Music Interview: Mark King of Level 42

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of World Machine, the group embarked on a 28-date tour of the UK, during which they played the album in its entirety, as well as other songs from their impressive back catalogue.

hi-fi+ spoke to King, who was in his home studio on the Isle of Wight, where he was born and grew up, about just how vital World Machine was for the band’s career and asked him to share some of his earliest musical memories and influences.

SH: This year, you’re celebrating the 40th anniversary of World Machine. How does that feel?

MK: It’s great that this article is for a hi-fi magazine because World Machine was very high fidelity – there was no expense spared in production techniques. We were always ‘go ahead’ in the studio – we used the latest technologies that would make the audio quality extremely high. 

We had a great team, with our co-producer, Wally Badarou, and our fantastic engineer, Julian Mendelsohn. We recorded at some of the best studios in town – Sarm [West], Red Bus Studios…

For World Machine, you worked at Maison Rouge Studios, in Fulham…  

Yes – that was great. We had such a nice time there that we did a lot of the work for the follow-up album [Running in the Family] there too. 

What was great about Maison Rouge was that it had a bar and a bistro in the lobby. 

During the World Machine sessions, we were all in awe of the fact that the great John Barry was in there, working his way through a bottle of brandy, which was extremely impressive to us. I’m a big John Barry fan.

World Machine got to number three in the UK albums chart, but also made number 18 in the US Billboard 200. It was an important album for you because it broke you internationally, and it took you into the mainstream…

It did – and we meant to do that; it was planned. We’d just got to the end of our initial contract with Polydor – we’d been bouncing along quite happily, but we’d always be doing maybe 60,000 copies in a territory, excluding America, which was somewhere we’d found quite hard to get a foothold in. 

I don’t think they really knew quite what to do with us or what we were about, and, more importantly, we hadn’t delivered the music that they could run with and would be attractive to them. 

That was uppermost in my mind, and I remember talking to Wally Badarou about it and I tried to explain it to our then manager, John Gould, but he wasn’t quite on the same song sheet as me. 

I knew that we had to focus on making our music more broadly appealing – some people said that it was self-indulgent, but we didn’t see it that way. 

In hindsight, I can understand why people might have thought that, because there were instrumentals… but that’s what we did. 

We were players and that’s where we came in, but if we wanted to move on, we had to smell the coffee, as somebody said back at that time, and try and come up with something. 

Now, that’s easier said than done – I’d defy anybody to say, ‘Right – I’m going to go and write a hit record…’ 

Well, maybe Amy Wadge and Ed Sheeran could knock one out… 

It certainly wasn’t easy for us, but we did it. We had a chordal run up to a chorus that Phil [Gould – drummer] had been suggesting while we were writing – it had been hanging around and it suddenly came of age… That became ‘Something About You’, then Boon [Gould – guitarist] delivered a wonderful lyric, and I was able to chuck in what became the verse melody and chord sequence – it was a real group effort. 

When we’d written that song, I think we all felt that there was something different, and once we nailed that, it opened the floodgates to write other things, like the ballad, ‘It’s Over’, [from Running in the Family] because we were so much more open to ideas. It worked out great and it changed everything – Polydor signed us for another five years. Job done, really.

Have you got a favourite song on World Machine?

The title track is a fave, and I’m seriously looking forward to focussing on getting the tour ready. I always put a lot of time into creating the set and the arrangements of the songs. Obviously, we’re going to be playing all the songs from World Machine…

Will you play them in the order they’re on the album?

I don’t know, as I haven’t really started on it yet. I’ll find out if that’s going to be the best running order when I string it all together. 

The album itself is only 45 mins, but with the technology that’s available and the ideas that I’m inspired by and want to expand on with those tunes… 

The track ‘World Machine’ is going to be a great intro song for the set, so I’m 99% sure it’s going to start with that, because I can really develop it. Who knows? You might be sitting there 15 minutes into the gig and we’re still playing ‘World Machine…’ We’ll see how it goes.

