Interview with Matt Taylor
Chris: Do you remember your first practice with Chain?

Matt Taylor: The story goes that I’ve got a band called Genesis in Melbourne, and Chain breaks up in Queensland, and I hear that Chain has broken up and my guitarist leaves so I send a letter to Phil (Phil Manning) and said Phil come and join Genesis, and a few weeks later they either send a letter, or send a telegram in those days, to say come up and join Chain.

Chris: What year was that?

Matt Taylor: This is late ’69 early ’70.

Chris: I’ve read that the first time you got together, that’s when you wrote Black and Blue, is that right?

Matt Taylor: Yeah, the first practice.

Chris: Do you remember much of that?

Matt Taylor: We were practicing in a place called the Red Orb, which was in the valley in Brisbane. Phil came up with this riff. Basically we had to play that Friday night, and this was probably Tuesday or Wednesday. We had to get a full repertoire together.

Songs like ‘Grab a Snatch’ We had done with The Bay City Union, Phil had a version of 32-20 Blues, so he did that, I just learnt the words and we had lots of other things, like a boogie that we would just blow on. We also had a shuffle that we would blow on. Then Phil came up with this riff… da dadada (sings the riff). And as soon as I heard it I thought, I’d always wanted to do a work song, so why don’t we do it as that. I got the guys to ‘blomp’ as we call it, and then figured out a melody and just went and sat down and wrote some fairly heavy lyrics. Heavy that you could get away with in 1970 or 1971. Anyway, we probably did it on that Friday night. So Black and Blue was with Chain right from the start.

Chris: And the ‘we’re groaning’ was written there and then?

Matt Taylor: Yeeah, we needed a chorus and ‘we’re groaning’ was what we came up with. It’s funny, I still have the first draught of “ Remember When I Was Young”, but the first draught of ‘Black and Blue’ is well and truly gone, it was just written on a bit of paper and was just lost.

Chris: There was a period you were playing the blues for a couple of years, and then realised, that you were just imitating the Americans… how did that change come to be?

Matt Taylor: That actually came fairly early in the piece, that was even in the end of Bay City Union. Bay City Union and ‘Broddo’s Band, ‘Adelie Smith’ [Broderick Smith] were made different from other blues bands around at the time by going straight to the source.

We by passed the English versions of everything and went straight to the source and tried to do versions as close to the original as we could. This is at the start of 1966. The Bay city Union did its first gig on the 14th of February 1966. It was the same time that the money changed from pounds to dollars, so I actually never worked for pounds, I always worked for dollars.

We did fairly good versions, but your average blues band today would be better than Bay City Union because we had never heard the stuff. I heard Jimmy Reed and Lazy Lester and people like this before I heard Muddy Waters. And I was already playing harmonica for a year and a half before I heard Little Walter Jacobs. Sonny Boy Williamson and people like that was all I was listening to because that was all you could get. I had to go down to Melbourne to buy albums.

All the other stuff we had, the Jimmy Reed stuff we got from record stores, where they just dumped singles that they couldn’t sell in America, and it just happened that a whole pile of them were great blues things.

For example, everyone’s heard of ‘Messin’ With the Kid’, but there was a fella named Jimmy McCracklin, did a song called ‘Messin with the Man’. We used to do that, a long time befoe we heard ‘Messin With the Kid’.

By about 1967, blues records were really starting to be released, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells became available, all the Muddy Waters stuff, but of course the English were about 5 years ahead of us.No matter what anybody tells you, there was never any 78s by the ol’ blues men released in Australia. Any ones that exist here now were brought over. Louis Armstrong was about as black as it got.

So we were struggling and the amazing thing was that by the time all that stuff was available, I was already thinking, “wait a sec, I’m a white bloke, living in Australia, and we have our own problems, conscription and in those days if you had long hair you would just get belted up in the middle of the street. It was really a torrid time. Any one who looks back at the “50s and early ‘60s with great delight, I think they were living on another planet.

So right near the end of Bay City Union, I started to write, and in fact the first song I ever wrote was with Paul Johnson, the original singer from the Bay City Union and then just before the band broke up we started writing songs with Phil. [Manning] Then Bay City Union breaks up and I just start song writing.

So I then formed a band called Horse, which was nearly all original, except for a couple of blues standards. That was where things like ‘Lightning Ground’ come from and ‘Great Hound Dog Dust Bust’ which Chain eventually does. And Phil was even telling me that I’d already written ‘My Ass is Black with Burke St’ before Chain, so that was another one.To me, it’s not the form that’s Blues, it’s where it comes from.

Of course a form of Blues that evolves in Australia is going to be slightly different to a form of Blues that evolves somewhere else.And even to this day I can listen to English Blues and really enjoy it and see that there is a distinct difference between English Blues and American Blues.

It became very obvious around Chain that there was absolutely no use in us being a second. Truly, if you try and copy the American Blues guys, at best you can become at best a second rate American blues artist. Right from the start of Chain, we wanted to be a first rate Australian Blues Band.

