By Shawn Perry
Take it or leave it — Mick Box is synonymous with the British band Uriah Heep. One couldn’t possibly exist without the other. He’s the captain and he’ll go down with the ship, come hell or heavy metal. Over the years, as Mick wore many hats — guitarist, songwriter, manager, tour manager, keeper of the flame — the Heep experienced its ups and downs. But you’d never know that talking to Mick Box. He is, without a doubt, one of most jovial, upbeat and optimistic musicians I have ever spoken with.
The following interview took place just before Box and the boys were getting ready to tour the vast continent of Europe — hitting all the out-of-the-way countries like Poland, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Holland before wrapping up in England for the holidays. There’s talk of a trek over to America in 2009. But it all follows the wait-and-see contingency plan. Whatever happens, Mick Box is prepared to weather the storm, come out smiling and carry on with Uriah Heep, wherever the chips may fall.
During our brief conversation, we not only touched on Wake The Sleeper, the first new Uriah Heep album in 10 years — we also ventured back and revisited the band’s beginnings, the tragedy of original vocalist David Byron, and a little bit of everything leading up to the Heep’s current status. They are a band of many firsts with a solid line-up, hungry and ready to reclaim their place in the pantheon of rock and roll. And no one knows the story better than Mick Box.
I guess the best place to start is with the new album Wake The Sleeper, the first new Uriah Heep album in 10 years. What took so long?
Aw mate, you know, it’s a long story but I’ll try to give you the short version. Our last album 10 years ago was Sonic Origami. The record company liked it, the fans liked it, the media liked it. We thought we had a winner there, and we put an 18-month tour together. But unfortunately, when we got out there, the record company didn’t fulfill the promises they said they were gonna do. You know, out and out in the field. When we came back, we were very disappointed in them and said, “We’re not gonna give you another album because you just messed up our lives for 18 months. It’s just not fair.”
It took a couple of years to get out of the contract. And when we did, of course it was the same time as the whole Internet explosion happened. We had the situation when record companies originally started attacking the Internet, trying to take Napster to court and all that. And then we found out, they couldn’t police it because there were a million Napsters. And then they had to embrace the Internet. And in doing so, the record industry was never the same again. Records companies disappeared off the face of the earth, they got smaller or amalgamated, loads of firings and not a lot of hirings. So it kind went all very fragile.
We decided we’d go out and do what we do best and toured the world. We played in 53 countries. We have a great fan base around the world. We released a lot of DVDs, which hadn’t entered the marketplace before. We did a lot of acoustic shows that we hadn’t done before, with guests like Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull who would come up with us. That was really neat. And guys from Focus joined us on stage, which was really a good time.
We used to have this thing called The Magician’s Birthday each year in London where we invite all the members to get on the stage with us. It was really good for the fans who’d get to see all these different reincarnations of the band again. So that was kind of neat. We go to the end of all that and Sanctuary Records UK, who owned our back catalog, decided they wanted to do a frontline label with bands like us. They suggested we do a new studio album. Se we said, “Fantastic. That’s what we’ve been waiting for.” So we went off and recorded an album, came back, gave it to them. They loved it. We loved it. We thought the fans are gonna love it.
Just before it got released, they got taken over by Universal. So then we had to wait another year while Universal decided they were gonna go with the album or not. Not being a big rock label, we weren’t quite sure how they were gonna bite. The first sign we had that Wake The Sleeper was special because they picked it up and heard it and said, “Oh God, we wanna run with this. We got no problems with it at all.” And they sent one to you (laughs). So it’s been kind of long awaited time, but the nicest thing in the end is that it’s now it is released. I think we’ve given the fans the album they’ve been waiting for all this time. It’s getting great reviews everywhere, all through Europe it’s getting stunning reviews, and I just hope the bubble doesn’t burst at all. And that’s the reason it took soon long, mate.
So, hopefully we won’t have to wait another 10 years for the next one…
Well, we hope not. With the success of this one, we’re moving onto the next stage. Being the positive people that we are, we’ve already started writing it (laughs).
