Ginger Wildheart has built an erratic career on brilliantly realised, rousing pop rock and the kind of offstage behaviour that might have given Hunter S Thompson pause for thought. He’s a Wildheart, a solo artist, a former Quireboy, the leader of Silver Ginger 5, SuperShit 666, Hey! Hello!, Clam Abuse, The Sinners and more, an occasional country artist, and even, ever so briefly, a Scorcher, a Bride Of Destruction and a member of Cheap Trick.
Currently, Ginger’s basking in the success of The Wildhearts' 11th studio album, Satanic Rites of the Wildhearts, described by Classic Rock as "a glorious ode to the litany of wankers we all have to deal with every day and a reminder that life isn’t always the big overarching questions."
Lemmy
The Wildhearts toured with Motörhead, I was nervous about hanging out with a hero; if your hero turns out to be a dickhead then you’ve got three weeks of him breaking your heart; but Lemmy was everything I wanted him to be. They offered to help us in any way they could and I said, “You’d help me by letting me play Overkill with you. And he said, “Okay, in Sheffield.” And I was like, “I want to do Hammersmith,” and he just walked off and I thought, that’s it, I’ve blown it. A couple of days later he came back and said, “You’re a cheeky bastard, but you’re doing Hammersmith.”
My trial by fire was going out drinking with him. His thing is he gets in the club; there are blondes and this bucket of ice with Smirnoff and another with Jack Daniel’s. I get in this roped off area in this club somewhere and there were no blondes, not anyone, just me and Lemmy talking. And it turns out that his girlfriend in LA was my first girlfriend – whom I’d lost my virginity to! And when I did Overkill at Hammersmith, the room was filled with people who liked and disliked me, and I’m up there playing Overkill – yes, sir!
AC/DC
The Wildhearts were on tour with AC/DC in Europe on their Ballbreaker tour, then we went to the US and it turned from majesty to comedy to tragedy all in one month. We got there and took full advantage of the welcome that America affords a young band, which is as much drugs and alcohol as we could get our hands on, and then, inevitably, we started fighting with each other. And then we decided that we couldn’t work together anymore and so we went home.
It’s possibly the worst thing that ever happened to me; I was partly responsible for blowing a tour of America with AC/DC. And our crew and our manager were all as fucked up as we were and they all agreed; there wasn’t one person who said, “You can’t go home.”
As a collective troupe, the Wildhearts were all idiots. I love AC/DC. They turn up, do their job and go; you tour for years and years and you don’t do that by hanging out and partying all the time. I mean, look at us: we managed five dates. Yes, why did AC/DC make it and the Wildhearts didn’t? It’s not all sonic.
Guns N’ Roses
The night The Quireboys supported them at Hammersmith, I only got to meet Steven Adler and Slash, but I met Axl when the Wildhearts attended the Freddie Mercury concert at Wembley. Axl was playing with Elton John that day.
Anyway, we’re sitting at this table, free drinks are coming, Liza Minnelli comes and sits down, Tony Iommi, then Roger Taylor pops over, and then these light bulbs come on over our heads that we’re at the wrong table, it’s Queen’s table! And I’m next to Axl and he was so nice and subdued and cool, and I wasn’t expecting it at all.
I didn’t know if we’d get on and I told him how much I loved Elton John and he just started on about how much he loved Elton John too and how much of an influence he’d had on him musically when he was growing up. I just warmed to him; this figure that I’m sure can be very hard work, but right then he was this lovely guy reminiscing about music.
I know a few of the guys in the band now, but Axl’s never around if I go and say hello. I met Tommy Stinson when he was playing with them and I was so nervous that nothing came out when I went to say hello. All I could think was, “When are you getting back with The Replacements?” And part of my brain’s going: “Don’t say it, don’t say it!”
