NEIL MURRAY

Who is Neil Murray you ask? You say that you have never heard the name before but I can bet you a stack of some of the best hard rock music ever made, that you have heard him play. Do you remember the 1987 WHITESNAKE album? That multi platinum classic spawned several hit singles and videos that should be included in any musical retrospective of the metal era. Still doesn't ring a bell eh? Well that is not very surprising, for Mr. Murray, as well as the rest of the band, had been replaced by the time the record was issued so all the press, not to mention the jacket photos, carried the faces of a group that had nothing to do with the creation of the music contained within. How about BLACK SABBATH? You have certainly heard that name, right? Well the band had a top five hit in England while the same Neil Murray who was in WHITESNAKE was a member of the dark lords of metal. Still, it is hard to place a face here. Peter Green's SPLINTER GROUP? Gary Moore? Brian May? The PHENOMENA projects? Nothing? Well, what the man lacks in public notoriety is made up for in spades by the level of respect that he has earned in the business. He has become the guy to go to when one is looking for a bassist who can do the job with both professionalism and class. The late, great and incomparable Cozy Powell thought so much of his talents that he made him a part of many projects that he had signed up for and if you were looking for a name to put on a rhythmic resume, you just couldn't do any better than Cozy Powell.

I have long since been a fan of Murray's work, if mostly by accident. My predilection for things DEEP PURPLE related actually brought me into the world of early WHITESNAKE and I can say without reservation that his bass playing on the double live version of "LIVE, IN THE HEART OF THE CITY" is some of the best I have ever heard. He probably wouldn't appreciate my fawning given the fact that he has an unusual amount of humility for a rock and roller but still, man can this guy move a song! I remember thinking for a time that if I could just get the same feeling that this guy has for his instrument, then I could be the rock star and collect all those women while I am at it! This is just short of hero worship, I suppose, but he is certainly a man that could get me excited about the possibilities. As luck, fate or chance would have it, I bumped into Neil via an Internet mailing list and was able to set up the interview that you are about to enjoy. If you get even a fraction of what I did out of this then you have improved your musical wealth immeasurable.

DAVID LEE How are you?

NEIL MURRAY Not bad. I am sort of rushing around this week a lot because we start rehearsing for the Brian May tour next week and I have got lots of learning of songs to do and equipment things to sort out.

DL Just little things like that?(laughs)

NM (laughs)Well, some of it is dependant on other people, the amplifier company, coming up with stuff and if they are not going too what else am I going to use and all that kind of thing. It doesn't get resolved until the last minute.

DL Is that the way that most sponsorships are?

NM Hmm...Yeah. This particular company is American and a fairly small amplifier company and they tend to not ship stuff out to Europe until after everybody in America has been satisfied with their deliveries. So, you never know if you are going to get something that is supposedly available.

DL That and knowing that Brian's music is pretty involved, so that has to be a chore to sit down and learn all of your bits for that.

NM Usually, as long as you've got enough time to listen to things and then go back to them and kind of double check, generally speaking, anything that is fairly well written, I mean, if it is a good song then it is memorable or if it has got a sort of good melodic parts to it, it is O.K. If the bass is played by somebody else and if they have done something very weird, then sometimes, it is difficult but if it is memorable, it's O.K. It might be something that I would never think of doing but in general if something is a bad song, it is hard to remember. That is the difficulty. In this particular situation we have to learn quite a few songs that we probably won't do. We have to choose the best ones really. It should be alright. A lot of it is stuff that we did five years ago on the previous tour and we have been doing a few unplugged and little acoustic gigs a few months ago so there really isn't much that I really haven't ever played ever before.

DL Unfortunately, you will only be having one date in The States.

NM Yes, it is a kind of separate thing to the main tour. Originally we were going to have done a few warm-up gigs before that but that is not happening either and really, if it wasn't for the fact that the manager who used to manage QUEEN set it up... if one wanted to be sensible you wouldn't go to America to do just one show.