It’s almost like this record could have been made in the 70s. Was there a conscious effort to recapture that era?
The first thing we did was we looked at the thing as a whole with Mike Paxman, our producer, who was quite inspirational when we were making the album. We said we’re gonna do this as a rock band — we’ll do a rock album. It’s gonna be Hammond organ, wah-wah guitar, bass, drums and vocals, and all the colors are gonna come from that. It’s gonna be real simplistic, but it’s gonna be powerful.
Then we took the songs into the rehearsal room, and Mike Paxman came in one day and said, “Listen, this is what we need on the CD. Yeah, there’s no way we’re gonna go in the studio and piecemeal it in two weeks on the johns and in the basement. This band works, at its maximum, on one pulse when it’s playing as a band.” So, that was the first decision.
So you recorded the album live?
We recorded it all pretty much live, yeah. We all went into a big studio called the Chapel, which is an old converted church, and we set everything up. Each day, we chose a song. We rehearsed up to the point where we were all happy with what we were doing. And press the record button, 1-2-3 takes, and we had everything we needed for every song.
The good thing about it is it gave us that extra impetus because you had to be on top of your game. There was that extra edge there because if somebody made mistake, you had to do another take because it was on every mic (laughs). So I think that gave us a little edge too. We can play our instruments and we enjoy playing as a band. I think it worked very for us, and I think it will probably be a template for the next album and the future with us.
You and Phil Lanzon wrote the lion’s share of the songs. What approach do you guys take to writing?
Apart from being together now for almost 26 years, and writing songs together, we just got a great partnership where we’re both on the same page musically and lyrically. It’s very unusual to define that with anyone, but we really do have a good partnership. We work very fast when we’re writing.
Basically what we did when we found we were going into the studio, we looked at all the stuff we stockpiled because as writers, over the years, we’ve written tones of stuff. Not necessarily for the Heep, but just music pieces. We were going through them and we actually only caught one of the ideas, which was just music, no lyrics for it, but we had most of the music done. Then we look at all these other ideas, and then we said, “Why don’t we just stop going through all this stuff and go for a fresh approach.” At least, the first five tracks were written two weeks before hitting rehearsals. That’s how we work. We work very, very quickly. And we like to work in the moment, because you get the best out of it.
Wake The Sleeper features new drummer Russell Gilbrook, replacing Lee Kerslake who left because of health issues. Have you been in touch with Lee?
Oh yeah, we’re the best of mates.
How’s he doing?
He’s doing absolutely fine. He’s in a great space. It’s like a big weight has been lifted off his shoulders. He doesn’t have to go trekking around the world again. He can take care of things he needs to take care of. He’s in a very, very happy space. It was the best move he could have had made at the time.
Do you think he’ll come out to see you guys play?
Oh yeah, he’ll come by and say hi and everything. There was no animosity. It was just a decision made for the right reasons and onwards and upwards, you know. And I thank God we did it, because if he had carried on with the rock and roll carousel that is Uriah Heep, which is quite extensive every year, who knows what would have happened. Right now, he’s in a very happy space.
Aside from the addition of Russell, this lineup of Uriah Heep has been intact since the 80s. Previous to that, you had a revolving door of players. What has kept this particular incarnation together longer over the others?
I think there are a number of issues. We actually found the right chemistry of people. Back in the 80s, I made a conscious decision to never, ever work with anyone I didn’t like or couldn’t get on with. That’s for musicians, crew, managers, agents, everything. I need to be able to pick up the phone and speak with them, go into the office and smile at them, go and have a pint with them, and enjoy life. Life’s too short for all these games that get played every now and again.
On getting everybody together in ’86, that was the template for it. And I was lucky enough to find all the right guys. We’re the best of friends, best of mates, and we love touring the world together and playing music. It’s a great position to be in. I’ve got a great crew. The manager’s great, the agent’s great — we’re all there for the right reasons because we want to be. I think that’s the essence of it — being there because you want to be.
