KEV RIDDLES interview – ANGEL WITCH / TYTAN / BAPHOMET.

MAL-
Talking to Kevin Riddles. Kevin, thanks so much for taking my call.
KEV-
You’re more than welcome, my friend.
MAL-
It’s good to have you on. Now, we’re going to talk about lots of things, but let’s start way back in the very beginning. When did you first pick up a musical instrument? Do you remember?
KEV-
Yeah, you’re going to love this story. I went to one of those very strange and quirky British institutions called a boarding school when I was 10 years old because my father was an ex Royal Navy man, this was affiliated to the Royal Navy. I think he had designs that I’d probably be a Rear Admiral on an aircraft carrier by now.
MAL-
And you’re not?
KEV-
Poor deluded fool, no, sadly didn’t work out. When I got to the boarding school, they gave us a choice of activities that we could do in the afternoons and evenings and one of them was a seven-mile cross-country run, the other alternative was learning the piano, and I thought I’d much rather try and carry the piano than rather do a 7-mile, cross-country run. So I elected for the piano. So at the age of 10, that was my first musical instrument was a piano which are hated instantly on sight. It was no excitement at all as far as I was concerned with the piano, but I stuck with it so I didn’t have to do the cross country running. So there you go.
MAL-
Yeah. All right. Where did we move on to bass?
KEV-
Okay, there was a good-looking, very good looking young, lady teacher at this particular school. By then I was about thirteen/fourteen, she had a glorious folky sort of voice and we were all into, you know, JOAN BAEZ and people like that. Me and a friend at school, we got acoustic guitars, and we put together a little folk trio and we were doing BOB DYLAN, JOAN BAEZ, all that sort of stuff, bit of CROSBY, STILLS, NASH AND YOUNG and all that suddenly realize I was bloody hopeless on the guitar, really couldn’t get on with it at all fat podgy, piano playing fingers I think. And somebody suggested, why don’t you try a cello and play the cello with this thing and I said don’t be stupid, but it got me thinking. And the next time I was in the local town with a music shop I happened to walk past and there was a bass hanging in the window and I kind of got suckered in to playing bass that way. It was like well, CROSBY STILLS, NASH & YOUNG used to do 2 sets basically, they do the folky set with all the amazing harmonies and then they go off for a break and come back and do electric music they used to call it and that’s what we tried to do. We do you know a couple of BOB DYLAN songs and we do a bit of T-REX like ‘Ride A White Swan’ and that sort of thing, first thing I ever played on bass was ‘Ride A White Swan’ by T-REX. So yeah, that’s what we tried to do. That didn’t work sadly because you know we weren’t very good. As I say this particular teacher and her name was Ethel Jones. Oh God. Ethel Jones. If you’re still out there, I hope you still got a great voice but hey the rest of us, the rest of the band were a bit rubbish. So that didn’t go anywhere but it got me started on bass. So I was about 13 or 14. Like a lot of bass players realize I was a crap guitarist.
MAL-
Righto, let’s move on to ANGEL WITCH, how did they form? How did all this come about?
KEV-
Well I guess again it was one of those right place, right time sort of situations. I was living and working in South London, place called Lewisham, in a music shop, one of the biggest in London, at the time. And Kev Heybourne, the guitar player used to come in almost every week, buying strings, and picks, and trying out guitars, and amps, and all that sort of stuff. And we got to know each other over a couple or three months. And he came in one day, and I was sitting there playing bass, demonstrating a bass to someone else. And when I’ve finished with that particular customer, I think I sold him a bass or something. He just asked me straight out. He said, ‘Are you looking to play in a band?’ And I said, ‘Well, I hadn’t really thought about it at the moment’ as I’m busy working, you know? And he said, Well, if you fancy it, we rehearse at this particular Pub down in South London’. He said, ‘If you fancy coming along on a Tuesday or Wednesday night or whatever it was and that would have been the Green Man in Plumstead. Yeah, the famous Green Man in Plumstead in southeast London. ‘Yeah if you fancy coming down’, it was all very casual. It was all nothing particularly pressured or anything like that. It’s just like you fancy coming along. And so, so I turned up the following Tuesday and there’s a glorious photograph of the trousers I was wearing at the time they were a white pair of white loon pants with red stars on them. I thought I was so cool, I was such a cool hippie and I wasn’t quite sure what I was walking into, I’ll be honest. Yes. I’ve heard of things like PRIEST and and before that I’d heard of, you know, sort of IRON BUTTERFLY and all that, MC5 lot of those Age of Atlantic bands, but I was completely blown away by ZEPPELIN. So that was as heavy as I got in my head so Kev fired up with the first song he played me was Angel Witch, and it was like , ‘Wait, a cotton-picking minute. What the hell is this?’ and just got stuck into it. I mean it literally went from walking into a pub at 8:00 and walking out of the pub at 9:00 and gone, ‘I think I’ve just joined a heavy metal band’.
MAL-
Yeah. Right. And what year would this have been?
KEV-
That would have been 78. Late 78 and the funny thing is that the we should rehearse in this Pub the back room of this Pub and the deal was that we would do a gig for them once a month. So that’s what we did. Literally was only gig we got at the time for the first six months, we played there six times, but rehearsed about 20 times, you know? So for us, it was a good deal. But it honed the craft. It was a four-piece then. And I’d actually joined the band, a band that was already in existence, in one form or another for a year or so, before hand, and the one thing that they needed was a bass player and I just happened to fit the bill I think. Right place, right time.