DL No.

NM Particularly if it is the first thing that we will be doing. I think that it has a potential for disaster but anyway, I think that the album is coming out fairly soon and if, for example, it managed to sell a lot or get a lot of air play or something like that it would be quite easy for us to come at the beginning of next year. It just depends because it is just so expensive to get over there and then to cover all the areas that you want to. Even five years ago when we were partly touring with GUNS AND ROSES we kind of hit all of these secondary markets because they had already been all over the place in The States so, we didn't really get a chance to play some of the places that we should have really done.

DL I have followed the more publicized portions of your career and I have a lot of questions about that but I am also interested in all of the stuff that comes in between those points...

NM Yeah, sure. Sometimes without having things to refer to I get a bit blurry as to when something actually happened or to when something actually came about but, I will do my best.

DL It does seem that over the years that "Neil Murray" has become the name of the bass player to go for when you are looking for a bass player. Is that something where you say to yourself "Are they hiring me for my name or for my abilities?"

NM It is not only that but it is also, "Are you a nice guy?" Because you have to be a genius musician if you want to be a really nasty person and vice versa you can get away with not being so good if you are good fun to be around.(laughs) I am sort of pleasant company I would say. I mean, I am not the sort of "life of the party" who cracks jokes all of the time and everybody loves to be around them. Sometimes those guys can get away with not actually being all that great although sometimes they have a definite style of their own which is kind of what you need as well. In my case, it is often that one thing has led to another. I mean, sort of purely by chance but following up a couple of things that happened very early on before I was even a professional musician. Those things led to me playing with Cozy Powell and then in his band, with Don Airey and Bernie Marsden and knowing and playing with those two led on to other things. Gary Moore was in that and that led on to me working with Gary again later on. With Bernie Marsden, when he joined up with David Coverdale, I knew him and worked with him before and he knew that I was a capable musician I got asked along, not even to audition for WHITESNAKE but just to help out because they had a bass player already. It was only that he changed his mind and decided not to do it that I got a second call back so at that point I wasn't a name particularly, in the late seventies. Later on you become a bit better known because you have been in a successful band but it can work against you too because people think "Well, he can only play that kind of music, he wouldn't be interested in doing what we are doing." or "He is going to cost far too much money." or something like that. Later on the Cozy Powell thing became much more important mostly after joining SABBATH because they had actually tried, I think that they had done the "HEADLESS CROSS" album which was in 1988, and there was a vague approach made to me then and then after they did the album I think that they wanted to get Geezer Butler back in the band and he was saying yes and then no then yes and being very undecided. They auditioned a few, kind of, unknown players and couldn't find anybody good at all, in Britain anyway, and so Cozy thought "I'll try Neil again and see what he thinks." and I went up and played with them and that was that. That partly led to me and Cozy working with Brian May and that led on too Peter Green but in the last ten years it has been a situation where Cozy has been asked to do something and he will say "Well let's get Neil in as well." He is not obliged to do so but generally speaking he would get offered the gig first so it is not necessarily that I am such a big name or anything like that. I mean, people know that I have done good things in the past but their memories are fairly short. You can't trade on something that you did fifteen years ago. People seem to think that if you disappeared in between times, "Well he can't be any good." or "He must be a druggie or an alcoholic or something. Why haven't I heard of him since then?" That sort of thing. Then you get people like the fans of say the post ‘87 WHITESNAKE who have hardly any idea that I exist. The fans of the early WHITESNAKE are pretty much in the minority these days or they certainly do not make their presence felt very much.(laughs) Let's say that you admired what I did with the early WHITESNAKE, The later albums like "SLIDE IT IN" and the ‘87 album, they are not really featuring me, bass playing wise, either in the mix or the lines that I am playing because of the way that the songs are written. There is much less freedom than there was in the early days so you don't listen to those albums and go "Wow! Listen to that bass playing." where as it was much more prominent in the early days so all through the eighties and to an extent since then, with SABBATH and Brian, my bass playing is sort of very decent quality but it doesn't jump out at people. Because of the situations that I have been in I am not really able to do as much in terms of putting my own thing on it compared to the early days of WHITESNAKE. I kind of feel that I slightly have a reputation as having been in big bands and stuff but I am not such an influence on other musicians as much as I would like to be simply because I haven't really done anything where people are sitting and listening to the bass playing as a very major part of what is going on. It is like, I am in the rhythm section and I am doing a really good job but, you know, most of the time it has been reproducing what other people have done before or putting my little spin on Geezer Butler's bass playing or John Deacon's bass playing.