I think the other part of it is that for about 20 years, I did manage the band as well. So if the band had any queries, problems, situations, they’d come straight to me and get a straight answer (laughs). With lots of managers, you go to them and you get fogged off with, or he goes to the accountant and you get fogged off with that. You don’t need that in your life. It can be quite simple if you look at it. I think I took all the rough edges out, I took all the complications out, and had a very simplistic way of running and looking at stuff. And it worked very well.
Was managing the band part of your incentive to keep it going?
Absolutely. I took the management on just to keep the whole thing rolling to the point where I could actually relinquish those duties to someone else. We’ve now found a guy called Simon Porter, who used to work at our old record company back in the 70s in PR. I’ve known him for many, many years. He manages a band called Status Quo, who are very huge in the rest of the world, but not so much in America. He’s taken over those duties now. I can get back to being one of the boys and getting on with what we’re doing — writing more songs, being more creative, and getting into that side of it. It’s something I’ve been working towards. You’ve got to find people you’re able to trust to work with you, to hand those things over, and make everyone feel comfortable. At the moment, we’ve found that, so it’s happy days, as I say (laughs).
You have lots of dates coming up around Europe, but I didn’t see anything for the States.
Yes, we are starting in Germany in October with Thin Lizzy supporting us. Then we take it through the rest of Europe — the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Holland, a whole run through there. And there’s talk now of coming out in mid- January or mid-February to America. We’ve got a worldwide agent who has an agency in New York. They’re trying to piece it all together now. There have been rumors of House Of Blues. Touring the House Of Blues would be a great introduction. And they’re looking at getting a solid attraction package together for the end of the year.
You haven’t been to the States since 2001, right?
We haven’t been there for a while, but we really do need to rectify that because we have a fantastic fan base there. With the Internet now and a web page, you have access to all these things. There’s a great fan base in America and Canada, and we just need to get out there and show them we’re still alive and well, and, obviously, that we have a new album.
Going back to the early 70s, you and David Byron were the chief songwriters, and then Ken Hensley stepped up as a songwriter on his own. I know that became an issue later on, but in the beginning it seems like it expanded the band’s palette of sound, if you will.
Yes, it did. And I’m thankful for that. Initially, it started off that if you’ve got something, bring it to the table and we’ll all have a listen. That was the healthiest part of our career. That’s when we started to get lots of success. You had that balance. Everyone was all going in the same direction at the same time. But unfortunately, the cracks showed a bit. When Ken was getting a little more successful with a few songs, then the natural thing that management would do was to just listen to one person. It’s kind of fell by the wayside. That’s where the cracks started to showing, unfortunately. We all still had a lot of say. But we weren’t allowed to do it because the management would only listen to Ken when it came down to the songs.
One band you were constantly lumped in with back in those days was Deep Purple. How did that go over?
That really was from the fans and the press really. It wasn’t us at all. We got on really great with Deep Purple. They’re great people. I have nothing but admiration for them. Their music is just tremendous. I’m a big fan. We had our own identity. Our five-part harmony was a big thing. We used our harmonies as instruments. That’s what set us apart from all those bands. When you look at it, Purple had one singer, Zeppelin had one singer, Black Sabbath had one singer — everyone just had one singer, and we always had that big harmony thing. Previous to us, harmony work in the late 60s was very pretty and sweet and nice, ala the Beach Boys, if you like. We brought it in and used it almost as another instrument and it was looked at in a totally different way. It probably inspired Queen and others.
Yeah, you totally pre-dated Queen with that operatic vocal harmony type approach.
Oh definitely. But then that’s great because they came up with some great stuff (laugh).
Over the years, of course, Uriah Heep has played with everyone from Kiss to Jethro Tull, who I saw you with back in 1978. Who was your favorite to tour with back in those days?
We had so much fun when we first went to America. There wasn’t any pigeon holes. We had people to support us like Earth, Wind And Fire. Uriah Heep and Earth, Wind And Fire. Think about it. You’d never get that today. We had Ike and Tina Turner support us. It was just unbelievable the people we had.