MAL-
Yeah. Back in the day, we are talking very early 80s, initially on one of those middle-of-the-night Rock shows because that was the only time you’ve got to see anything remotely heavy back in the day, there was a clip of you guys playing ‘Angel Witch’ and it looked like you were live in a studio. I just searched YouTube for it just before I called you but I couldn’t find it on YouTube so it’s probably disappeared into the wind somewhere. But do you remember doing that one?
KEV-
Yeah, that was would have been the promo video for ‘Angel Witch’ which came out as a single on Bronz Records back in that time the weird thing was with none of us had ever lip-synced anything before, it was just the oddest thing. I mean it was a very weird experience. It would have been so much easier and so much quicker for us to just bloody play it. But it was all the rage kind in the late 70s early 80s top of the pops was around and other shows were around and they were so focused on getting the performance rather than anything else that they thought if we let people play live, A- we’re going to kill our sound engineers because it’ll be too loud. But if we if we let them play Live, anything could happen, chaos could reign. Somebody might even fucking swear. So if it was the one that was in colour that you’ve seen, that’s the promo being video for ‘Angel Witch’. As I say, we’ve been playing it for so long, we would have done a better job with would have played it live. And it would have taken three days less.
MAL-
Back onto ANGEL WITCH, how did that go? And with the New Wave coming in, being on the inside, did you see the tide turn, or were you just getting more gigs and more people are rocking up and you didn’t think too much of it.
KEV-
At the time we were just intensely grateful to get gigs. It was hellishly difficult then and it hasn’t changed since but it was hellishly difficult then primarily because of the rise of apart from anything else, the rise of punk at the same time. The gigs that we had been getting had suddenly disappeared. Because everybody wanted punk bands you know ‘oh you know if you if you be a punk band tomorrow night you’ll be fine, I’ll book ya.’ but you know and it was just crazy crazy times..
MAL-
Sorry to butt in. Did you actually get told that?
KEV-
Yeah. Yeah. We’d have a booking at say a place in Burton-On-Trent or something. And then suddenly, we get a phone call saying, ‘We have to pull that booking, people round here want Punk now. So unless you can be a punk band, your gig at the end of the week, then I’m gonna have to cancel it and get a punk band in’. And we literally lost gigs because of that. At the end of the day, in theory, you’ve got to give people what they want, whether you like it or not, there’s no point in trying to ram stuff down people’s throats that don’t want it. It’s always been that way of course. So you know I’m sure George Handel had a bit of a problem with the Water Music, when he wrote it back in 1647 or whatever it was because nobody , very few people had a boat. Haha, that was an analogy. Was that not an analogy? I’m pleased with that one.
MAL-
Tell us about the debut ANGEL WITCH album.
KEV-
Well, we were fortunate enough, you mentioned the ‘Metal For Muthas’ album. We were lucky enough to get on that for a start, that was really where the ‘New Wave Of British Heavy Metal’ kind of started really in an official way in my head, was that ‘Metal For Muthas’ album. That was put together by EMI and everybody on the album got the same deal which was you got one or two tracks on the ‘Metal For Muthas’ album and an option for a single. We didn’t have the option, EMI had the option to put out a single from any of the bands on there that they wanted and out of all the bands on there, the only people that they’d put single out of was ANGEL WITCH and IRON MAIDEN. And at that point we heard a little rumour that the EMI were going to sign either IRON MAIDEN or ANGEL WITCH and this isn’t blowing my own trumpet. This is what happened. You know, we were on a par with each other at that time. We used to support each other and we, you know, we’d headline one gig and then the next week they’d headline the gig, so you know, we were great friends and in the same circuit, and as it turned out, they had far better management than we did. They knew about this sort of battle of the bands coming up way before we did and so they pulled out all the stops and quite rightly they got the huge deal with EMI, and events have proved them right. Look at the band. Look at MAIDEN now and good luck to them, because they absolutely deserve everything they get.
We were then approached by Bronze Records because they were owned and operated by a family organization, the Bron family. Gerry Bron was head of the record label. His son was ahead of A & R and believe it or not his sister was a very famous actress over here. Eleanor Bron, been in a few films over here, back in the 50s 60s, 70s, she saw us, and for some reason, there she was in her mid 60s, absolutely fell in love with the band, and forced her brother Jerry to sign us against his will. He didn’t really, like us very much. Well, it’s a bit odd, considering the only bands that were on Bronze Records at the time were URIAH HEEP, MOTORHEAD, GIRLSCHOOL and TANK, not exactly a classical roster, shall we say? Anyway, we got on there and we had a ball. We were doing gigs with GIRLSCHOOL, MOTORHEAD and all that sort of stuff. So we were loving every minute, we were serious rock stars in our own heads and where the Bronze Records officers was, below there was a recording studio owned by Bronze Records and I think at least three URIAH HEEP albums were done there. 2 MOTORHEAD albums were done there. BARON ROJO, Spanish band, did an album there. BERNIE TORME did two albums there. So, it was s a top-notch studio.
MAL-
I’ve got a BARON ROJO live album actually.
