion of his destiny.

The initial success of the Parker/Rumour hybrid, however, petered out and by 1980's The Up Escalator album, the partnership dissolved. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Parker has continued to record and release albums, albeit on a smaller scale; they have been devoured by a cult fan base that couldn't care less for the old days. For this crowd, the albums Parker has released since 1988's The Mona Lisa's Sister is where they're at: albums wilfully released on independent labels, words that duel with the collected lyrics of Van and Bob, tunes that bounce around the closed parameters of tightly structured songs. And the anger? That's still there, too. Is the audience? "My dad isn't sure how I make a living because I'm not in the newspapers or on music shows any more. The world is bigger than England, however, but for the large part, yes, people don't know who I am. What are you gonna do? Unless you're a superstar act that attracts young people because it might be their last chance to see you before you die, then it's fairly typical. I'm astonished that I have any audience at all, to be honest. Not that the music hasn't been good - I think it's been consistently great over the years.

"But then it isn't just about the music, it's about perception. People buy into what they think is successful, not whether the music is good. That's the least consideration. Is perception everything? Maybe not, but that's what the music biz is all about. Trends have so much to do with it, and why should young people buy into me when their friends are saying, 'who's he, never heard of him'."

Sales and audience figures may have dipped, then, but Parker's energy levels remain at their peak. It was always thus, he recalls. "I had a tremendous drive to strike out; I was old enough in the mid-1970s to have been through my psychedelic and prog-rock phases, the singer-songwriter stuff. So I came out at the end of all of that and began to yearn after the music I loved in my early teens - ska, Tamla Motown, aggressive Rolling Stones, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, one of the best records ever made, and I got into that. I wanted to reintroduce short pop songs back into the music scene, pop songs executed with great intensity and fervour. That's what I was aiming for - and, of course, trying to impress women. Let's face it, that's what it's all about. Suddenly you have a guitar in your hands and chicks are looking at you, the same chicks that weren't looking at you a few weeks before when your hands were empty. Wow! It's hard work until that microphone is front of your face."

Then aged 24, Parker's mindset was in the now-or-never mode. He was working at the petrol pumps in the morning, cleaning houses in the afternoon and writing songs at night. He'd gone on the hippie trail to Morocco, too, returning with a sore head and an idea to write his angry little pop songs.

"Some record companies didn't get it," he remembers. "I went to Virgin in about 1974 and sat on psychedelic cushions while talking to an A&R guy who just didn't understand the songs. Then some of the songs were played on Charlie Gillett's London radio show, and Nigel Grainge from Phonogram rang up and asked who was the guy that sounded a bit like Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. And I got a deal from that. Quite instant, really."

A lot of artists, implies Parker, reckon they're going to get caught out - they think they can't be that talented, yet the next minute they think they're God. "There's a lot of schizophrenia involved with being an artist, which accounts for the mood swings. And that's still there with me - in fact, it's a driving force. It's like, okay, I'll show 'em, the next album will be really great, the definitive stuff, the real thing, no more funny business. And it is a funny business, you know - you're on a knife's edge all the time. But at this stage I have a level of craft I can fall back on. I can write songs that have three chords to them that are very good, and I don't feel the need to make them smarter."

According to Parker, he thought he'd only last three albums. Back in the mid-1970s, he says, five years seemed an enormous amount of time. "There I was at the age of 24 reckoning that 30 seemed a very long way off. I had no idea I would be making a living out of it in my 30s, let alone my 40s and 50s." He can't see any other way, of course - in the words of one of his heroes, it's too late to stop now. No subs' bench just yet, then? "Keep away from the day job for the next 10 years! I think I'll make it, don't you?"

• Graham Parker's new album, Don't Tell Columbus, is on Bloodshot Records