DL As you say, in the early days of WHITESNAKE, save a few DEEP PURPLE songs, you were playing all your own lines and now most of the material that you perform was originally written by someone else. Is that something that frustrates you?

NM Yeah. Admittedly, a lot of those songs where standard chord changes and nothing terribly adventurous about the song writing but, yeah, it has been a bit frustrating. It is enjoyable to play songs that you like, don't get me wrong, In most cases I have played with people that I like and I have made a decent living at it and I have certainly not played horrible music or anything like that with horrible people but, a lot of those things don't give you that much freedom to put your own stamp on it. That just seems to be the way that it is. If you come into a situation that is already established and already very famous then you have to stay true to that, I suppose, at least that is my reading of it. Maybe somebody else comes in and stamps their own personality all the way across it but I tend to try and stick pretty much to how the songs where on the record because I reckon that the audience for bands that have been around since the seventies want to hear something that is fairly close to what is on the record. They don't want to hear some kind of completely off the wall version.

DL How do you reconcile that with being and artist and wanting to break out of that and say "O.K. I have played "Paranoid" every night for the last couple of years is there any chance that we could put some of the songs from records that I played on into the set?"

NM Well, that wouldn't work. I am just totally realistic that if , for example, I play on a BLACK SABBATH album that isn't particularly featuring the bass very much compared to the ones when Geezer Butler was in the band and if that record doesn't sell very much you really don't expect the band to keep going back to that record and keep plugging away at these songs that nobody is terribly interested in. Obviously, when you are touring to promote that record you will play four or five songs off of the new album so after we did the album called "TYR" we would do that and more recently with the album called "FORBIDDEN" we did the same with that. If I was back with them now and they had another album out, because neither of those albums sold terribly well, you wouldn't say "Oh let's do this song." just because it was something that I was on. You want to do the songs that are best, really. The only thing that I would say is that a lot of the enjoyment that I get from playing is playing to an audience that is enjoying what you are doing so I wouldn't want to go on stage and play something just for myself if the audience wasn't into it. I would rather play something that was maybe not what I would want to go home and sit down and listen too on a quiet evening but I can really get into it if I am in front of a few thousand people who are going nuts! That makes it all worthwhile. There is always a more perfect situation where you are playing huge places and the sound is fantastic and the audience is really intelligent and music loving but also incredibly enthusiastic as well. It sort of doesn't exist, you go to different countries and you get different responses. Some places are better in some ways than others and some nights are better than others. Some nights it is purely because you are feeling hung over and other nights you are playing great and it just doesn't happen for some other reason. Maybe the acoustics in the building or the other members of the band are not into it or whatever you just can't kind of predict which makes it interesting. Part of being on the road is that you can try a few things here and there just on the spur of the moment so, I do get some satisfaction out of it by changing things around. I certainly don't play everything note for note exactly the same every night but it is more that I have to be careful not to overstep the mark and it would be nice to play my own parts from albums that I contributed a lot too but in general these days, even from mid eighties WHITESNAKE really, it is more like it has been somebody elses band and I am just the bass player. With Gary Moore before that really but I shouldn't complain too much because really what people do in this circumstance is they become songwriters themselves and they start their own band up or they basically get things their own way by being the composer and I really haven't done that so I shouldn't complain because I know that is the necessary thing to do.

