At a time when, seemingly at least, Punk ruled the airwaves and snarling teenagers were saying naughty words on the TV – it looked like bands with talent were threatened with oblivion. Some carried on regardless, other bands folded, while some stuck their heads below the trenches, waiting for it to be safe to pick up their guitars again. But there were a few even braver groups of musicians, with talent, who swam against the tide, ignored the background cacophony and formed groups with talent. Sad Café are one such courageous example.
At their pinnacle in the late 70’s and early 80’s they released some great albums that have not aged and can still be enjoyed today. Along with that, they were regulars on Top of The Pops with such hits as My Oh My, La-Di-Da and, of course, the beautiful classic Every Day Hurts.
Although their 15 minutes of fame might have passed, with multiple line-up changes (including Mike Rutherford in an early Mechanic ensemble) and many members having moved onto the great gig in the sky, Sad Café had a hiatus but came back in 2012 determined to keep their legacy alive and have been touring and entertaining ever since then.
Keeping the name, and music, alive is bassist and vocalist Des Tong whose life as a musician could fill several novels and, as he is also an author, they do in a fictional way.
Darren Walker: Hello Des, on behalf of The Progressive Aspect, we thank you for your time today.
Des Tong: My pleasure.
A great introduction, and too true about hostile reviews. Although punk had cooled down, there was a great review of a gig that we did in 1981 at the Hammersmith Odeon and there was this journalist who came in to meet us before we went on. He was in the Green room, drank most of the rider and he ate most of the sandwiches as well. We then we went on stage and he disappeared off and then three days later, when the music paper came out, his review was ‘I don’t like saxophones. Sad Café have a saxophone. I don’t like Sad Café.’
So that was, nice. Such is life, today’s newspaper reviews are tomorrow’s chip papers – but that was the sort of reaction we were getting. Hard to please people who wouldn’t listen to us. I’m not knocking punk because the energy was amazing, but we were actually criticised for being able to play. We had spent 20 years perfecting our craft to be slagged off because we played too well.
Darren Walker: I know you’ve had a fascinating life before Sad Café, but for those who are unfamiliar with you, please can you give us a potted history of your musical life?
Des Tong: I started playing when I was around about 12. My dad was a wonderful pianist. He used to play in all of the big hotels in Manchester and, obviously, as a young kid, I wanted to bang things and be a drummer. But he said “No, you’re not going to be a drummer, but you can be a bass player because there’ll always be gigs”.
He had a pal who owned a carpet factory and he had this battered old double bass, which he stored the stair carpet underlay on it, the roll was on the neck, so he just unwound it. My dad gave him a fiver for this old bass ’cause it had a crack in it’, we did it up and then I had lessons at school during the lunchtime. One time I was having a double bass lesson in the cricket pavilion, where they stored the bats and the stumps and I was about a couple of minutes late back to registration and my teacher pulled me out in front of the class and he said, where have you been? And I said, well, “I’m sorry, sir. I’ve been having my double bass lesson” and he said, “when will you realise that you will never make a living from playing music?” Now is that a challenge or is that a challenge?
Darren Walker: Proving teachers and similar people, that say you are wrong, is the best incentive anyone can ever have.
Des Tong: Definitely. I was 13 and I was playing in my dad’s trio in hotels, clubs and bars playing jazz. And then when I went to grammar school where mates were all into The Small Faces, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles so the double bass made way for a bass guitar. I was in a small soul band with school friends, but then I was head hunted by a really good bunch of guys who were all a lot older than me, and I joined this band called Henderson Chambers, and we used to do house parties, and then I got a residency in a club and I just left school.
I then started working with American artists, who were coming over to the UK to tour. Fontella Bass was one of the acts, and whilst I was doing that I met five guys from Liverpool called The Chance who asked me to join them as their musical director. I was 19 and suddenly I’m touring, doing major concerts and touring Germany and Belgium which was amazing. You know, great experience. It was absolutely mental. When I was with Fontella Bass, we’d have an early gig at a place called the Boston Glider Drone in Lincolnshire and then we did another gig later that same night at The Twisted Wheel in Manchester. Crazy but you did it because petrol was 3/6 (three shillings and six pence) a gallon 😉 and there wasn’t the traffic that there is nowadays. And then I met some guys in Manchester who were session players who got me into doing different sessions and strange things like radio jingles.
