Part III: Family Entertainment

ZigZag: When you came to make 'Family Entertainment' you must have felt that you would do things differently having accomplished 'Music In A Doll's House'?
Charlie Whitney: Certainly we did. We hadn't known too much about making albums, and I suppose that the biggest feeling was that we had made all the songs in little blocks, and now we wanted to have a few blows---stretch out a bit. Another thing was that Gilbert had got Glyn Johns to engineer it, and he wasn't too keen on working with Dave Mason, which left us to work with Glyn on our own. Gilbert had pissed off to Rome to do a film or something. After we'd recorded it we went off to Scotland or somewhere, and when we got back, Gilbert came round to the house with the acetate, and we were meant to have done the mix! We just played it and he mixed it.

ZZ: Yet you didn't give him the elbow for some time after that.
CW: Wasn't for the want of trying.

ZZ: "Second Generation Woman" seems very feeble to me
CW: On reflection the backing track does seem a bit weak, but it was Ric's song and he was into his Dylan thing. It's very hard to say about these decisions. "Observations" is my song and Jim King singing it is a joke---I think it's terrible. He was a good singer, but it was all wrong. That was a terrible mistake.

ZZ: "Summer '67" is a great song, but it differs from all those songs that tried to evoke that mood by being almost Arabic rather than Indian.
CW: That's interesting what you say because the real reason that it wasn't Indian was because I'm not that good a sitar player to play it, so I used strings. But the idea came from a tape I'd heard of Ravi Shankar with the All India Orchestra which was unbelievable.

ZZ: What was Nicky Hopkins like?
CW: He's very good to work with. He'll walk into the studio and you'll play him the back track and he'll ask what key it's in, and he'll get a piece of paper and he'll go 'Right. A minor', he'll get all the bars together, figure the whole thing out and he's away. It's frightening. To have that kind of ear. But actually Glyn brought him in---he really is fantastic. We didn't have to ask him to redo stuff, because he did exactly what we wanted straight away.

ZZ: Is that a mandolin, or a banjo on "Dim"?
CW: A banjo, speeded up. I played it.

ZZ: Is "Processions" the only number that you've ever written without the collaboration of other guys?
CW: No. There's been a few. How that came to be put down solely to me I don't know. There are some songs that Roger wrote completely, where I would just put in a chord or something, and there'll be songs that I write, and he only writes a bit of lyric. But usually we just put it down as Whitney/Chapman.

ZZ: What's that 46 in "Dim"?
Roger Chapman: It's three doors away from 40, which was our house in Lots Road and the other lads were 46.

ZZ: It sounds like the 46th position from the A-Z of Spanking.
RC: Yes, it could well be that too. There was a bit of lechery down there. We were always in and out of the two houses.
CW: Christ yes. They used to run the electricity from our house to their house over the roofs.
RC: They used to have about three tents in the living room, didn't they?

ZZ: Was "The Weaver's Answer" about anyone in particular?
RC: No it was a story, and I don't really understand how I got that together. I was working frantically, beating out my brains, to get it written out. And the next day we were going to Hull in the van and I finished it during the journey. I never had to do any more work on it.

to be continued...