Mark King

MK: "I got my first drum kit when I was nine, and I was doing three gigs a week on the Isle of Wight when I was 11. I was in a band called Pseudo Foot, which seemed like a good name at the time. Also, that band gave me my first dose of singing live. All I ever wanted to do was be a musician, so there really wasn't anything else for me when I was at school.

MK: "This guy called Andy Sojka came along to see us play one day, and he was looking for bands for his independent label. He seemed to have his finger on the pulse. The only song that he liked was 'Love Meeting Love', which became an underground hit in 1980. They were quite clever, 'cause they only put white labels out. All the DJs thought we must be some black band out of New York or something, but we were from the Isle of Wight, not Brooklyn [laughs]. All we were really trying to do was sound like our heroes."

MK: "I loved drums, but Phil had the drum kit and I didn't have one, so I started playing bass. We used to borrow instruments and jam at the Guildhall School, where Mike Lindup was studying. Mike's principal instrument was percussion, so you can imagine how tedious those conversations would have appeared to anybody listening in. We thought it was all riveting, but it was just drummer talk.

MK: "I got the Best Bass Player Award from Blues & Soul magazine, and I think I'd been playing it about 18 months, which seems a bit ludicrous really. I was thinking to myself, 'Am I a bit of a charlatan here, or should I just roll with it?' And you just sort of roll with it, really, because you're not gonna get up and say, 'Oh, actually, I'm not very good after all' [laughs]."

MK: "Well, that was true, actually. In fact, my thumb was insured for £3 million. Mind you, I only had the one insured. It's just third party, fire and theft now, so the premium has come down somewhat [laughs]. Anyway, it was the record company who insured my thumb, not me."

MK: "Ken Scott had produced so many of our heroes from the past that we jumped at the chance of working with him on 'Hot Water'. By the time Ken produced us, he'd been a bit out of the loop for a while, because I don't think he'd produced anything since Bowie, but we didn't care. We wanted to work with him because of the music he'd done with John McLaughlin, Billy Cobham and Stanley Clarke. Of course, the record company want you to be working with happening, 'now' producers.

MK: "I remember sitting down for a meeting with the guys in 1985 about what were gonna do, and we did make a collective decision to try to write some hit singles at that point. So we wrote 'Leaving Me Now' and 'Something About You', which became our first Top 10 hit in America. Once you start getting into America, then you've got to spend so much time working there promoting it and nurturing the possibilities that that country can offer. It's funny really, because I think the seeds for the end of the band had just been sewn during this time.

MK: "Things were happening incredibly fast and we just couldn't keep up. It was big time. We were opening for Steve Winwood in the States, we came back and did six weeks on the road in Europe and then went straight back out and did three months supporting Madonna. Phil and Boon had just kind of had enough of constantly working at such a hectic pace and being manipulated by the record company to come up with hit records. I can remember a phrase that was very popular at the time: 'The album's got to have legs.' What they meant by that was that they wanted five or six singles to be released from each album. It was too much for us."

MK: "I think you do, but it's a very small window of opportunity when you're in that zone. I'd say I was creatively in that zone where I was in touch with what was going on and what was turning people on for 18 months, and that was it. Looking back at that period of time now, we couldn't seem to put a foot wrong. I think that was our time, and we had our fingers on the pulse of what people really wanted from us.

MK: "Having the bass so high up in the mix set us apart, and although what we were doing wasn't unique, there was nobody doing it at the time. Then again, you had Sting with the Police, McCartney with the Beatles, and although people might say Cream was Clapton's band, I think you'll probably find that it was Jack Bruce who was pulling more strings than anybody else, and he was right in your face with it. The idea of the bass being so prominent didn't seem unusual to me at all. I suppose we used the bass as the lead instrument just because of the way the music was being written. I think the bass seemed more upfront and more important because I was centre stage doing the lead vocal."

MK: "Whatever you felt about the band, you really couldn't say we kept writing the same song over and over again, because there's always so much more music to be done. That often didn't sit well with the record companies at the time. We had a minor hit for Polydor in 1981 with a song called 'Love Games', and they were immediately saying, 'Let's have another one of those, lads.' That was the first time I realised how the music business worked. Record companies are always looking to replicate something that's just been successful, and I think that can be such a short-sighted thing to do.

MK: "So much of the way the band sounded is down to the roles that Wally Badarou and Mike Lindup took together as keyboard players and co-producers of the music, because they obviously understood how this whole thing was actually working and how it was being lead by the rhythm section. The keyboard arrangements that are going on in there are actually really sophisticated, and they give the music great depth. If you take those keyboard arrangements away, you just end up with the bass and the drums, so you'd be left with a good funk riff for three minutes, but maybe you wouldn't have a song there."

