Sting described BJ Cole as the best pedal steel player in the world. You might think – what does Sting know? Well, you can read BJ’s CV for a start. In a career stretching back to the mid-Sixties, his recording credits read like a Who’s Who of rock music, to name a few: Elton John, Marc Bolan, REM, Bjork, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Verve, Depeche Mode, Beck, Elvis Costello, David Gilmour, Groove Armada, Emmylou Harris, Jools Holland, KD Lang, Moody Blues, Pet Shop Boys, Robert Plant, Scott Walker. He’s had an incredibly diverse career, playing on albums ranging in style from rock to ambient, jazz, country, folk, dance and classical. We caught up with him recently in his north London home for a chat and a glass of wine…

NFMP: Most people hear ‘pedal steel’ and they immediately think country music. But reading your CV, it seems to be an incredibly versatile instrument. Of all the musical genres you’ve worked in, which do you think was the most unlikely?

BJ: Classical music is the most demanding, because it’s got to be pretty convincing to make it work. You’ve got to raise your game to a level where playing pedal steel has got to come across properly, not like a novelty. Over the years I’ve raised my game to that point and it obviously spins off into everything else to make it better. If you’re learning Debussy and Satie and Purcell then playing country is something you can do in your sleep.

But I wasn’t a country fan to start with. When I discovered the pedal steel I was so blown away with the musical possibilities of it and the sound of it, that I didn’t really bother thinking that the instrument might be limited in people’s minds to country music or Hawaiian music. When I heard it in country records I thought, that’s interesting, they’re amazing players. But I discovered country music through the steel guitar, not the other way around. So when people say, it’s sounds country when I play Debussy then I get very narked cause I think, hang on a minute, you’ve got it round the wrong way and it’s your stereotype or your preconditioning that makes you say that. That’s always been the challenge of the instrument. I don’t hear any connotations in the instrument at all.

NFMP: So did you start off playing piano?

BJ: No, I played guitar to start with, mainly listening to Hank Marvin, like a lot of other people. When I discovered the steel guitar, not pedal steel to start with, I thought it was fluid and melodic, it was much better than the guitar at doing the aspect of the guitar that I liked. It was lyrical; I was always into the lyrical, melodic stuff. Hank Marvin, is a lyrical player, but then I discovered that he’d been listening to steel guitar players.

NFMP: Did you teach yourself the technique?

BJ: Pretty much; I went to a Hawaiian teacher for a little bit for about a year, but that was before pedal steel, just because I wanted to. It was someone who advertised in a magazine called BMG – Banjo Mandolin and Guitar – it was around in the 50s and 60s and very old school, very old fashioned looking and published by Clifford Essex Music who were based in Earlham Street, now long gone.

NFMP: How would you say you have adapted the instrument, and your technique, over the years?

BJ: I think when it comes down to it, it’s not the country thing that limits the pedal steel – it’s America. If it isn’t used in country music it’s used in country rock, or some sort of American music of a roots kind. It’s not been internationalised. And I want to try and internationalise it. If you listen to the sound of the way that pedal steel is played in America, it’s got an American accent. I try and play it with an English accent and that’s the difference between what I sound like and what one of the great players from the States sounds like. It’s the same with singers over here, if they’re singing country music or blues, they sing with an American affectation. I think there’s a parallel in instrumental sounds as well.

NFMP: Tell us a bit about Cochise – your first band – the first English country rock band?

BJ: This was between ‘69 and ‘72, it was three years but it felt more like thirty, it was pretty intense. Well – that era was pretty intense. We did a lot of gigs, mainly with Hawkwind because we were managed by the same people, which meant we were playing lots of psychedelic establishments with lots of liquid light shows and lots of marijuana, touring round the UK. There were lots of places to play; a lot more than there are now.

NFMP: Many people will have heard you play on Tiny Dancer, the Elton John song featured on Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous (2000). How did you come to work with Elton?

