Murray Head

The town's name? Marcheprime — 30km southwest of Bordeaux in southwest France. Population: 3900. The stranger's name? One Murray Head. The location of the scream and laughter? The 500-seater Salle Culturelle La Caravelle where Head is performing with a superb band, featuring top-flight British musicians who have each amassed an impressive list of session credits: Phil Palmer, Geoffrey Richardson, Jennifer Maidman and Tim Goldsmith.

Since Head's singing first attracted international attention in 1970 when he appeared as Judas in the original version of Jesus Christ Superstar, raspy, goose-pimple-inducing vocals have been his trademark. This night in Marcheprime, however, he appears unwilling or uninterested in mustering the required intensity. When the band drops out for a few bars to give him space for some vocal pyrotechnics, the singer briefly tries a raspy scream, only to burst out laughing, unable to take it seriously. Clearly, at age 61, Head's angst-ridden days are behind him, even on this gloomy December evening in rural France. But what on earth made these illustrious Brits, surely used to playing larger venues in more inspiring places, march to er Marcheprime?

One obvious answer is that Head is better known these days in France than in the UK, yet he's not exactly a household name among the Gauls either. Apart from being a singer and songwriter, the Londoner is also active as an actor. As early as 1968, he starred opposite Brigitte Bardot in a movie, marking the beginning of what's been called his "love affair with France". After the success of Jesus Christ Superstar, Head pursued a fairly successful music career, with his largest international solo hit 'Say It Ain't So' (1975) a million-seller in France. The Brit also combined his acting and singing talents in various musicals, among them Chess, resulting in the worldwide hit 'One Night In Bangkok' (1984). He briefly came close to being considered an A-list artist — performing for 300,000 people in Paris in 1985, for instance. During the 1990s, Head gradually drifted out of sight in the Anglo-Saxon world, but he enjoyed several hits in France and French-speaking Canada in the same period, and continues to tour across the Channel and the Atlantic.

"We will play anywhere where people will have us!" grins Head. "We enjoy playing small, intimate halls in a time when many artists are asking too much money for performing live to compensate for their record sales going down! Live performance is the last bastion of some sort of tactile exchange in music. This is what music is all about. We enjoy each other's company and what we play is different each night, just like the audience is different each night. We present the real thing to an audience that's been brought up on style and look."

"But we're old and shabby," interjects bassist Jennifer Maidman. "No," protests Head, who still wears his '60s counter-culture values on his sleeve, "we are lively and dangerous!"

Moments after his exclamation, Head gets up to iron his shirt, illustrating the low-budget nature of this tour. Yet when his band takes to the stage 15 minutes later, there is nothing low budget about their activities. Although they are playing through rented equipment, the sound is first class, as are the arrangements and the playing. The quintet skilfully weave their way through a selection of Head's most successful songs, including 'Los Angeles', 'Corporation Corridors', 'When You're In Love' and 'Say It Ain't So', as well as a couple of tracks from the singer's latest album, Tête à Tête (2007).

Head and his musicians start slowly and tentatively, go through several energetic peaks and valleys, are joined by Head's daughter, Sophie, for a few songs and reach their high point with a barnstorming version of 'Boy On The Bridge.' Geoffrey Richardson plays some outstanding solos on the viola, as does Phil Palmer on his guitar, and Jennifer Maidman drops jaws while thumping her bass. Head is in excellent voice and the quality of the songs is, for the most part, top drawer. It's regrettable that he can so rarely be admired on these shores, other than as an actor in a TV series like The Bill, The Vice or Heartbeat. The only notes of discontent are that Head rarely lets rip vocally — especially while playing his nylon-string guitar, which seems to take his attention off his singing — and the occasional descent into questionable populism with songs like 'Maman' and 'Bangkok'.

The most arresting aspect of the concert, however, is the unexpected appearance of Murray Head the entertainer. Given the intensity of much of his singing on record, one expects a deeply serious and perhaps slightly pretentious artiste. Instead, Head is relaxed and humorous throughout, frequently addressing the audience like a stand-up comedian, and on several occasions jumping off the stage and racing around the crowd while singing. There is also more than a whiff of the French chansonnier to his stage approach. By the end of the evening, the audience have gone wild and are ready to throw themselves at Head's feet.

"It is absolutely essential to give the audience a good time," explains Head. "You owe it to them. Throughout an evening an exchange of energy happens with the audience — raw and timid at first, and then it builds and builds — and your profession is to put it back to them. The object of the exercise is for them to go out with a smile on their faces, having lost some of their inhibitions. I tend to deal with audiences that are 10 to 20 years younger than I, and there is definitely a bond."

"My father used to say to me, 'You do it for the applause,' but my response to that was, 'I don't have time for the applause.' If you sit back and indulge, you're not doing your job. You have forgotten where you are and you lose the place. Quite often, a song will go very well and the temptation is to turn around to everyone and go, 'Wow, that was good!' That's fatal because the next song is going to suffer, without a doubt. You have to be 20 to 30 seconds ahead of the audience all the way, so that you can take this thing somewhere. You are steering a boat or a machine, or whatever you want to call it, and you cannot lapse into being self-satisfied or self-congratulatory. The hardest thing is when the audience gets over-excited. In response, I'll often make a mistake, trip up and fall over, do something to subconsciously goof, so that they get shaken out of it and we can all start at the same place in building this energy structure between us."