KEV-
Yeah? Great band. Great band. But what killed it for them sadly, we’re diverting slightly. But what killed it for them sadly was they could not sing in English at that time. They couldn’t make it work, for whatever reason. And so they didn’t do much outside of Spain. Anyway, so there we were in the studio, but, you know, recording like real rock stars just, you know, loving every minute of it until the night John Bonham died, which happened smack in the middle of a recording and that news came through and just literally killed everything for a week, and we literally couldn’t move for grief, if that make sense.
MAL-
Yeah, it hit me the same way, I was a massive Zeppelin fan.
KEV-
Yeah, I mean it literally knocked me for six certainly and Dave Hogg our drummer was a huge Bonzo fan, and we didn’t see him for three days. He went on a quite justifiable bender for three days. And so yeah, that kind of killed the pleasure side of things for me anyway, certainly for most of that album until it was finished. And then we were just damn happy that we were able to get an album recorded and released. We’re really happy with that.
MAL-
How did that album go for you?
KEV-
It went brilliantly well, in every single respect except sales. To this day I get, we’re giggling here. People piss and moan about how little that you earn off of downloads and streams and that sort of stuff. And trust me, unless you sold millions in physical copies, you didn’t get anything either. I still get my yearly accounts from Sony, ATV who inherited the EMI back catalog. And although there is money, this always gets me every year when I see it, although there’s money in the account, the account has not reached the threshold for payment which means that the 48 pounds 60 but I should have earned from the sales of ANGEL WITCH albums over the last 42 years haven’t reached the threshold where it’s worth Sony actually writing me a cheque and sending it to me. So for those sales it should have amounted to 48 pounds 78 I think was the last one we had in February or something which bothers me not a jot for the simple reason being, it is still one of the seminal albums of the era. Hmm and when I hear people talk about it in the same breath as first METALLICA album, first SLAYER album, first ANTHRAX album, it’s in that area of ‘Oh my God’, you know, people have grown up with that album and are now playing guitar and playing bass and playing drums because of that first ANGEL WITCH album, which thrills me like I can’t even describe, the hair on the back of my neck is going up as I’m talking about it. The fact that we inspired people, okay, they might have borrowed the album off a friend or bought it in a second hand store somewhere. I don’t care. The fact is, it’s up there.
MAL-
How heavy were you touring that? Were you touring it? Did you go over the channel?
KEV-
Yeah we never stopped. Back in the day,there was a constant circuit you could play, especially in the UK. There was a circuit that you could play which meant you could get every two months probably, you’d come back to the same town. So you could be playing, you know, Plymouth and Darlington and Preston, and Edinburgh and then down into London and back up. You could do that whole circuit and be pretty much on the road three, four nights every week. And every couple of months you come back to the same Club again. So you know, by that time you have, maybe you’ve got a new song in the set or something like that or whatever, but everybody was doing the same thing. We’ve been constantly criss-crossing with PRAYING MANTIS and SAMSON and the like. TOAD THE WET SPROCKET were another one who sort of toured fairly heavily at that sort of time as well. So a lot of those ‘Metal For Muthas’ bands, if you like. We were on the road constantly. There was a circuit that you could do, but that circuit was the one that was gradually overtaken by punk bands. And that part of the reason for it is because punk bands would go in and play for nothing, you know, promoters loved them because they charge, you know, three or four quid on the door but pay the bands nothing because all they wanted to do was jump up and down, make a lot of noise and spit at people.
MAL-
Yeah, yeah, I never got that.
KEV-
Exactly right.
MAL-
So, when did you leave, and why?
KEV-
End of 1980 into 81, it became fairly obvious that kind of ANGEL WITCH had come to the end of it’s natural life. We couldn’t get… We were banging their heads against a brick wall all the time, trying to get bigger gigs. Uh, yes. We’ve been able to tour with some fantastic bands, MOTORHEAD, SAXON, RUSH and GIRLSCHOOL, and APRIL WINE, KROKUS, and all of those. Yes, we got on those, but we never seemed to be able to get past that, we could never get between the gap of that circuit I was telling you about up to the big circuit, up onto the college circuit and higher, we could never quite break into that. And it just seemed as though we’d done as much as we could do, Bronze Records had disappeared by that point, so we didn’t have a record deal. We had material that was either written or in the process of being written, but we couldn’t get any interest because of the whole Punk thing, everything was turned on it’s head by Punk, quite rightly. It was something brilliantly new. Even though to us it was horrible. It was very heavy metal, very badly played with a lot of saliva involved. That kind of overtook pretty much everything for a while. So yeah, in my head and I’m fairly certain. It was the same in everybody else’s head, basically died a natural death in that incarnation. By that time, of course, Dave Hogg, the drummer had already left prior to me leaving and we got Dave Dufor in who had again, been around for ages with a couple of great bands, the EF BAND was his main claim to fame as it were, so we decided to go off and try and do something but there was no animosity. There was no recriminations. We’d had a great run, we’d had a great time and we’d done that album and even then we knew we’d done something a little bit special, but we couldn’t quite work out A- what he was and therefore, would we be able to recreate it and quite why it hadn’t done more than it did.
MAL-
So what did you do then?