BJ: There were connections between Cochise and Dick James Music (DJM) because Mick Grabham’s (Cochise’s guitarist) music publisher was DJM and they had a demo studio. The studio was in New Oxford Street at the time, above the bank, neither of which are there anymore. Elton was on DJM as well so he did his demos in that studio. It was very much the centre of what was going on at that time; we’re talking 1969/1970. He happened to be one of the budding songwriters to be coming through the office and I got to know him incidentally because we used the same studios, he was just a mate really. It was bizarre the way he took off. He wasn’t Elton John then, most people called him Reg. I’d already known him a few years indirectly when they called me up to go and do that session. I think it was a last minute idea to have the steel guitar on it because they called me late in the afternoon and said – can you come in this evening. So we worked through the night on that and we all just sat there and worked it out, it was all done at the same time – apart from the strings and the voices which were added – the rest of it was all done in one go. We finished about six in the morning, came out of Trident Studios which is still there, not in its same form. But I wouldn’t have said at the time that this was so special that it was going to be the cornerstone of my career, cause at the time, it’s just another thing you do, in a studio full of a bunch of people you know.

NFMP: Looking back, what kind of impact did it have?

BJ: I think it’s crucial, now. I wouldn’t have had the objectivity to see it that way at the time, but when that record came out my phone started ringing. I was already doing sessions, but it wasn’t to the same level. That record really established me as a sound that people wanted to use. And it wasn’t because they wanted a country influence. It was the fact that an English songwriter had incorporated the steel guitar into his sound. On that level, other songwriters wanted a part of that. That really is what gave me my career. Singer songwriters started to see the steel guitar as one of the sounds in their arsenal. I worked on Gerry Rafferty’s City to City album, I didn’t play on Baker Street but I played on quite a lot of other tracks on that album and it wasn’t a country thing. He just wanted to use it as another sound in the production.

NFMP: Can we move on to another legend, John Cale – you toured a lot with him in the 90s, which was your longest spell on the road with an artist. He has a reputation for being a difficult man to work with, how was your working relationship?

BJ: My Transparent Music album was signed to Joe Boyd’s Hannibal Records, and that was how I met John Cale because he and Joe were talking at the time. John tends to fall out with everybody eventually. He’s a very unusual person. He’s quite a character, larger than life, egotistical as hell. But our working relationship was very good. I met him because he had written this piece called the Falkland Suite in the early 90’s, which he’d written as a full orchestral suite featuring Dylan Thomas poems, and Cale being Welsh, it was something very close to his heart. He had a piano part on it for him and a pedal steel part, don’t know quite why.

Here’s a clip from the US show Night Music of John Cale and BJ Cole performing Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night from the Falkland Suite:

And then there were other gigs; we played at a 60th anniversary of Elvis’ birth, organised by Don Was, the producer. He was a fan of John Cale so he got him down to this place called the Pyramid in Memphis which was a convention centre on the banks of the Mississippi and it was a 3 day musical blast, the most extraordinary gig I’ve ever done. We played Heartbreak Hotel – John does a version of it in a minor key, which is very bizarre. It’s not exactly Southern Rock – playing that to a Southern Rock audience, it went down a little mutedly. He was in his element; he likes it when he freaks an audience out. (You can see a version of it here from 1981 on Musical Express)

He has seen it all Cale. He’s been in at the beginning with all of the avant-garde of the Rock, Punk and classical scenes in the fifties and early sixties; it’s amazing, extraordinary he’s been there and back again. He’s now living in Los Angeles writing film music. I really enjoyed working with him. He’s not a person you like, necessarily, some people are too full of themselves. I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of people like that. I’ve worked with a lot of great singers too. Steve Marriott, back in the 70s, he was amazing. And working with Terry Reid now.

NFMP: One of your more surprising musical excursions has been into dance music (Drum and Bass) – your albums with Luke Vibert have been incredibly successful and exposed the pedal steel to a whole new legion of fans. How did your collaboration with Luke come about?

BJ: I knew David Toop (the writer and musician). In about 97/98 I told him I was interested in working with a DJ and he turned me on to “Intelligent Drum & Bass”, people like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. I got deeply into it; I became convinced that it was very musical. A lot of musicians were deriding it and saying they were not musicians and that they were taking their work. This is not true, these guys were real craftsmen, with great musical heads and I’m not worthy of understanding their talents.

I was first turned onto Luke Vibert by his album ‘Drum and Bass for Papa’. I went out and heard him DJ and was just completely blown away. Those guys, back in the late 90’s, they used vinyl, and their sense of knowing how to play with tempo, and knowing how to play with the audience and judge how to get the vibe going and how to keep it going, it was something I really respect. At the same time I thought that that sort of music needed a musician to play over the top of it, something that was organic and improvised, and interacted as a person, on top of midi-constructed music. I loved that record and said to David Toop, I’d really like to meet this guy, not expecting to – but he knew someone who hooked us up in Stamford Hill.