DL Is that something that you have purposely not done or is it that you just haven't found the time to do it?

NM Neither Really.(laughs) It is that I am not driven to do it. Some people have a burning creative energy and they have to show the world what they can do and I am somewhat lazy but also I am not that kind of creative individual. With me it would take a lot more work and encouragement which I have not really had that much of. What has given me a good reputation as a bass player, I suppose, is spending a lot of time working on my bass playing but really I should have spent a bit less on bass playing and more on learning the guitar or the keyboards or singing. I mean, I am aware of what I should have done over the years which isn't to say that it isn't still a possibility but I have lasted kind of a long time compared to other people.

DL Your bass playing style is obviously very rooted int he blues...

NM Yeah.

DL And when kids today are forming and playing in bands they are a bit removed from the origins of blues based rock and roll. It is like they are looking through several layers of glass and getting a somewhat distorted image of the original. Is that something that you notice or something that concerns you at all about the state of rock and roll in general?

NM Well, the difficulty is that I am seeing it from my perspective of a sort of late forties person so I am a product of what was around in the mid-sixties which in England was the blues boom with John Mayall and CREAM and all of that stuff. It just happened to come along at the right time for me and that was a very good sort of grounding from which to go off and explore the black blues artists and then you would take off in sort of the other direction towards jazz and jazz rock and more other complicated aspects of rock but it certainly is the basis for everything. I have always thought that even BLACK SABBATH is very blues based music but has been taken off in a direction away from there. If you start off just listening to BLACK SABBATH and then take that somewhere you are missing out on some of the thing that they were. In early WHITESNAKE it was a lot of early sixties blues rock influence there and then later, of course, it became much more American AOR sort of stuff which is fine as well but I think that what is difficult for people now is that they do not hear that music and if it is not seen as being very exciting there is no reason for them to get into it.

DL As a matter of influence I would say that despite the fact that the latter day WHITESNAKE was significantly more popular in America, the early band has had a great impact on the kids from that generation who are now becoming professionals themselves. Is that something that you have taken note of?

NM Well, from my point of view I have been on a lot of records that where not that successful and a couple that were but it is just hard to know who is out there listening to stuff that you might have recorded some years ago. I tend to not listen to anything much after I have done it and I wouldn't necessarily expect people to be still playing stuff that I played on fifteen or twenty years ago except once in a blue moon they may pull it out and go "Yeah, that is a nice bit of nostalgia." I don't know but it is nice when people say that they admire what you have done.

DL When kids approach you with an item that they would like you to sign what is it that they usually hand you, I mean, is it something by WHITESNAKE or BLACK SABBATH or...

NM Well, it depends on the band. I mean, to be honest Brian May fans, unless they are the obsessive type who kind of collect everything that any member of the band has done, will bring QUEEN albums and Brian May albums and they won't really be interested in WHITESNAKE, ninety-five percent of them or BLACK SABBATH or anything else and vice versa. They are quite narrow minded in a nice way. They tend to be very enthusiastic about what you are ding in that particular situation. For example, Peter Green fans would have no interest at all in anything else that I have ever done, maybe some early WHITESNAKE but that is about it. If I say that I played with Gary Moore that might go down very well with them but I didn't play blues with Gary Moore. Most people are not incredibly wide ranging in their tastes, they tend to like what they like and that is it.

DL I know that it is not a great leap form WHITESNAKE but something that I liked quite a bit in my own musical explorations were the PHENOMENA project.

NM Oh yeah.

DL How did you become involved in that project?

NM It was a kind of a session type of thing where the guitarist who was in WHITESNAKE around that time, Mel Galley, he and his brother had written songs and it was their project and Mel Galley was always a friend of Cozy Powell and a fan of his playing and a friend of mine and wanted us both to play on that first album. The sound, the way it ended up, Cozy was very unhappy with it and it sort of went on from there and I played on the next one. It was very much, I think that I went in and played on all the tracks on the first album in a day and that is all the involvement that you have with it. It was just a session and sometimes you would like to be more involved but that is not the way that it works. If they write songs where, frankly, the bass part is going thump, thump, thump because that is what is required you might like the music but it is not going to be difficult to play and it is not going to impress people as being very creative but sometimes that is all that is needed.