We actually broke ZZ Top in America — they supported us. We broke Kiss in America — they supported us. Rush — we took them right through America because they were only big in Canada. All these bands leapfrogged over us in the end. It was incredible. They were all great fun to work with. It was just a really cool time.
I read that in the early 80s you and (bassist) Trevor Bolder tried to reconcile with David Byron, but he wasn’t interested.
I went around to his house and I said, “Look David, I’ve got a record contract. I’ve got everything going. I’ve got a band here. We can get the strength back to where we were from the beginning, before Hensley and all these other people that came. Let’s piece something together and start writing stuff.” But unfortunately, he had three managers in his house. Why anyone would want three managers — you got me beat. They were all pitching in with their piece.
He’d drunk an awful lot and I couldn’t get any sense out of him. In the end, which really gobsmacked me, he asked me if I could join his band and work with the guitarist he had at the time. It was just not a real world he was in at that point. He had all these managers running around and doing stuff — it was just laughable, really. It was like Spinal Tap.
No one was trying to help him?
They probably were, in their own way. They’re all looking at the gain, aren’t they?
What a tragedy.
I was trying to get him to strip back everything. “Let’s clear up with this and clear up with that and get into a room and write some songs and get everything from the ground up again.” But it wasn’t to be. To be honest, me and Trevor sat in the car outside his house, and we looked at each other and I said, “What happened?” We went in there with all the hope in our heart that we could actually pull this off (laughs).
You brought in a lot of singers after Byron — John Lawton, John Sloman, Peter Goalby. Were any of these guys ever right for Uriah Heep?
John Lawton had a big pair of shoes to fill with David because David had the whole package. He had the voice, he could write, he had charisma by the bucketload, and he was quite flamboyant with all his stage clothes. So along came John, who had none of those except he had a great voice. It was very difficult for John, but he came aboard and we had some great success with Innocent Victim. It kind of kept us high up there, especially in Europe. We did all the major festivals and everything. It was quite a good time for us. We had two or three singles in the Top Ten in Germany.
It was just weird that songs like “Free Me,” which was more of a pop song than a rock song, was very successful for us. It kind of put us in another field, if you like. Which I felt quite uncomfortable with. That’s why I wrote “Free N’ Easy” with John as a ballad, which went against “Free Me.” John, he had a great voice, but in the end it didn’t work. It was a natural progression for him to not be there.
Then we got John Sloman. John came from a great background. He used to be in a band called Lone Star, which was a Welsh band. They were a great band — very rock. Really on the button, they were. John’s a great writer, singer, keyboard player, guitar player, drums and bass. He was one of these multi-talented guys, good songwriter. But when he got in the Heep, for some reason, he went all Stevie Wonder on us (laughs). All the melodies, he was singing all around it, in jazz formations, minors and stuff. It was very difficult to accept that, and very difficult for the fans as well. So, that kind of folded down.
Then we got Pete Goalby in. The good thing about Pete was that he had a voice of the 80s, and it really fit with a lot of what was happening in the 80s. We had success with Abominog in the Top 40 in America with “That’s The Way That It Is,” written by Paul Bliss. We had our first video that went out on MTV. Eight times a day, heavy rotation, whoop-dee-do nowadays, but it was good then. So we had a lot of success, and did a major tour with Def Leppard, who were the hottest thing since slice bread out there. So, it was all on the up. Record companies again destroyed that, and the next album (laughs). Pete got disillusioned and left.
And then we got in Bernie (Shaw). When we actually got Bernie and we went out on a long European tour, the fans would come up in hoards saying at last we got a Uriah Heep singer.
His voice seems very reminiscent of that David Byron singing style.
He can cover the four decades. He’s got the range and everything else. Funny thing when we were doing these acoustic shows, we did a lot of the old catalog in acoustic, stripped-down form. When Bernie was singing them sometimes, I got a little chill because you closed your eyes, it was David. He was really close in all the falsetto. It was really something.
You were encouraged at some point in the 80s to take the guitar hero route, but you chose to stick with Uriah Heep. How come?