"I am not able any more to do what I did in the '80s," says Head, "whether it was abseiling from the lighting rig down to a platform in the middle of the audience, or climbing rigger ladders, or being hung from a device that NASA used to train astronauts in walking on the moon. Health and safety regulations have put a stop to all that and, of course, I'm not as agile as I used to be. So I now have to do it another way, on a chat level. But I still try to give people something that they are not going to get the next night. The theatrical aspect is designed to make things a) idiosyncratic and b) hopefully unique. Most importantly, they are things that leave an indelible impression."

One of Head's 'chats' in Marcheprime involves him dissecting the contents of the local newspaper, which has the audience in stitches. He skilfully manages to poke gentle fun at Marcheprime, highlighting the obvious, that it's not exactly a French city of great pedigree, while his warmth and good nature make people feel valued and appreciated nonetheless. Commenting on the way he approaches live performance and dealing with audiences, the singer explains that two things are of vital importance to him: one is to be relaxed, the other to retain the humanity of the performance. In the process, he relates a hilarious piece of on-stage theatricality.

"When I'm relaxed, I sing well," Head elaborates. "I was still smoking at 50 and had to stop. It took five years for my voice to come back into something like being in control. But I'm over that and I can control it fully now, and it's better than it has ever been. So my answer to the question of how I prepare is be relaxed and natural. Life is much better when you adapt to it, rather than when you try to force something on it. The closest I have come to a natural feeling on stage was when I did some shows in the '90s and I literally created a flat on stage. The show began with me being in bed and being woken up by an alarm clock, which started playing some hideous music from the radio station that was sponsoring. I got up, tried to go to the bog, but the door was closed, so I peed in the sink with my back to the audience. Then I shaved, had a cup of coffee, and there was a telephone call asking whether we'd begun the rehearsals.

By this time, the audience had usually laughed, which I acknowledged, and I played one song on my own. Then I woke up a musician sleeping on the settee with a cup of coffee made from the water from the hot tap. There was another musician behind a bar, who I woke up, and a third musician came from outside, late. We continued like that until the interval, when the band left the stage, supposedly to go to the pub, and I stayed around to hoover and change things around for the slightly more rock-y second half. The reason for all that was to show people that the rehearsal could be more interesting than the actual show, and to get as close to being natural as possible."

"In preparing for a tour, the band and I have perhaps a week of rehearsals. It's important to bring in new songs as often as possible. I could never emulate the big names that rehearse for three months, and everything is absolutely meticulous and every show identical. As far as I'm concerned, you retain the potential of every night being different. The songs are arranged so that you can keep a flow and spontaneity, and the musicians have the maximum amount of freedom and can play off each other. The whole point of live is that it is live. You have to make recordings, but the concept of recreating a recording on stage is completely insane. It's the stupidest thing in the world!"

"One of the people I admire a lot is Bob Dylan because he's persevered for 40 years with playing completely new versions of old songs. The audience will sit there with ridiculously puzzled expressions on their faces for at least 30 seconds, trying to work out what song they're hearing. It takes courage to do that, because it inevitably creates a ghastly silence while the audience is trying to work out what's going on. Audiences want to be reassured about what they're hearing, but that's not our job. Our job is to get them out of that niche, and to make sure the band and the audience enjoy something new and fresh together, so everyone is discovering something new at the same time. The whole thing is about the joy and beauty of spontaneity."

"You have to be able to recognise the dynamics of your own songs," says Head. "I've been surprised at how many artists don't know how to do that. They may be great musicians, but their sets don't work. I now start my concerts very slowly, very low-key. Many people like to come in with a bang and I have in the past also done that, but as I said, the hardest thing to handle is when the audience gets over-excited.

One of the finest acts I saw recently was Joseph Arthur. He works with loops, so he builds up his songs slowly. He has paintings dotted around the stage, and while singing he carries on painting them. Everything in our business is geared towards repetition, and I prefer to find ways to make every event unique."

With his penchant for uniqueness, it's perhaps not surprising that Head doesn't think new technological developments have made live performing easier. "I fight hideous battles with digital desks," fumes Head. "I hate anything that's supposed to ameliorate the soundman. What is the point of having certain settings when the halls and the acoustics change? In analogue, it's easy to do fine-tuning, but in digital, it's a complicated mess. From the beginning of the 1980s onwards, technology was fighting against us to the point that technology became the star. You could write your own pop song in five minutes, and identity and the craft of songwriting went out of the window. I love jungle and rap and drum & bass, but not as performance items, because they take away the whole tactility of live performance. When people hear skin, wood, strings, the tactility cuts through. Luckily, songwriting and real instruments are making a comeback with Elliot Smith, David Gray, Joseph Arthur, Jack Johnson, James Blunt and so on."

It appears that Head is influenced in his rant by his experiences with recording his album Sooner Or Later (1987), which was produced by Steve Hillage and mostly programmed by the latter on early music computers, including the BBC. "That was the most soul-destroying experience I've ever had," recalls Head. "I had some great musicians, but he removed almost all of them. There was no question of enjoying the experience of recording together as musicians and of bouncing things off each other. The album cost me five times more to make than any other album, and it sold five times less. It was almost the end of my career."

Despite his arguably quixotic struggle with the digital juggernaut, Head has reason to be optimistic. With the recent re-emphasis on songwriting, he may even find his way back into the Anglo-Saxon limelight, especially given the continuing strength of his material. Or, as Head puts it, "One of the strengths of my music is that the songs, however simple they may be, last for some reason. They hold." Quite.  0