KEV-
Oh, well, TSat on my backside for a good few months wondering what the heck I was going to do. Because by that time I’d left the music shop. I’ve got married, all sorts of things had changed in the personal life, always for the good I have to say at that time, and then Dave Dufor and I just said, look, you know, we’ve we’ve got all this experience, all these ideas, we’ve had such a run of good luck and fun, let’s try and do something, so we did. My background from playing piano meant that I was slightly more. what’s the word I want to use? melodic?
MAL-
Yeah, that’s the word I was going to put in your head. Yeah.
KEV-
If there was any melody in ANGEL WITCH it was usually something that I brought to it. Kev was the heaviness and that sort of stuff. And I was able to balance out a lot with some of the more melodic things and I wanted to explore that a bit more. It sounds really pretentious toddle but I wanted to explore that a little more. So I was lucky enough to meet up with guitar player Stevie Gibbs and we had access to some studio telling time and we just lucked into a couple of songs and thught ‘that’s pretty damn good’ and by various machinations, shall we say, we got introduced to a fella called Nick Raymond, who had a record company called Kamaflage records. At this point, we didn’t even have the name, my then good lady wife…I had the idea of calling the band HAMMERHEAD after the shark and she said, if he called it HAMMERHEAD, I’ll hit you in the head with a hammer. So HAMMERHEAD bit the dust. We came up with TITAN and there was a big announcement in Melody Maker, and all this other stuff. And the first communication I had from anybody about TITAN was a band in East Midlands of the UK threatening to sue me because their band was called TITAN. Okay. So that’s why you’ve got a different slightly different spelling of the word Titan. People think that trolls and the like and gas-lighting is a new thing, well trust me, it’s not
MAL-
Did the launch, if you like, of that band,.. was that made any easier by your, for want of a better word, heritage or pedigree?
KEV-
Yes. Yeah, without a doubt because most of what people sort of digested in their social media, if you like in those days was music press. It was the New Musical Express, Sounds, Melody Maker were the three main ones, around that sort of time, Kerrang and Metal Hammer and stuff had started the magazine version of those papers. But for instance, I was looking for a singer. So I put an advert in Melody Maker. That’s what you did. As it turned out, I didn’t get any replies from that, but I found the singer for TYTAN through Paul Samson from SAMSON, who had just lost Bruce Dickinson to MAIDEN, and so I rang Paul up and asked him if while he was trying to find a replacement for Bruce, had he found anybody that although he’d chosen Nicky Moore, did he hear anybody that I might be interested in, that I might be able to use and he said, ‘no, they were all a bit crap, although, there was one guy from from Tamworth, near Birmingham. When I told him to send me a tape’, meaning, send me a tape of you singing on it, so I can hear what you sound like, Kal actually sent him a blank tape. A brand spanking new TDK C90 still in the wrapper. Paul said if he wasn’t so bloody stupid I probably would’ve hired him but he might be worth contacting. So, that’s exactly what I did. I contacted him straight away and it worked out perfectly. But yeah, sending a blank tape from for your audition was.. It got Paul’s attention and he eventually got mine as well.
MAL-
Yeah, firstly Nicky Moore, may he rest in peace.
KEV-
Absolutely.
MAL-
Just on a side note, remember his band, MAMMOTH?
KEV-
Not only do I remember it, there was talk and a meeting was had where I was going to be the second bass player.
MAL-
Second bass player? Okay. 
KEV-
Yeah, there was going to be 2 bass players, me and John McCoy, and this is, I swear to God, I don’t know if this is written down or anybody’s ever said the story before I wasn’t offered the job because I was too small.
MAL-
Yeah I can believe that.
KEV-
I’m six foot three and 22 stone, but apparently I was nowhere near big Enough. Yeah, nowhere near big enough for MAMMOTH but I knew that they were my sort of band when the first interview they ever did was with the Sun newspaper and hey weren’t asking questions about the band, it was their daily intake of calories. Nichy was a boy of some substance and so was John at the time.
MAL-
So we’ve got a young chap called Kal Swan who had the most amazing voice. So you got him in to actually sing for you so you didn’t have to ask for a blank tape. Tell us what happened next.
KEV-
So,very fortunately, again, due to whatever reputation I had. I was able to flag rehearsal time and found it relatively easy to get gigs which was a surprise to me, anyway, but the main thing was, we were able to get on the Friday Rock show Tommy Vance, which did us a lot of good and play the Marquee in Wardour Street in London, actually our debut gig, first gig we ever did was the Marquee for God sake. I mean, you know, most people never get a chance to play it and when they do, they’ve been trying to get in for years. But that was our debut gig and things sort of snowballed a little from there. Somebody had snuck a live recording from the desk from that gig, played it to Nick Raymond that Kamaflage. And he immediately was the first and only record company that came to us, offered a studio time. It was all done within the space of a couple of weeks, and it was done on a handshake, believe it or not. And then, lo and behold. He said, I’ve got you some studio time to start recording. It’s a place down in Covent. Garden is called Ramport Studios.
MAL-
Yep, heard of that.