Even though there were commercial pop songs on World Machine, there were still some nods to your jazz-funk roots, like the track ‘Physical Presence…’

There were. That’s a bass and guitar riff … a really loping thing… and it’s a pretty classic Level 42 track in that respect. 

Going back a few albums before, we had a song called ‘Kansas City Milkman’ that is kind of similar. I was probably looking for another ‘Kansas City Milkman’, as it always worked great… What is it they say? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. 

You’re constantly touring, but the last new music you released was the Sirens EP in 2013…

I still noodle – I’m talking to you now, sat in my studio, and I’ve got my trusty old bass here, which is the first bass I ever had – the old girl, as she’s called. 

I pick it up, stuff comes, and I get inspired, but I don’t get inspired as much as I did back then, because we’ve kind of done it. 

I know that if I’m going to go out live, we’ve got such a good catalogue of songs that it would be remiss of me not to deliver those to the fans that are coming to see the shows, because they will want to hear them. They don’t necessarily want to hear what a 66-year-old, comfortably off guy is going to come up with… Is he going to write a song about his Tesla, or something? I’ve got enough songs in the bag… 

If you go and see Bob Dylan, I’m sure you want to hear the great songs that he’s written and not necessarily hear what his take is on things now. I think we all know what his take on things now would be – Trump’s a w*****, etc, etc. 

Do you get a lot of young people at your gigs?

For sure – that’s why we’re still able to go out, and business gets better. I can assure you that our promoter, AEG, would not be booking us if business was dropping off. That’s not the way it works. We just do better and better business. In November, we played to over 5,000 people at Indigo at The O2.

How do you listen to music? Are you a hi-fi person?

I would love to say, ‘oh, yeah, my Linn Sondek and all the gear is set up…’ I’m terrible. How do I listen to music? Mainly in the car. In all my years of working in studios, mastering and everything else, the best way to hear music back is in a situation that everybody else is going to hear it in. It’s quite rare that people are in the most pristine, wonderful, acoustic environment – nine times out of ten, you’ll be listening to music en route somewhere, in a car. 

I guess you’re always travelling, as you tour so much…

Yes – exactly. When I’m listening to stuff, I’m always travelling. With Spotify, you can get anything at any time. That’s a wonderful thing to have, but, at the same time, it almost spoils everything because nobody is as interested in the idea of an album as a concept or a complete package anymore. 

The last thing we recorded was Sirens – it’s an EP. I cottoned on to the fact that there’s not a lot of point in coming up with 12 songs… I’ve got six songs that I’m happy with, let’s go with those and if they go down brilliantly, we’ll write another six the next year. 

People will just cherry pick anyway. On that EP, we had a song called ‘Build Myself A Rocket’, and, according to our PRS, it was the third most popular Level 42 song after ‘Lessons In Love’ and ‘Something About You.’

That was just incredible – what a bizarre selection. You would’ve thought it would be ‘Hot Water’, ‘Love Games’, ‘It’s Over’, or ‘Running in the Family.’ People just choose one track from the EP they like, and they download it, rather than the whole thing.

What are your earliest memories of hearing music?

Getting up one Christmas morning, when I was four or five, and my dad had bought my sisters a record player. They both had two seven-inch singles each – Rachael had The Rolling Stones and Belinda had The Beatles and something else… It was fantastic because they were the only records we had, and they got played to death. I found myself loving The Rolling Stones more than The Beatles back then, because I liked that whole blues vibe. 

I think one of the records was ‘Little Red Rooster’ or ‘Not Fade Away.’ Having two older sisters was marvellous, because they had their finger on the pulse of what was happening, and I was getting exposed to it a lot sooner than my friends were. My first real love was Cream. 

How did you get into jazz? 

I was obsessed with drumming, and I absolutely loved Ginger Baker. Then, through getting Melody Maker and New Musical Express I got to hear about a guy called Buddy Rich and, when I was nine years old, boom, that opened up a whole new world. I saw him on a chat show and was blown away, and then I went down lots of other rabbit holes. 

For details, visit www.level42.com.

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