It was after the Conquest album with John Sloman when I folded the whole thing up. I thought, well…that’s it. You know, time to move on. My agent said, “Look, get a Mick Box thing going. I’ll get you this, that and the other. I can get you a deal.” And it all looked very, very encouraging. But then I started getting loads of letters into the record company and agencies from fans, and I thought let’s have a look through these. After I was reading them, there was a lot of letters from young fans saying, “We just found out about the band, please don’t let it die.” It was rumored I was gonna fold it all up. And then I got loads from older fans saying, “You’ve been the landscape to my life, please don’t let it die.”
I was thinking about it for awhile. And then I thought to myself, if I could piece together the right people with the right spirit of Uriah Heep and write great songs again, that might just be the way to go. That would keep the legacy of David Byron and (late bassist) Gary Thain alive too. By me keeping all the new stuff out, it drags up all the old stuff too, and people can hear all those great bass lines and all those great vocals. It kind of inspired me, and that really tipped it for me to carry on with Uriah Heep in the end.
That being said, do you think you’ll ever record a solo album?
I couldn’t because over those years, I was in the management, being part of the band and one of principal writers — doing everything that one can possibly do. Now, if I want to do some of those things, I can start looking at those areas. I’m not saying I’m gonna go do one because I think a lot of the solo albums that do come out are under par. But generally, it is something I’ll probably get out of my system at some stage.
I’ve got a Pro Tools system on my computer, and I really haven’t had time to look at it yet. So you know, I got get in there and learn all that, and maybe I’ll start putting stuff together. I got my own web site. Maybe I’ll piece some musical stuff and just put them on there for free downloads. Just for a bit of fun. Put my toe in the water and build it up from there.
I’m looking at writing a book at the moment. I’ve been reading a lot of our biographies, and I’m just getting fed up with reading about when they did their first heroin injection. That’s been driving me up the wall. I just want to write a really upbeat side to it with on- the-road stories and fun. In a month on the road, we usually pack in what most people get in a lifetime. It will be great and interesting read if I can just get myself around to doing it.
Uriah Heep was the first Western band to play Russia. What do you recall of that experience?
Well, it was funny because with all that you’re taught in school about Russians, you never think you’ll be going there to play music. But that’s the power of music, isn’t it? It really is a powerful medium. It rises over all that. Basically, what it was, even in the early 70s, when we were playing 20,000 seaters in America and we were doing major stuff in Europe, we always had a saying within the band that if the people couldn’t come to the music, we’d take the music to the people. While we had all these great things happening to us, we were still going out and playing East Berlin, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, South Korea and all those areas that other bands didn’t really go to.
It used to take — excuse my pun — a lot of red tape to get there. But by the time you got there and played the songs, it was absolutely wonderful. It took us two hours to get through the border at East Berlin. They confiscated all your cameras and magazines. Mirrors underneath the van to make sure you weren’t smuggling people out. It was just incredible. But once you get through there and play your music and see the look on people’s faces, it was just very worthwhile.
We had a Hungarian promoter called László Hegedus. He kept telling us, “You don’t know how big you are in Russia. In the black market, everybody buys your albums and you’re the number one band there.” And we said, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.” So he kept applying every year and he kept getting the answer “no” or “net” as we now know the word to be (laughs). In 1987, he tried again and Glasnost had just been formed, Gorbachev and Reagan were having their discussions and it was very high profile. They sent us an official letter to be the first Western rock band to play in Moscow.
So we obviously accepted. We went over there. We had to deal with the equipment side, so we got in a lot of equipment from Hungary with Hungarian crews, so we thought at least we could make it work on a musical level now. We played before 180,000 people for 10 nights. And it was absolutely amazing.
Through that success, the following year, our London office helped the school kids go. The following year after that, it was the Peace Festival with Ozzy, Motley Crüe and Bon Jovi. We’re actually pioneers in that regard. With the success in Russia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, all these places we went to, we were the first to go. We kind of opened up the doors for everyone else to go there.