NFMP: How did you work together, a DJ and a musician?

BJ: I turned him on to my record collection and he turned me onto his record collection. We started off making steel guitar records, or exotica records. All the guys at that time were deeply into exotica. And exotica obviously features steel guitar, a lot of steel guitar and Hawaiian music. So I just provided him with a limitless supply of samples that he didn’t have to pay for. Later on he started to give me tracks that he didn’t know quite what to do with. Because he’s so prolific, he’s at home turning tracks out whether they’re going to get released or not, great stuff. He just gave me various things that were unfinished and he didn’t know how to complete them, so he gave them to me and I would find a way to complete them. We developed quite a close and playful way of working with each other. He’s great, we really got on.

NFMP: You clearly have an unusually open mind when it comes to music. Where does this come from? A lot of people feel uncomfortable with things that are challenging or different, whereas you seem to be able to embrace all of it.

BJ: I’ve never had a component in my head for conforming or for stereotypes. I hate them with a vengeance and I think they should all be got rid of. I think we’d all be a lot more intelligent and better people if we didn’t have them. Unfortunately things like the fashion industry and the media industry depend on them to exist. Music is a voyage of discovery, and I’m open to be inspired. There are certain things I cannot handle for various reasons, like opera. The sound of it bothers me, I find the voices forced and over-coached, and unnatural. They were developed when there was no PA system. I’d much rather hear Scott Walker or Freddy Mercury singing opera than an opera singer.

When I was working in Cochise in that psychedelic period the climate was such that people were actively trying to find musical areas that hadn’t been invented. It was almost encouraged. You were looking for something that had never been done before.  That was a good climate to come up through. There was much more of a willingness in the public and in the audience to hear something they’d never heard before. Whereas now it’s becoming harder and harder to find truly original things, or put it this way: the music industry has less and less ability to market things that don’t fit into certain categories. There are people out there doing innovative things, but there are less and less channels for it to find an audience.

NFMP: You’ve got such a diverse musical background. How have you not become pigeon holed?

BJ: When I first started, what music impressed on me was its diversity and that there was always something new, just when you thought it was stale to you, something would come round the corner that blew you away again. Which is why I can never understand why people get partisan to one kind of music, really. There are great things in every sort of music. Each one informs the other and makes you more passionate about any one. The difference between good music and bad music usually comes from the attitude of the people performing it.

NFMP: Don’t you think it’s the nature of the music business to try and keep artists in one lane?

BJ: Don’t get me started on the music business. I can see that it makes things easier; they don’t have to be as imaginative if they’re given a narrow area to market because they formulate their marketing strategy to one market or another and they don’t have to think about it anymore. It wasn’t really that way in the early 60’s and 70’s when I started, people in the industry were more music fans, the A&R men and the producers were more people that were passionate about the artists they were working with. Obviously the economics of it were much more manageable: there were less overheads, it didn’t cost so much to record people, so they could afford to run with developing an artist. It was run by music fans who knew what they were passionate about and had the time to develop an artist or a genre.

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BJ Cole will be featured on BBC1’s ‘The One Show’ at 7.00 PM (17th May 2011), playing and talking about his role in the making of Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’, and how it helped establish his session career.  You can watch it here on i-Player

If you’d like to see the passionate and diverse BJ Cole in action, you can see him playing at the Jazz Café on 21st May with the legendary Terry Reid and full band, tickets here; or at Glastonbury with Terry Reid, and also with one of his current collaborators, cellist Emily Burridge, 4pm on the ’71 stage, Saturday 25th June /. For more dates visit his events page.

Selected BJ Cole discography below, (for more click here  – BJ says this is the most comprehensive he himself has found!):

• Swallow Tales: Cochise (1971)

• New Hovering Dog: BJ Cole (1972)

• Transparent Music: BJ Cole (1988)

• Stop the Panic: Luke Vibert and BJ Cole (Cooking Vinyl, 2000)

• Trouble in Paradise: BJ Cole (Cooking Vinyl, 2004)

• Lushlife: BJ Cole, Roger Beaujolais, Simon Thorpe (UntiedArtists, 2009)

• The Gnossienne Suite: BJ Cole and Emily Burridge (Academy Recordings, 2011)

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Interview by Kathy Magee and Jane Parsons