KEV-
And we said, well, fair enough, and it’s owned by THE WHO, and we were recording at the same time as Roger Daltrey was in. So Roger would be walking out, at which point we were allowed to come in. He had obviously priority, but as soon as he was finished for the day, we were allowed to go in. So most of that TYTAN album, most of ‘Rough Justice’ was done on the night shift. But yes. So there we were and we were just in the most incredible studio with a great producer, great engineer, and I couldn’t believe our luck. You know, I thought we should, you know, obviously done something really good in a previous life, because this is these what dreams are made of. Should have kept my flaming mouth shut of course because it all went a bit tits up from there, when just as the album was about to be released. It was all done. We had CBS in America wanted to release it in America and blah blah blah blah, and then Kamaflage records folded and it was… I’ve never had such deflation at the time. Anybody who writes material writes songs, you have this almost desire to for the birth to be witnessed. It’s like you want to video it and put it out on Facebook straight away, you actually want everybody to know what you’ve done, what you’ve been laboring over and what you’ve been paining yourself to do and of course, all of a sudden it was taken away. We had this whole album done, we had the two inch tapes sitting on a desk in front of us, we have the quarter-inch masters that have just been to Abbey Road to be mastered and came back and it was all ready, literally that close and then it all stopped. Literally stopped dead in it’s tracks.
MAL-
Yeah, look I’ve got this three-track EP, dated 1982, so where in this timeline did that get released?
KEV-
They were probably all first and the first lot of tracks, we probably did five tracks to start with the parent company of Kamaflage Records, Dick Jones Music, wanted a single as soon as possible, which is what record companies wanted to to do in those days. Most rock bands don’t really do singles but everybody had to have a single. And so they picked ‘Blind Men and Fools’ which was brilliant for us because that was our signature song. It was my big protest song. Still is because they’re still blind and stupid. So he brought out ‘Blind Men and Fools’ with ‘Ballad of Edward Case’, which is my silly song as a 7 inch single, and then the 12-inch had ‘Sad Man’ on it as well. So that came out while we were still finishing the album which was a bit of an old timeline thing, the plan was to use that as the promo for the album coming out 6 months later, you know. This to all of your listeners is gonna sound like a really weird, long, convoluted and complicated way of getting a record out, compared to nowadays of course. There was no streaming. There was no downloading. There was nothing like that, you physically have to go and buy a copy of the album from a record store. That’s how you did it. That was the only option you had and other than like you were saying, get the cassette player and taping the Friday Night Rock Show, which was illegal of course and nobody ever actually did it.
MAL-
No, obviously. Frowned upon. No one ever did it.
KEV-
They certainly didn’t package them up and send them from the UK to Australia.
MAL-
I received them under protest.
KEV-
There you go. It was obviously a mis-directed package.
MAL-
The third track on that 12-inch is ‘Sad Man’. Over the years I’ve played that track to numerous people, normally prefaced by, ‘Fucking listen to this’. That is just so ball-tearingly heavy when that riff comes in, and yet it’s so beautifully melodic as well. Did that song come easily? Was it sitting there for ages being worked on? How did that song come about? That’s a huge song.
KEV-
I’m going to completely disabuse you and I hope I’m not gonna disappoint you but it came together in about 20 minutes. The a simple reason being, Stevie Gibson, guitar player, who wrote all of that beautiful melodic stuff at the beginning and at the end, that was a song that he had in his head for probably decades. So that was solely His but it wasn’t a metal song. I had the middle riff and the words in my head for decades and as soon as he played it to me and he came to the end of that refrain at the end of the first verse and into the chorus and then he stopped and that had only lasted two minutes, maybe. He stopped and I, on my bass, (mimics riff) and everybody just looked. ‘Wow. Where the hell did that come from?’ And it literally, just exploded in the studio into the song. No real writing went on in that because the writing had happened months and years beforehand. It was just bringing those two bits together and then we came to the end of the heavy bit, said ‘What the hell are we gonna do now? And I think it was Kal came up with the idea because Kal at this point was completely redundant as far as that song is concerned because we had’t written any lyrics or we hadn’t put a melody to the heavy bit at this point . And he said, ‘well, why don’t you just start the song again and just do the whole thing again?’, the whole melodic bit and that’s what we did. And the whole concept came together in about twenty minutes. Kal and I then went away and wrote the lyrics for the middle, again very quickly, a lot of the time lyrics tend to come from the music. So the music almost dictates what the lyrics are going to be in my head, that’s the way I work. Obviously it was going to be called ‘Sad Man’, because that was the theme of that melodic part. People often ask me what it’s about. I haven’t got a bloody clue. I know what the middle bit’s about, but I haven’t got a clue about the bits either side. You’d have to ask Stevie. It didn’t matter what it was about, it was just a beautiful piece of guitar playing and a beautiful voice. And it just worked. It worked.
MAL-
Is there any truth to the rumour, there was a rumour floating around here back then that Kal was asked to join BLACK SABBATH.
KEV-
It wouldn’t have surprised me in the slightest. I haven’t heard that rumour. Basically what happened it is sort of leads into what happened to TYTAN after the record company disappeared. Kal was living with me in my flat at the time. And at that point, we had a Simon Wright on drums. All happened in the space of a week. Simon came to me on the Monday and said, ‘I’m really sorry. Kev. I’m gonna have to leave the band because I’ve been offered another job.’ I said, ‘Oh yeah, what’s that then?’ And he said, ‘Oh well, I’ve got the gig with AC/DC.
MAL-
A band you may have heard of.
