TALK TIME: EOIN BUTLERtalks to James Taylor, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee turned cruise ship singer
How are you doing?
Pretty good. I’ve been on the road for most of the past month. Keeping my socks up ahead of my visit to Europe this summer. Right now I’m just re-engaging with civilian existence a while – going to baseball games with my twins, sleeping in a tent in the yard with them this weekend. It’s pedestrian stuff, really.
You’re reported to be concerned about the environmental impact of touring. Might this be your last visit to Ireland?
These big tours necessitate a lot of people driving very long distances. I’ve been making that point for 20 years now. But no, I’ve been to Ireland six times in the past decade, I think, and I just love it. For me the audiences who are the most alive and the most responsive are the Irish, the Italians and the Brazilians.
Having stumped for Obama and played his inauguration, did you get to spend time with the man?
I felt very strongly that Obama represented the last chance for the country to recover and reorient itself after the Cheney/Bush years. So I offered to help his campaign any way I could. It was very gratifying, subsequently, to be invited to participate in the inauguration. All of our meetings have been very brief, so I couldn’t possibly tell you that I had a sense of him in a personal context.
The era you’re synonymous with is southern California in the early 1970s. But you had a previous life in the Beatles orbit at Apple.
The Apple days were chaotic. It really just existed in the gap between Brian Epstein’s death and Allen Klein coming in. It was a kind of Prague Spring, but it was too idealistic, too much of a crazy dream, to last.
What were the Beatles like as people in the eye of that storm?
To me it was always amazing that the Beatles even survived the amount of attention that they got, that it didn’t paralyse them. They were making the White Album and of course there was a fair amount of drug experimentation going on. I remember coming in just as they had finished a session and listening to playbacks of Hey Jude. McCartney actually called me from Trident Studios about a month ago to say that the place had changed, but it was still completely recognisable.
Has your perspective on those days changed at all?
I think at the time it really seemed that new worlds of possibility had opened up and that the world was about to change utterly. As it turned out, change doesn’t happen that quickly. It comes in fits and starts. Certainly, in the music business it was a period of amazing creativity, followed by a much longer period of business consolidation. But it was still an amazing time to live through.
Who or what has been the biggest influence in your life?
Musically, Ray Charles is at the top of that list. McCartney is in there too. Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Harry Belafonte . . . But the most transformative thing in my life has been 12-step recovery . Until 1935, it was a death sentence to be an addict. Even today, something like 80 per cent of addicts die.
It’s always baffled me how you managed to produce music that sounded on such an even keel when your life was in disarray.
There are different ways that people abuse drugs. I was a self-medicator. I wasn’t trying to get blasted, I was trying to get even. I did stretches in psychiatric hospitals as an adolescent and, when I look back on my subsequent drug use, I wasn’t trying to get crazy – I was trying to get sane. What I would say, though, is that if you’re addicted to something, the sooner you deal with it the sooner you’re able to get on with your life.
You’re booked to perform on the Queen Mary II this summer. After 40 years in show business, you’re playing cruise liners.
Before any tour, our band always gets together for a few days to rehearse. So I thought: why not do it on the boat? Since my audiences are smaller in Europe, the cost of transporting my full entourage and equipment is usually prohibitive. This way we get to transport all of our crew and equipment across the Atlantic, there’s no jet lag, and all we have to do in return is give two performances. So it works out well for everyone.
James Taylor plays the Marquee in Cork on July 2nd and the O2 in Dublin on July 3rd