We never realise how different, like if you get those albums like ‘Straight as a Die’, for example, and people will say well that isn’t blues, I said well if I just did the 200 hits of the blues and I could do it perfectly cause that’s what I do, it would sound like blues, and it would even have a lot of the emotion of the blues but it wouldn’t be as real blues as what this is, because this how I’m expressing myself and all of those things of where the blues comes from. The Blues comes from your life and your heart.

Chris: Do you remember the first time you heard blues?

Matt Taylor: My sister bought all the great music of the fifties, we had tons of Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and those guys were all playing a form of blues, and certainly they were playing rhythm and blues. And I had been listening to this stuff all my life, but hadn’t really taken a great deal of notice of it. I was just a crazy little kid running around shooting things, just a typical twelve and thirteen year old.

But when I heard The Beatles, I was bought into that whole thing. This was my generation speaking up for itself. And I can always remember having the same opinions as my dad until Muhammad Ali came along. I can remember saying, ‘Dad, He’s going to win, he’s going to be the world champion, and dad would be saying, ‘agh, Sonny Liston is gunna kill em. That’s the first time I ever went one up on my father.

So I was starting to develop my own place in the world.So I hear The Beatles, and the first album I buy is ‘Please Please Me’, this has gotta be ’63 or ’64, it’s really quite early and I bought it as soon as it came into the shops. It was only from a little picture that we saw in the paper, so I listened to it all and the funny thing was, that the songs I liked most was the Little Richard and Chuck Berry songs, I went out and bought Chuck Berry’s greatest hits and Little Richards greatest hits. I remember reading on the back of Chuck Berry’s ‘Greatest Hits’ that he got recorded by visiting a bloke by the name of Muddy Waters and that name just went into my head and I never thought much about it.

I remember we used to buy this English magazine called “Fabulous” just all photos and there would be ‘what’s your favourite color’ and all this and one time I opened it up and here is this band called The Rolling Stones and they said what’s your favourite past time and the answer was ‘smoking marijuana and I thought, “f*** who are these blokes?” I didn’t even know what marijuana was, but I knew it was naughty.

Years later I read Andrew Loog Oldham’s book and saw how they were just fishing for people like me basically. I heard ‘Not Fade Away’ and I wasn’t terribly impressed with it, compared to The Beatles, but as soon as The Rolling Stones album came out, I bought it immediately and now I was seeing all these different people like Jimmy Reed etc.

So I am about 14 at the time and I am going to shops looking for these guys, Jimmy Reed, Bo Diddley, and guys like that. Now I was growing my hair long and I’m learning to play guitar. I probably took up the guitar to play Beatles songs, but as soon as I heard The Rolling Stones, that went out the window, and then as soon as I started hearing blues, that all went out the window. This was something just so foreign, so different, so wonderful.

My dad had been a harmonica player and he could play any tune. He used to be a tram driver and conductor and he played in the tramways band, so there were always harmonicas all over the house. I gathered them all together and sat down with The Rolling Stones albums and Jimmy Reed albums that I had. I knew they were playing harmonica, but how were they getting the sound?

Then that same magazine ‘Fabulous’ had Keith Ralph from The Yardbirds telling you about harmonica playing. And the first thing he says is that you need to get a Marine Band harmonica and my dad had every other harmonica except the Marine Band. So I had been trying to get a sound out of these things and I was just getting nowhere.

So for 14 and six, from a place called Parlings in Brisbane, I asked for a Marine Band but they said ‘We don’t have a Marine Band.’ But a British equivalent of the Marine Band was called the ‘Super Vamper’ in a lovely little blue box. So luckily I bought an A.

Chris: By accident?

Matt Taylor: Purely by accident yeah.

Chris: Did you know about cross harp then?

Matt Taylor: I found out about that in that article. By this stage I could actually play. Now in those days you could not buy a harmonica brace in Australia, it was absolutely unheard of, so I started getting coat hangers and rubber bands, and all I would do is strum E and play the harmonica.

People have often asked me “who taught you?” and I would say ‘there was no one.” There was no one to teach you. Sonny Boy Williamson taught me and Lazy Lester taught me.

Chris: So there was no footage of Dylan doing that brace holding thing at that time?

Matt Taylor: We are around ’64 or ’65 now. I don’t think I would have known who Bob Dylan was at that particular stage.

I then went down to Melbourne and we were going to start a band down there but it didn’t quite happen, but when I was down there I bought all these albums like Bo Diddley, tons of Bo Diddly stuff, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker so when I went back to Brisbane I bumped into this fella named Paul Johnson and Paul said he had a band. I said I’ll play in your band as long as we just do blues and nothing else. He said OK, I’ll be in that. And I said I don’t even wanna do Rolling Stones stuff, I’m just gunna bloody get my record collection and learn that.

So we basically just did hundreds of Jimmy Reed songs, Bright Lights Big City, Honest I Do, Lots of Bo Diddley. For a first effort it wasn’t too bad but it was just something that no Australian’s had really tried. That eventually became The Bay City Union.

