Shindig! Issue #158 – Billy Nicholls
JON ‘MOJO’ MILLS interviewed BILLY NICHOLLS in issue #158 about his fantastic 1974 album Love Songs. In this abridged extract he remembers his friend Caleb Quaye
An important figure in the adjacent Small Faces coterie was Caleb Quaye, who Billy had met back in ’66 at Dick James Music. The well-told tale of how the aspiring teenager songwriter ended up meeting one of the most important people in the biz goes something like this. Nicholls had knocked on the door of George Harrison’s Esher home wanting the Beatle to hear his songs, an impressed Harrison then passed them onto Dick James, who in turn invited Nicholls to come and see him. “James said, ‘I’m sorry I lost the tapes, but can you come up and record at my studio? At least you can then have some nice demos of the songs then,’” says Billy of his rapid introduction to the industry. “I jumped at that chance. I was only 15. I went in to record these demos and Caleb Quaye was behind the jump. He was engineering.” From there, Quaye then recorded further demos with Nicholls for Immediate, this time playing on them, and they remained close friends. By the time Nicholls was working with Townshend, Quaye was aiming for the big time with Hookfoot, but was always at hand.
After returning from Ireland, Billy was somewhat fortuitously approached by his old friend Phil Chapman at Olympic Studio, who’d heard that Billy was back in the game and asked if he’d like to come and record his new songs with him in studio downtime. Caleb was called up and the two musicians worked regularly over the next few months, primarily before the Stones came in during the early hours to work on the UK sessions for Goat Heads Soup. “I was so lucky to be recording in Studio One at Olympic,” says Billy with a huge smile across his face. “I knew it very well as I did my first album there and I recorded a lot of stuff with The Small Faces. It was like my second home, so I was very comfortable to go there. Pete gave me some electric guitars for Caleb to use, and I think Caleb had BB King’s old guitar too.
“When I went into the studio with him, I knew the format of each song. We wouldn’t just sit there and doodle and jam. I don’t work like that. The songs were always completely finished before Caleb heard them, and he was totally in tune with what I was doing. I would play the song to him on my Zematis acoustic six-string, and he’d say, ‘Okay, let me play drums along to that.’ That’s how it would always begin. I didn’t even know he could play drums, but he played great. The next thing would be him adding bass. I would then put a guide vocal down and that’s when it really started to happen. Caleb would play electric guitar and sometimes organ. It was very organic, but we had it off pat.”
The finest example of this method must be ‘Winter Rose’, which opens the album. “I played my acoustic tuned to an open E chord,” says Billy of the process. “Caleb played two guitar solos layered on top of each other. He made Love Songs as if he wrote the songs himself. He added stuff that wasn’t anything like you’d get from a session player. He totally understood where I was coming from. We’d known each other for so long that it was a very natural thing.”
To read the full article order Shindig! issue #158 here
