Mr Mick Page

Mr Mick

Parts of "Mr Mick" were performed live at the back end of 1975 and as Andy graciously said at the time,

"It was more or less a conscious effort to show off Mutter's best points. On stage the audience always fixes on his face and he is their idea of Stackridge. ... It's not for me to change that."

From the early days when the band hardly exchanged a word with the people who came to see them, Mutter had developed an onstage persona using repartee to involve the audience in what was going on in classic pantomime tradition. Mutter explained his "transformation" in his usual self-depreciating way:

"At first I felt embarrassed to be up there. All the attention was on me. I'm not a dazzler so I'd go on, trip over, lift my hat, make funny noises, growl and scream. Now it's something that happens as soon as I go on stage. It feels so natural. I'm no Harold McNair after all, so flute playing isn't enough. With "Mr Mick" all these bits of dialogue give me the chance to put on silly voices, walk around like an old man, dance or spin around like a cotton-reel."

Ah yes, the dialogue. The dialogue was supposed to link together all the musical pieces into a seamless whole, making "the first true concept album" according to Andy. .... At least that was the idea, but things hadn't gone well from the start ...

Andy takes up the story:

"We all started off at Rockfield, but by the end of the first week it was obvious the producer was going in a totally different direction from us and despite our protests to Rocket Records, it looked like we were going to be stuck with him. So in the middle of the night we did a moonlight flit back to London! Rocket said they'd let a member of the band produce it (i.e. me), with an executive producer and a good engineer. Danny Bridges was the engineer, who was absolutely brilliant and deserved a co-production credit really. The executive producer sat through the whole proceedings (about three weeks) and went along with everything we did. He liked it all and at the final playback champagne was drunk.

But then we were called into the Managing Director's office and he said, "Listen, this has got to go and that has got to go." We couldn't believe what he wanted to do with it and even when we offered to go back and re-record parts of it, he said no ... a flat refusal. All he could talk about was the wonderful pair of jeans he'd bought in Kensington Market while we were sitting there trying to defend this album we'd done."