KEV-
And I thought ‘Bloody Australians, coming over here, stealing our drummers’, Simon, quite naturally having borrowed a tenner off me so he could get a train home to Manchester, which he still hasn’t paid me back, the little shit. We still talk about that occasionally. He still never paid me. So he disappeared off, and then Kal the following week, ‘I’ve been offered a gig with a band in Los Angeles called BRITISH LION’. He said, ‘but I think we’re gonna have to change the name because there’s another BRITISH LION over there, so it’s probably going to be LION, and then off he went to California, to L.A. and the guy had a voice, the voice of the gods, I mean, It was just extraordinary. It would not have surprised me in the slightest. In fact, it would have delightedly if he had joined somebody like SABBATH.
MAL-
Yes. That basically, when you called it a day, when that happened?
KEV-
It kind of was, the deflation was just palpable, at the time. We literally had, and I’ll often tell this story because it’s so ridiculous, but it’s tragically true. We were literally on our way in my band bus to Heathrow with our guitars and a suitcase full, ready to go off to tour supporting JOURNEY in America. This was because, as I said there was this interest from CBS Records, and they put up some money to get us over there. So, we will literally pulling out of the end of my street, when my then wife came running out, literally ran in front of the car and waved me down, said the phone’s just gone for you. It’s Nick at the record company, you must give him a call right now. So, off I went, rang him back. He said, ‘Can you pop into the office on your way to the airport?’ And I said, ‘yeah, was it that important?’ He said, ‘yeah, you got to come into the office’. So okay, so we go up to the office and sitting there with Nick is Dick Jones Music’s main accountant fellow who said, ‘Have you got the the airline tickets?’ and I said, ‘Yes’, and handed the airline tickets over and he stood up and walked out and Nick said they’re going to get the money back for the airline tickets because everything’s just gone, we just gone bust and I thought, if I left half an hour earlier I’d be on that plane. But I didn’t. If we got on that plane, what would happen? I don’t know, and here’s the tragic thing. The reason that Dick Jones Music had gone bust is because Elton John had sued them for the rights to his songs back.
Well he’d failed, but the costs of that court case had cost Dick Jones Music every penny they had, and they were out of business from that moment. And we were one of the casualties. We certainly weren’t the main casualties because a lot of people lost their jobs because of it. And I’ve never been able to look ELTON JOHN and his bloody yellow brick road ever since. But, hey, these things happen. And I can’t say that we didn’t have fun doing what we did. I can’t feel bitter about it. That’s the thing. I refuse to do that because I’m in many ways, I feel like one of the luckiest guys on the planet. I’ve had two great albums. But there are musicians sitting in their bedrooms, as we speak listening to this show, who would give their eye teeth to be able to do an album. They never get a chance.
MAL-
So what happened then? What did you do then?
KEV-
Blimey, it’s a little bit of a blur in so far as I didn’t do very much. For a year or two, I was actually doing production and I was a guitar tech and stuff. Can’t remember the dates and the times very well but I joined up the Paul Samson, funny enough to put a band together called Empire. That was in 85 and that lasted about 18 months and our main claim to fame was that we did the UK and European leg of IRON MAIDEN’s ‘Somewhere In Time’ tour in 86, we were asked to go on there. That was back in the day, when buy-ons to get on the tours were the norm. And W.A.S.P. had paid a huge amount of money to do the MAIDEN tour. One of those dirty little secrets that nobody talks about, but it’s a fact of life. It was expensive to tour in those days and that was one of the expenses but then for whatever reason they pulled out, I’m not sure why, but they never got their money back. So we were lucky enough to get a phone call to do that tour, but sadly, again, as is the way of these things couldn’t get a record deal out for it. Even with that behind us, we couldn’t do anything with that. So then went back to being crew. I worked with URIAH HEEP and SAM BROWN funnily enough, came to Australia with SAM BROWN Sam Brown. She supported Johnny Farnham, one of my absolute heroes and where I first got to meet and drink vodka with Jimmy Barnes. Oh my chuffing god. What? What a voice. What a man. What a geezer. And by christ, could he drink in those days. At the end of the day, I was out there working, I was a working stiff like other people, but still loving it. It’s like the guy that sweeps up the horse manure in Earls Court, horse of the year show. You know, everybody says, why don’t you get a proper job and the answer is ‘What, and give up show business?’ It’s what you do. Once it’s in your blood, you can’t you can’t stop doing it. I certainly couldn’t. So as I say, if I wasn’t playing, I was going to be crewing. I was ended up tour manager for people like TASMIN ARCHER, TORI AMOS, SAM BROWN, then I got a job with THE FALL
of all things. And by very long convoluted route, I started off as a truck driver, then I was the monitor engineer and Mark E. Smith decided to sack the keyboard player. So on tour, I was the keyboard player and monitor engineer at the same time, which was interesting doing a good few shows in Australia and Japan and New Zealand and busiest time I’ve ever had I think. So that brought me right the way through the nineties I suppose doing that. I was in Moscow with URIAH HEEP in 1990, but just, you know, gradually ticking over. And the weird thing was and and again you ask people about how they write songs and stuff. I was writing songs in my head through that entire time, because I always hoped that I would get a chance to put them together with another band. I suppose, if you spring forward, I mean, literally nothing happened musically for me at all until 2012.
MAL-
Yeah. Hang on, before we skip up to that, ‘Rough Justice’ actually did get a release. How did it come about and did you have anything to do with it?