One day I’m listening to, believe it or not, there used to be a radio show that actually played Blues on commercial radio in Brisbane about ’65. His name was Tony McCarther, He eventually named The Bay City Union. Anyway, I turn on the radio one day and I hear ‘Born in Chicago’ by Paul Butterfied, and I had a little recording machine with me and I think I would have run to that radio station, I recon I broke the four minute mile. I just f****** ran there.

I got there and I said “Tony, who on earth is that?” and he said “That’s the new Butterfield album” Ihad to have it, so he let me tape it off the record.

A funny story is that years later, there was this band that used to do “Mellow Down Easy” an old little Walter Song that was on that album. And I asked them one day where did that song come from and they said its from the Butterfield album and I said “Look I had the Butterfield album right from the start” and eventually I figured out that I’d run out of tape before the last song. So I never heard ‘Mellowed Down Easy’.

We used to love Butterfield and of course at this time, Eric Clapton joins John Mayal and there was a lot of controversy as to who was the best, Butterfield or Mayal. I was a Butterfield fan, I just thought he was superb, and I still do, I think he was just one of the greatest harmonica players whoever lived.

What I liked about him is that he invented several techniques that no one had played before, and those several techniques I still use. So again, I have heard Paul Butterfield before I heard Muddy Waters.

The next album that did to me what Butterfield did was ‘Are You Experiended’ by Jimi Hendrix and that came out I think ’66 or ’67 but we were already in Melbourne playing by that stage. During the early days of blues in Australia, there was a band called the Blue Dogs who recorded ’Help Me’, around ’64 or so.

The difference between myself and someone like Dutch [Tilders] you know, people say Ditch brought the blues to Australia blah blah, is that Dutch came from the folk side and I came from the Rock and Roll side. I think equally we did what we needed to do. He was listening to Sonny Terry and Brownie Mcghee, sitting down with Brownie too. When you hear Brownie Mcgee play, you hear a lot of Dutch. So from the Rock and Roll side you worked your way right back to Barbeque Bob and all of these guys from the 1920’s. I’m sure that if you came from the folk scene you got into the more rocky blues like BB King, Freddy King.Eventually I played gigs with the lot of them. All the Kings. Freddy King, Albert King, BB King.

Chris: In the states?

Matt Taylor: Nah here in Australia. Yeah, because they would usually get me or Chain or someone to do all the supports. I did the first Muddy Waters tour and quite a bit of the second Muddy Waters tour and toured with Willie Dixon. Some of them were friendlier than others.

Willie was a really friendly guy.I’d talk to Willie quite a lot and he would mention people… ‘ have you heard about this person or that person? And he said ‘have you heard of Lowell Fulsom?’Isaid, “I’ve heard a little bit of Lowell Fulsom but his stuff is not really super available in Australlia. Anyway, just before the tour ends he writes a song for me called ‘Good Advice” and years later I find out that he just pinched it off a Lowel Fulsom album because he new I didn’t know much about Lowell Fulsom

.Chris: Word for Word?

Matt Taylor: Yeah, word for word. Willie didn’t care. A lot of great songs are like that. Robert Johnson wrote one of the great songs that he’s known for. That was ‘Sweet Home Chicago’, all the rest he copied off other people. 32-20 is a copy of 20-20 blues by Skip James. They were always pinching off each other.

Chris: Why do you think chain was the only blues band to have a number one?

Matt Taylor: Purely by accident in a lot of ways. Chain hit at a time when the music industry didn’t know where it was. It had always been really poppy and now it was getting a harder edge. People were getting bashed up, protesting. It was becoming a very real situation.

To me that had to be reflected in the music. I couldn’t sweep all that under the carpet. So all of a sudden, you were getting hard rock bands coming to the fore in all the clubs in Melbourne along with us who were dominating at the time.

There weren’t that many pop bands, The Zoot was around at the same time, however I think The Zoot was really the last of the over the top pop style bands and even someone like The Masters Apprentices who were still a pop band would have a bit of an edge to them but with Chain, we weren’t pretending to be anything.

We were very anti establishment and didn’t mind singing about it, and we were all smokin’ dope and everything. Then we came down to Melbourne and we record Black and Blue on the way down.When we hit Melbourne, it felt like Melbourne was just waiting for us, cause Genesis had a good following and Chain had an even bigger following and when the two of us got together, we just walked straight into enormous crowds. People were just waiting for it.

So when they released Black and Blue as typical the radio stations just said… ‘agh f***, why should we play this crap’ but our following bought it into the top ten and they had to play it. And when they started playing it, it just went through the roof. On the 3XY chart it was number one for 18 weeks.

Chris: Playing the blues is part of you being a rebel. What role does a rebel play today?

Matt Taylor: I don’t think things have improved all that much. The façade changes quite a lot but the inequality however is still there. I’m certainly not one for revolutions. Most have just ended up with dictators after them. Ultimately the only person you can change is yourself. Even on the new alb, there are certain references to things that are happening around me today that really peeve me off. Evolution to me is much greater than revolution.