Viva Brighton Issue 34 December 2015

a half pint with...
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Wreckless Eric
Homespun pop god
“I made these home-made records and people
said ‘you can’t do that’ and I’d say ‘well I just
did.’” Eric Boulden, aka Wreckless Eric, takes
a sip of his soda water, and, in that nasal Sussexy
voice of his, carries on his rant. “I mean,
what’s going to happen, are the you-can’t-dothat
police going to come and arrest me in the
middle of the night?”
We’re in the Prince Albert, on Trafalgar
Street. Eric’s over from upstate New York,
back in his home patch for a bit, before
embarking on a European tour. He looks like
he feels at home, and well he might: he was
brought up in Newhaven and went to school
in Lewes; he lived in Brighton for a spell
in the nineties; his mum and sister still live
either side of the city.
Eric is something of a musician’s musician.
Back in 1976, he was signed by the maverick
independent label Stiff Records, alongside
other emerging artists like Ian Dury and
Elvis Costello. The first single he made for
Stiff, Whole Wide World, was a big hit in the
indie chart and remains a classic, much loved
by John Peel at the time, and since covered
by the likes of The Proclaimers and The
Monkees.
I’ve spent much of the afternoon listening to
Eric’s latest album, amERICa, which has just
been released by Fire Records, and much of
the week preceding the interview humming
Whole Wide World in my head. It’s a hell of a
catchy song, but the new stuff’s pretty good
too: it’s refreshing to see a bloke in his sixties
still creating viable music. “I don’t [just] want
to play all my old songs,” he says, when I put
this to him, in so many words. “They all turn
into old songs eventually, and you wouldn’t
have any room for any new ones, and basically
you become a nostalgia act. You become
creatively stuck if you do that. I know there
are bands who are my age, and when they play
they try to sneak a couple of new ones in. But
I think it’s much more viable to play new stuff
....86....