DL Those sessions never involved everybody on a given track being in the same room at the same time?

NM No, definitely not. I mean, in that situation I think that I was playing before any real drums were put on. I think that there was a drum machine or something so that is something that is not enjoyable. There has often been circumstances where I am there just on my own which is not as good as a lot of people playing together. It is much better for me to play after the real drummer has already played because it is just much too sterile or tame with a drum machine or programmed drums.

DL I can imagine, especially with the long relationship that you had with Cozy, that the two of you knew when one would zig and the other would zag.

NM Absolutely. And in his case he is pretty much going to set the direction, I mean, you have to follow him.(laughs) It was, particularly on the road, if he had worked out a particular way of playing a song he would pretty much stick with that. He'll stick to that, he wouldn't change it around very much so it is very easy for me to duplicate it and make sure that we are both right there on the money. I would definitely be slightly in his shadow in that case. If I played with somebody who is just much more straight and sort of keeping it very simple and maybe less powerful then maybe I might come across a bit more myself.

DL Now that he is gone do you think that you will establish the same type of relationship with another drummer?

NM Not as yet. I do try with all drummers really, to lock in with them. His actual replacement is Eric Singer form KISS and Alice Cooper and BLACK SABBATH and Gary Moore(laughs). He is a very good player but we will just have to see because I think that with him he is going to have to duplicate what was done before so it will take a bit of time for him to put his own stamp on things. I am sure that if you asked him you would get similar kinds of answers because we both have played with lots of different bands without being the most important core member from year one if you know what I mean.

DL Absolutely.

NM It's like, Geezer Butler is the bass player with BLACK SABBATH and I am just sort of substituting really.(laughs)

DL While trolling around the Internet I have noticed that there is a certain rabiditity of the fans for certain bands in particular some that you have been in. Does it ever concern you that the music is being lost in all of the trivia that people collect or even the fact that there may be too much information about a given person floating around on the web?

NM Hmm? Yes, you could be right, I mean, what is funny to me is that people will believe the rumor every time. If somebody says, I don't know, "Tony Iommi rides goats around." "Does he really? What kind?" And they won't be skeptical, they will believe it every time. It is difficult because sometimes you want to write back and say "The truth of it is..." but then it just goes on and on and on and you just can't stop the tide of information so you have to be careful and let people chat amongst themselves. Also with all these bands it is so subjective, one person will absolutely love one version of the band and certain songs and they won't hear anything apart from that and if you dare say that "It is not quite as good in my opinion." you might as well have said that I am going to kill your mother!(laughs) There is no reasoning with it and I mean there probably shouldn't be. It is all down to individual tastes and sometimes people who are not musicians can enjoy it more because musicians are always analyzing and they have heard it all before. I don't know, maybe I miss out because they may be hearing it in a much more direct emotional way.

DL I know that much of the music that you have created has touched many in very deep and personal ways but I am curious to know if there have been artist who had that effect on you or even if new artist have that effect on you at all?

NM Yes but very, very rarely and as the years go past there is less and less that really knocks me to the floor. I would try not to act like a fan because I know what it is like to be on the receiving end of that and it is kind of putting the other person up on a pedestal and you down on the floor and it is much better to try and establish more of a rapport with them. Yeah, there are a few people. Jeff Beck, I think, is amazing. Eric Johnson, the guitarist very few others really. There are a lot of fantastic musicians but the people who really, really grab me are few and far between.

DL I know that you have to be going and I really do appreciate you having taken the time to speak with me, it was quite enjoyable.

NM I tend to yak on and on.

DL Not at all!

NM O.K. David, my pleasure.

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