It was during that period, in 1978, that I played on the number one song, the Matchstick Men and Matchstick Cats and Dogs, by Brian and Michael. I did everything, getting phone calls asking “are you available tomorrow?” And even if I didn’t know what they wanted I just turned up and did it. So I was playing with people like Lisa Stansfield doing all our early stuff and then be playing live with Engelbert Humperdinck at the NEC. Then in 1981 I got a phone call from Paul Young, from Sad Café, who I’d known from about 1978 when I was in a band called The Soul Train. With them we supported The Jacksons on their tour in 1979.
He asked me to turn up and when I walked in Sad Café were sitting there. I thought they just wanted a session musician so I played this bass line and they all loved it and they all said wow, that’s great. Can you come back tomorrow and do another one? I’m talking like ‘Kerching here!’ So I went back the following night, and while I’m there, the bass player walked in and told me that he’d pulled back from recording and playing, and that the band wanted me to do the rest of the album. Once that was done they asked if I fancied doing the tour? And that was it, no more side projects, I was part of Sad Café. Suddenly I’m at the Apollo in Manchester in front of 5000 people.
You know, before that, you’re unknown, just a face in a local band. Now I’m in the program and everybody knows I’m Des Tong from Sad Café. That was a huge shock really. In fact, somebody asked me “how long did it take you to adjust?”- and I said “a day” because that’s all I had. The first gig was in Preston and the next night we were up somewhere else and that was it. We were off, touring all over the place. Glastonbury, Reading, all over Europe and supporting Nils Lofgren – crazy but fun days. But there’s a saying in the in the industry “too much month, at the end of the money” which meant I had to diversify.
I was doing a gig at the BBC in Manchester and a couple of very old friends of mine, who were running the Radio One and Radio Two office in BBC Manchester asked for a chat so I met them in the pub at lunchtime and they said, “We’ve been meaning to give you a ring. Would you be up for doing some production for us, because we need a freelance producer?” So, my first session producing was Simply Red and it was their first radio session. Fun times as I also produced Spear of Destiny, Erasure, Richard Thompson and plenty of others. It was a great grounding because, as a producer it taught me to be to be very concise and to be very diplomatic. A prime example of that was with Simply Red spent a year doing an album and they had from 10:00 until 6:00pm to record 3 songs in full and we then mixed the following morning. And then from there I was asked to produce Damien and his version of The Time Warp. His manager at the time, a guy called Nigel Martin Smith, who went on to be Take That’s manager told me that he wanted Julie and Sheila to be able to dance around the handbags on the dance floor to it. Not rock ‘n’ roll, but dance, so, basically, I did a Stock Aiken, Waterman version.
Darren Walker: I’ve still got the 12″ single of it somewhere, but that was from when I when I used to do the mobile discos.
Des Tong: So that was me cutting my teeth in production. But with Sad Café, when Paul died in two in 2000, it was a massive shock to everybody because he was so young, he was never ill although he was a bit of a hypochondriac.
Darren Walker: It was a heart attack, wasn’t it?
Des Tong: Yes, it was a heart attack. He left unfinished material from a solo project, which was left in a basement somewhere. About 4 years later there was a knock on a friend’s door and it was Paul’s wife, Pat, and she had a cardboard box full of tapes and she just said “can you do anything with these?” So my friend took them to Gothenburg to a studio where he was working. They had to treat the tapes to prevent them disintegrating and then they stripped all the vocals off and basically started again. I got a call as they needed to redo all the music. By then word was going round so Graham Gouldman, Eric Stewart, Mike Rutherford, and Paul Carrick got in touch to say that they’d like to be involved. This led to the release of the Sad Café album called Chronicles. A great album, but as soon as the Genesis fans found out that Mike Rutherford was on it, it was bootlegged. One day we found out that there was something like 60,000 streams, but only 2000 of them were legitimate. But thanks to that we were approached by this agent who said “guys, you know, there’s a lot of interest in the album. Would you be up for doing some gigs?” And we went “well, we haven’t got a lead singer”, but we managed to get Steve Walley, who’d replaced Noddy Holder in Slade, and we were back on the road again. There were some who seemed to think that because Paul is no longer in the band, it can’t be Sad Café. But the answer to them is, well, when Dennis Law left Man United, did you stop following Man United? We got a lot of grief for that. People want to hear the music and they let us know that. We have never responded to the criticism. I own the Sad Café name now. So I can basically do what I want with it but the one thing I have done is get a great band together and the response from the fans has been fantastic.