KEV-
One of those questions have been asked many times, and I’ve got the same answer because it’s the truth, we had nothing to do with it. We had no idea of where the master tapes went when Kamaflage went bust, we had no idea who owned the right to them other than we know we didn’t. We contacted the Musicians Union over here and said, like this is a situation. What the hell? And they said, ‘actually you’re stuffed’ because you don’t own this, you don’t own the rights to the songs. You certainly don’t own the rights of the recording. So for nearly four years, as far as we know, they sort of sat in limbo, it was on a shelf somewhere in some storage unit. And then Majestic records I believe bought the rights to the album and at that point it became ‘Rough Justice’. That wasn’t a title that we have anything to do with. Same with the artwork, kind of when the album came out it was the first I had seen the artwork, first time I’d seen the name. So the weird thing was, with them having bought the right, they had no obligation to contact me at all, so they didn’t, which was an interesting business model and to this day, nothing. Yeah I’ve never had any contact with Magestic Records. Can I say, I’m grateful that I did what they did because without it the album would have just disappeared. You know. It would still be sitting on a shelf in a storage unit somewhere.
MAL-
It would have been a big piece of History missed out on, wouldn’t it?
KEV-
This is the thing. You only realize that because they did what they did. If only they’s done it the right way and involved the band and we could have toured it because you still toured albums in those days. If they’d  involved us it could well have gone on to do more and I’m not just talking into as far as sales are concerned, but, yeah, if there’s a very good chance I would have done something with the band that would have helped promote the album and get the album out there more. What if? What if? You know Woulda Shoulda coulda kind of thing. But I’m grateful to them for actually bringing it out in the first place because it gave like a plinth, a basis, a foundation upon which what I’m doing now is based to a greater or lesser extent, ‘Rough Justice’ is TYTAN’s equivalent of the first ANGEL WITCH album. So I’ve been very fortunate to be involved in both of them.
MAL-
Yeah. So you mentioned 2012, let’s skip forward to there.
KEV-
Well as I say you you’re absolutely missing nothing between like 1990 and 2012, bugger all happened until I got. By this time of course, technology caught up with me in a way and I actually had an email account. I didn’t have a computer, but I had an email account, I used to go the library once a week and we used to log on the computers there
MAL-
Yep, did the same.
KEV-
I get an email from a fella called Oliver Weinsheimer in Germany, who to my eternal shame I’ve never heard of, I mean, I’d heard of Germany, obviously. But anyway, Oliver ran, a festival called ‘Keep It True, based in the old East Germany of all places but he said, what would it take to do a 30th Anniversary reunion concert, the 30th Anniversary of the album being recorded. I said ‘well okay, leave it with me’. I don’t even know where everybody is let alone anything else. So I’ve spent a month or so contacting people again, you know, having an email account wasn’t as as helpful as I hoped it would be. So, I was still trying to get phone numbers and stuff, spoke to Simon. He by this time moved to America, and was actually playing with RONNIE DIO, and he couldn’t do it, because of commitments with DIO. I finally got in touch with Kal And it turned out he had stopped singing about 15 years before hand and got a job with Apple Computers in San Francisco. I think so anyway, somewhere somewhere in America.
MAL-
Imagine having a voice like that and not using it and just working for a fucking computer company.
KEV-
Well, as it turned out, he had had some horrendous experiences with American record companies promoters and God knows what else. He had a band called BAD MOON RISING, which had an enormous amount of money thrown at it and they were in the Realms of sort of POISON, RATT, W.A.S.P, they were in that sort of Glam, sleaze sort of metal thing, and I think he hated every single minute of it, but couldn’t get out of it. I think he just got so disillusioned, he’s stopped singing. It was simple as that. He walked away. So when I spoke to him, he said that’s the only time I’ve sing is when I’m scaring my children when I’m singing in the shower. So he declines shall we say, but at this point, that seed has been planted in my head and I had about 7 or 8 months to do something. So I basically put together a new TYTAN. I tracked down Stevie Gibbs again. I tracked down Steve Mann whose claim to fame now is he plays with Michael Schenker and before that he was, he was with TYTAN, he played on the album but also he was with LIONHEART with Den Stratton from MAIDEN. And so he came on board and we it was as far as I knew it was going to be a one-off show in Germany, ridiculously well paid for the you know, the standards of the day because it was going to be a one-off show and we went there and had an absolute ball. People loved it. I can’t tell you how many times I signed either a bootleg t-shirt or a copy of ‘Rough Justice.’ The place in like 3,000 people in it and it seemed like half of them had a ‘Rough Justice’ album tucked away somewhere in a carrier bag, you know. And it just got me thinking, ‘let’s keep it going’ and from 2012 to now, that’s what I’ve done, I’ve just kept you going, I genuinely see no reason to stop because the fun is still there. The music is still there, the ideas are still there. And again, any musician will tell you that… even as we’re speaking, now, riffs are going through my head. Or a song lyric is going through my head and and I will stop. I’ve before now I have actually stopped driving the car and pulled over and said to Jules, ‘get your phone out, write this down’ and I will come up with just a line of lyrics that have popped into my head, and then we’ll carry on driving and that’s what keeps me going. If that ever stops then I’ll probably will give it up but until that sad and inglorious day, I’ll still be doing it. But hey, we ain’t doing this for the money. We’re doing this because it’s fun.
