Chords for Andy Fraser talks to Terry Rawlings

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_ _ _ [N] Aidy Fraser from The Legend of Three.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to be with you.
Not in California obviously.
It's been trotting though, it's been really hot recently.
Yeah, it's been hot today.
_ _ The Heavy Metal Kids, that's a bizarre thing that a lot of people know about, don't they?
You was nearly christened The Heavy Metal Kids by Chris Blackmore.
We were not going to have any of that. _
I remember being in my mother's living room,
and the four of us wrote out Three and The Heavy Metal Kids and put it on the little mantelpiece there.
[Dm] And we looked at it and said, [Eb] nah.
That's a lot [N] of words, isn't it?
So as the leader, it was my job to call up Chris Blackmore and tell him, nah.
And he says, he does this little call, well, if it's not The Heavy Metal Kids,
I don't think Ireland will be interested.
Slammed the phone down on him.
Five minutes later he calls back and says, you win.
And we've had a great relationship ever since.
_ You wrote all these songs in collaboration with Paul Rogers and Violet.
How did you manage not to fall foul, like The Move did, The Small Faces did,
they all lost their publishing, they all wrote these songs, they don't get them.
How did you manage to _ manoeuvre around the sharks?
No, no, no, no.
No pun intended.
Well, I think Chris Blackmore and Ireland have important things.
_ And although they weren't great deals by today's standards, they were okay by those standards.
[Bb] [N] And they were always pretty clean.
I remember our first gig, because they had in-house management and agency,
and we did a gig for like 20 quid or something somewhere.
And I showed up next morning with a change in my pocket, put it on the table, there's your cut.
I said, well, you can hang on to that for a while.
_ It was going up and up and up, and then you suddenly decided we're going to break up.
For no apparent_
No apparent outward reason.
Yeah.
It wasn't a good decision, it didn't seem.
It was totally appropriate.
Because although we'd been brothers in arms, comrades, a gang, we had each other's back,
it was the best thing any of us had ever been involved in.
We all loved it to the zenith degree.
It looked good as well, didn't it?
We fit together really well.
The chemistry was such that there was what we called a fifth member.
But at some point in time, that fifth member departed.
What happened is, me and Paul Rogers were like A and Z as far as personalities.
_ I suppose I'd say I was a sensitive gay boy, although it took me a couple of decades to come to terms with that.
And Paul was like your northern street fighter, you know, you need to shave his back twice a night.
_ But we found common ground.
And when you do that, I think you invite the most amount of people in.
And we learnt from each other, we needed each other to help complete each other's ideas.
But by the time we'd learnt how to write songs by ourselves, we started going in different directions.
And although I felt _ _ things were going as we wanted them, Paul felt that we had done things my way,
and now we were going to do things his way.
And I wanted to strengthen my voice, and the only way to do that is put your ass on a stage
and start at the bottom.
And I think likewise with Peace, he wanted to strengthen his guitar playing,
and the only way to do that is to get out there and see what it takes.
And they were sort of experimental, and I credit him for having the balls to do that.
But then when we saw what was happening to Koss, we said,
if for no other reason, we need to get back together, because this guy is dying.
And although that was the motivation, it wasn't enough to prevent him from slow suicide, basically.
What was his problem?
He lost confidence.
Did he?
_ When he was spoken of in terms of Hendrix or Clapton, he was all feel.
When he played those solos, he cried every single note.
If you were on stage, you could actually hear him singing out of tune.
His guitar did the singing.
_ When it came to chords, that was really a big problem for him.
And learning to sing, All Right Now, and all those other things, was a real mind-bender for him.
Because their first idea, before I came along, was to form a kind of Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart kind of thing.
And I came in, changed gear, we're going to do some songs.
And I think that was hardest on Koss.
And when me and Paul started going in different directions, Koss was stuck in the middle with nowhere to go.
And we were his only support.
And when that was no longer the case, he was unsupported.
He didn't feel worthy of the Hendrix compliments and comparisons.
Once the drugs had sort of got a hold of him,
he was like, he would rather be seen on stage as not playing well because he's drugged out of his mind,
as opposed to not being very good, which is what he feared was the truth.
It's a very mixed up kind of mind-bender, but I think that's what it is.
_ [G] But then you did get back together again, and then you leave.
Well, we came to the point, I mean, on that last album,
I mean, we're being there, and one minute we think it's [N] going great,
and the next he's going out there and we're going to put on a solo.
And he just falls asleep over his guitar.
And we're going, oh no.
He's the only guitar player.
Yeah, and then like, the first gig, we flew over, the first gig in the States,
he looked just fine.
We did soundcheck at the Hollywood Palladium.
And by the time it comes to like, going to the gig, we couldn't get in his room.
The hotel had to break down his bathroom door, rush him to hospital.
He was, wherever he got it, he was out of his tree.
We had to go and do an apology gig, the three of us.
Me on piano, Paul on acoustic guitar, and then take like a week off
to like, try and get him back together.
And it was sort of like that, this is like, not happening.
This wasn't the dream that we were living.
And we had to be honest, this ain't happening, we got to face it.
Yeah.
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