MK: "There's only one way I can do this stuff, and that's the way it comes out. In terms of the bass, I would love to be able to play less, and I admire the restraint of a lot of other musicians, but I just can't seem to do that."

MK: "Maybe, but that's not pointing the finger at ourselves, that's pointing the finger at the 1980s, because that's how music was made back then. You couldn't leave a lot of space, because there was always a big chunk of reverb to fill it up. I think it probably would have been better if some of our records had been more organic sounding, but it is what it is, and I can't change it now. A lot of that is almost sort of forged in the fire of playing live, because the last thing you want on stage is silence, so you kind of fill the gap up. Truly amazing songwriters like Leonard Cohen or U2 almost luxuriate in the space that they create within their music.

MK: "Well, Stanley Clarke, Billy Cobham, Tony Williams, Lenny White... there were a lot more drummers than bass players that influenced me, and that's what really gave me that rhythmic feel. We played with Billy Cobham recently at the Hague Jazz Festival, and we had two days of rehearsals with him here, and it was one of the best times of my life. Playing with him is so powerful and so loud, it's a serious turn on. I can't explain it better than that, really."

MK: "We were playing big venues here, yet in America and Europe we'd be doing these tiny places where nobody knew us, and that was exactly what you had to do to build things up. Touring has always been the fundamental building block to the success of the band, and long may that continue. We're still doing it because it's still worthwhile, both financially and musically."

MK: "I still love playing, and I get excited every time we go out on tour. I've just had a brand new bass delivered from Status this afternoon, and I really can't wait to just get it out on stage tomorrow and beat the hell out of it. I enjoy it all much more now than I did before. I think it was perhaps just the pressure of being a pop star, because that's something that didn't sit very easily with me. You can't just say, 'I'm a musician and this is what I do', because once you're successful, you're also expected to sell your records all around the world."

MK: "The band just fizzled out. We'd just done Forever Now, which I thought was a really good album, and everything seemed totally different in the industry. It was all boy bands and Britpop, and I just felt so totally out of time and I didn't know where we fitted into any of it. I just thought our time was up. I felt so knackered by the whole thing. You've got to remember, we'd been doing this non-stop for the last 14 years as well, so it was kind of time for a break. It was the first time I'd actually stopped since school. In the end, I was only away for about three months, because I found the idea of not doing anything so terrifying."

MK: "I rented a house in London, and it was really funny, because for about 18 months, I had this steady litany of great people writing songs with me; Brian May would come round one day, or it would be Midge Ure or Paul Young the next — all these dudes would be rolling up in this horrible house in Kingston, which was sort of like Terry and June suburbia.

MK: "I had a collection of songs which once again I'd written with Boon Gould as the primary lyricist, and I just went in and recorded a Level 42 album. I wouldn't look at it as a comeback, because I thought I'd never gone away. Well, I went away for three months, but if you look at it another way, it wasn't three months...it was 10 years [laughs]. I didn't really know where the time had gone."

MK: "I think we have, and I think it would be really childish of me to say I think we deserve more respect, because looking back on it now, I'm amazed that we sold as many records as we did and made as much money as we did. I suppose Level 42 is a jazz-funk band who can write catchy songs. People got confused by the pop thing, but I don't blame them for that, because we did buy into it. I suppose we were swept along by success as much as anything, but what are you gonna do?"

MK: "I think we'll maybe do 40 or 50 dates this year, so I suppose my income comes from the publishing for the songs and also the money from the tours. I'm very happy to play live and to give people what they want, because I still love doing it and the audiences still seem to respond really well to it. After 1994, when I felt I had to stop and I didn't want to be touring all the time, I was just banking on the publishing from the songs we'd written in the band keeping me going until I retired."

MK: "I find playing a complete joy, and every time you play, new things sort of invent themselves. I think it's absolutely essential to keep learning. As a musician, keeping your ears open and also keeping your mind open is really important. I think if you're lucky enough to play with really great musicians like I do, you've got to listen to them because they're so good. If you don't listen to the musicians around you, then it's a waste of an opportunity. I guess that willingness to learn and to listen is a big part of what still makes doing this exciting after all these years."

MK: "The noise that we make when we're together is unique, and it's definitely greater than the sum of our individual parts. The buzz for me is about playing with the guys. I mean, I got up at 4.45 this morning to come up here and do all of this, and I was like a little boy with a new train set at Christmas again, and that's because we haven't played a gig for three weeks. This band is definitely the best train set in the world. I love it."

Level 42 will be on tour from 4th to 30th October.  0