MAL-
Yeah, how often are you gigging?
KEV-
Between 20 and 25 gigs a year with TYTAN. Jules is obviously the the manager and booker of the band. She does a brilliant job I have to say, sometimes makes a rod for her own back though, because she came up with the wizard idea of, ‘why the hell haven’t you ever done anything with the material from the first ANGEL WITCH album? Yeah yeah. Okay. What you talkin about? She said well if anybody’s got a right to play those songs, you have and you were involved in it and that’s how KEV RIDDLES’ BAPHOMET came around. It was all her idea. At the time of the album, so we’re talking 79-80-81. We were gigging constantly to the extent all three of us had to give up work and we were technically full-time professional musicians although there was a lot in the way of money coming in, but we were working all the time so the songs that made it to the album were what we considered the most suitable song for the album at the time. But there was also another half dozen, maybe even a dozen songs that we were playing in the live set, so ANGEL WITCH would have maybe an hour and a half, two hours of material back in the day and we can chop and change the set around and have some fun with it and keep it fresh. Well, all of that stuff I had and still have the right to perform. And fortunately, when Jules came up with the idea of doing something with KEV RIDDLES’ BAPHOMET, we got in touch with Kev Heybourne who has the rights to the songs, the recording rights and that sort of stuff. I felt I had to ask his permission and he was cool with it. He said, ‘yeah go ahead’. His actual words were, ‘Ive been playing those songs and 40 odd years. I’m getting a bit sick of them now, I want to play some new stuff’. So I said, ‘well, that’s great. I’ll play the old stuff, you play the new stuff and everybody will be happy’. You know I’ll be the the the joy of doing it this way is that is that the old material will still be being played Kev’s done another six seven or eight albums I think since since the first one and so on. So I literally play what’s on the first album and the material of the time around the same era. So you’ve got things like, ‘Baphomet’ weren’t on the album, but it was on the ’70s tapes’ and I think it was on the second metal from others album if I remember, like
MAL-
It was on the first one.
KEV-
Yeah, there we go. I knew we had 2 on there. So that was, that would have been ‘Angel Witch’ and ‘Baphomet’, ‘Extermination day’, for instance, wasn’t on the first album, but we play that because it was a live track. I think ‘Guillotine’ as well. I mean we do pretty much everything that’s on the first album. We’re having a ball with it. I tell you it’s generated a lot of interest because Kev’s not playing at the moment with ANGEL WITCH for whatever reason, he lives in Belgium now, he’s probably eating fast. Too much chocolate. That’s the problem. If he carries on, he’ll end up my size. We’ve literally celebrated our first year of BAPHOMET and it’s going brilliantly well I have to say we’ve done a dozen gigs, we’re off this weekend, we’re off to to Belgium to play. We’re doing a BAPHOMET gig in a club on Friday and then in a TYTAN gig in the same club on Saturday, which is great for us because it makes financial sense. It means we can make it pay for itself. The one thing I don’t have is any money to throw at it Yeah, either TYTAN or BAPHOMET. I just don’t have it simple as that. So the gigs have to pay for themselves. So, as long as we come out of it, you know, the van hire’s-paid the diesel costs are paid. Everybody’s been fed and watered and we’ve had good fun for two or three days. That’s all we can ask, you know, if we sell a few t-shirts and a couple of albums, even better. Okay, the great thing about BAPHOMET is it was the easiest thing in the world to get the band sorted because it’s the same band as TYTAN now. I’ve got Gary Bowler on drums, otherwise known as Magpie. Tony Coldham, we were talking about Nicky Moore. Tony Coldham, our vocalist is on a par with Nicky Moore I believe. He has the most sensational set of pipes. I’m not going to say he’s better than anybody but certainly up there with some of the really really well known ones.
We have a Lord of the Rings type Hobbit theme going throughout the band. So you won’t be surprised to know that I’m known as Gandalf The Wise and tony is Frodo.
Once you see a photograph, you’ll realize why, he’s about four foot three high, nd then my guitar player fellow called Chris Borsberry who is a Hartfordshire lad born and bred, he’s just a wizard, absolute wizard and and then with TYTAN I’ve got my keyboard player of the last 10-12 years, Andy Thompson, who’s been with us right the way through. So, yeah, we’ve got a very stable long-term thing. We’ve got a third album in the process of being written. We’ve got a record label that actually wants to not only pay for it, but to promote it and distribute it and that sort of stuff. So, from that point of view things are looking good. So, blow my own trumpet, we’re having a whale of a time and doing bloody well at it.
MAL-
Excellent. I reckon that’ll be just about wrap it up for this time.
KEV-
I think we’re there, you’ve reminded me of things that I’d forgotten about, so thank you for that.  I will store those away in the memory and hope they stay there for the next time.
MAL-
Thanks so much for taking my call. Thanks so much for sharing the stories. Wish you all the best with whatever you do and stay safe and hope to speak to you again sometime.
KEV-
That will be great. Would be fantastic to get one or both bands out to Australia promoters promoters need to get off their arses and do some work which will be nice. It’s been fantastic to talk to you mate and you take care and thanks for your interest in keeping it going, you stay safe and sane my friend..