Manic Street Preachers
We did the Generation Terrorists tour, and saw them every day for at least a month. Richey Edwards was lovely: he was quiet, studious. He was learning to play the guitar and he had a Beatles songbook. He’d sit in the corner of the dressing room going, “That’s a D, that’s a G,” and then he’d go out and this fevered, kind of crazy Clash vibe came off him when he played.
The juxtaposition used to fuck with my head: the guy’s learning to play guitar, but when he gets on stage he looks like Mick Jones. We were sharing dressing rooms for the most part, that’s the bits I remember, talking about our love of the Stones and the Pistols and Guns N’ Roses, kindred spirits all the way.
I wanted to go onstage all guns blazing, but if we hadn’t gone on tour with the Manics we might never have stepped our game up and done anything. There are not many tours you do that start off with 50 punters in the audience and end up with queues of people outside who can’t get in.
Cheap Trick
We were playing with The Darkness in Nashville and Rick Nielsen just walks in our dressing room and we’re like, “But for you, we wouldn’t be here!” Then he goes, “I’ve got a friend who wants to meet you,” so he drags us out and taps the shoulder of some guy and he turns around and it’s Steven Tyler and I’m talking to Tyler and Nielsen and going, “Will someone for fuck’s sake take a picture?!”
Steven Tyler gave me the best cigar I ever smoked. It was this ridiculously two-coloured cigar, dark and light tobacco; very rare, so expensive and just like you’re smoking air. Then I met Rick again when I was in the Bravado store in New York, and this guy comes over I know and says, “Do you play bass? Cheap Trick are coming to play and they haven’t got a bass player. Do you want to do it? It’s in about 20 minutes time?!”
They asked what I wanted to do first and it was He’s A Whore – had to be. Then Voices, Surrender and Clock Strikes Ten. It was only a few songs, but it came together so quickly and it sounded great and I was in Cheap Trick, if briefly.
UFO
The Quireboys used to hang out with UFO all the time when Phil Mogg managed us. We used to go and stay at Pete Way’s house. It was where I discovered Tracii Lords, we’d be in our sleeping bags, passing a spliff around and he’d put a porn movie on and we’d be like, “Oh no, wrong! We’re all young guys and we’re in your living room. Why are you giving us a hard-on? What’s the thing? What happens next, you give everyone a hard-on and then go around the room with a bat like Al Capone?!”
UFO was the first dressing room I ever went in when I was a kid too; I was at City Hall, No Place To Run tour. And everyone was leaving, and I just walked to this door. I wasn’t planning anything, I didn’t even know where the backstage was. I walk in this door, no one stops me, straight past security like I’m invisible and along this corridor and I walked straight in their dressing room and they just gave me a drink. They sat me down, gave me some drumsticks, plectrums… I’m in heaven.
Seeing Pete Way on stage earlier and wanting to be like him and then being back there and them being so nice to a kid they didn’t even know, I still find that incredible.
Mick Ronson
He was going to produce the first Wildhearts album. He came down to the rehearsal place to see us and he was just a lovely man, unassuming, humble, talented as fuck. He didn’t end up producing because the label thought he was so sick he might not get to finish the project. We didn’t get it at the time, we hated the label; we were so reactionary.
We had the song My Baby Is A Headfuck and it wasn’t that great, but we thought if we can get Ronson to play a solo on it then it’ll work. I got in touch with him and said, “We’re not going to record this song unless you come down and play on it,” and he went, “I’d be honoured.” And Ronson wasn’t around for very long, but I take solace in that it was the last of his recordings you got to hear, because he died during the making of his album.
We got him to do one more take of the song because we didn’t want him to stop playing; he nailed it the first time. We just wanted to listen to him. He had one of our cheap Les Pauls and he was using a bottleneck and it was just like, “How the fucking hell is he doing that with that?!” And he’s doing all these gorgeous bends and really clever stuff and me and CJ [Wildheart] are like school kids – ‘Look how much we don’t know’. It was a real lesson.
The original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock 155 (March 2011)