Darren Walker: With you owning the name, if you decided to retire, would that be the end of Sad Café or would you hand on the baton?
Des Tong: Well, it depends, I’ve got no plans to retire at the moment and we’re now writing and recording new material – the first new material for 35 years. As far as I am concerned, the legacy will continue. We will always do the favourite songs but we can’t just keep playing the same old stuff and we want to do something new. An EP first and then, hopefully a full album.
Darren Walker: Excellent news and I look forward to hearing all your new material.
Back to your own story, who were your musical heroes and have you ever played with any of them?
Des Tong: No, I haven’t. The first concert I ever went to was Jethro Tull at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester – and that freaked me out because I’d never experienced anything on that scale before. But as far as who are my heroes? It is difficult to say really. In terms of bass players there’s a guy called Chuck Rainey, who played with Steely Dan. There was Louis Johnson who was part of The Brothers Johnson. Ray Brown who was the double bass player who with Oscar Peterson and not forgetting Phil Lynott who used to drink at the same bar as me, when he was in Manchester.
When I was in a band, in 1979 we toured all over the UK with the Jacksons and one night we played at this place in Birmingham called Bingley Hall. It was a freezing cold January night and when we got there, there was only one dressing room. So the support band, who were this bunch of irreverent lunatics shared the same dressing room as the Jacksons, with Michael Jackson, and they were on one side of the room having a prayer meeting while we were on the other side getting rat *****. Rock’n’roll man. But I never joined Michael on stage.
Darren Walker: I mentioned in the introduction that you’re also an author. Now is your chance to plug your books. Please tell us about them? How and when did you get into writing?
Des Tong: Oh, ok. During my varied career path I went from musician to computer games composer and then I joined a company in Birmingham who ran the local TV channel, originally called Big Centre TV. It was there that I came up with this concept of driving around Birmingham, in a car, with Bev Bevan from The Move and ELO. We drove and talked about all the old venues, clubs and bars. Chatting about all the musos and all the anecdotes we had. We did a series of three shows and it was the most watched show on local TV. People would stop both myself and Bev in the street and say how much they enjoyed it.
It was due to the show that a friend of mine, called Sissy Stone said to me why don’t you write a book about it? But my thoughts were that there’s already loads of books about Birmingham music, but what I will do is I’ll create three characters and I’ll write a story about them. It was never on my bucket list but I just sat down and wrote. The story was based on three people, a club owner, his wife and a rock star. A chance encounter with a proofreader, who loved the story, encouraged me to write more, so that is what I did. In fact I wrote four more books during lockdown and I kept going after that. I loved it and I couldn’t stop. Then, thanks to another friend I hooked up with a guy called Andrew Spark who is a publisher.
Darren Walker: Yes, I know him and he is a great guy. Anyway, I’ve just noticed the time and I’ve been keeping you for quite a long time but, as a sort of seasoned veteran, have you any advice or hints for any wannabe rock stars out there?
Des Tong: The one thing I always say is follow your heart. If you’ve got an idea and you believe in it, do it because there’s more opportunities now than there’s ever been. When I first started schools didn’t have computers and I’m not happy about AI but I know it’s going to take over eventually, but if you’ve got the wherewithal, do it because you can do everything on your own. Now you can create your own songs. You can create your own record label. You can create your own publishing company and you can put it out on social media and who knows…
I’ve just been introduced to a girl who lives down the road from me and she’s had 80 million hits on social media, never heard of her. But, you know, she’s 19 and did it all in her bedroom. So, just do it and don’t be afraid.
Darren Walker: Wise words! Anyway, OK, well, seeing the time I’ll just say, thank you for your time. On behalf of The Progressive Aspect and myself, I’d like to say thank you.
It’s been wonderful talking with you.
LINKS
Des Tong – Website | Facebook | YouTube
Sad Café – Website | Facebook | YouTube
