Hey, hey, hey, it’s a beautiful day. I can’t stop myself from smiling. Welcome to a breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye.
Cause it’s a beautiful day. A breath of French air. Beautiful day.
Oh, baby, any day that you’re gone away. It’s a beautiful day. Hello, and welcome to this week’s episode of a breath of fresh air.
Could you possibly do me a favour? If you’re a fan of what I bring you each week, would you mind subscribing or following the show on either YouTube or your favourite podcast platform? If you do that for me and send me a note, I’d be happy to give you a shout out on a future episode. Now, I have another fabulous guest this week, an artist requested through my YouTube channel by a guy with the handle MWB5150. David Payton is a Scottish bassist, guitarist and singer best known for his band Pilot and their massive 70s hits Magic and January.
January Second time you’ve been hanging on me You make me mad with angry lies David’s also played with The Pretenders, Kate Bush, Christa Burke and Elton John amongst others. David was born in Edinburgh and started playing guitar as a youngster. Hang on, I’ll let him tell you more.
Hello. Welcome to a breath of fresh air, David Payton. Lovely to have you with us.
Nice to be with you, Sandy. We haven’t really heard a lot about you since the late 70s when you were a massive hit with Pilot. Yeah.
Yes, I know. And I know I was in Australia with Elton John in the 80s. I was his bass player for three years and I travelled all around Australia, even to Tasmania.
I had a great time with Elton. Even to Tasmania. Our Tasmanian listeners won’t like hearing that.
Oh, I was in Hobart. That’s a lovely place. It is indeed.
Yeah, I count myself as very lucky in being able to live the dreams that I’ve lived because it’s every musician’s dream to do what I’ve managed to achieve. Let’s just back up a little bit. You started Pilot in the mid-70s.
Of course, you had those two massive hits, Magic and January. Tell me just a little bit about those. You wrote them both, didn’t you? I did.
In fact, I wrote Magic at least a year before it was released as a single. And the song came about when… Well, you know, I used to sit and write songs at a piano and I’d have a little cassette player above the piano and any ideas that came into my head were added to the cassette player. So I started singing Magic.
Oh, it’s Magic. It was only four bars of a song, but it went down on my ideas tape. And I thought, one day I’ll find a bit to go with that.
What were you actually thinking about at the time? What was it that was so magic at that very moment? It was just a word that we used in the Scottish language a lot. At that time, everything was magic, you know. I don’t know if you say that in Australia, you know, but even when I go to my dentist, I say to the dentist, Hello, it’s David Peyton.
I’m here to see Mr Gruber. Okay, that’s magic, David. Just take a seat.
I thought the girl knew who I was. She sang that, but she didn’t. She said it to the guy behind me as well.
That’s magic. That’s funny that you should say that because just a couple of weeks ago I spoke to George Thorogood about Bad to the Bone, and I said, What’s bad to the bone? And he said, Well, to say something was bad was part of our language. That meant it was really great.
So magic was exactly the same. That’s the same thing, same thing. I mean, we even say it to this day.
It’s magic, you know. It’s just used all the time. Right.
So what was magic? I mean, were you just in a terrifically happy mood? Life was great at the time. You must have been feeling fantastic to just even come out with that. Yeah, it wasn’t preconceived.
It’s just because it was used so much. And especially back then, if somebody said something to me, it went in my head and stayed in my head. And when I sat down at the piano or the guitar, it would usually come out in a song.
So I imagine that’s how it happened. It was just in my head while I was trying to write a song. And then you left it with each one of us for it to remain in our heads for years to come.
Yeah. And actually, the verse came to me. The verse begins with the words, I’ve never been awake, I’ve never seen a daybreak.
And these words came from my wife. I was getting up at 5 o’clock one morning, just as the sun was coming up, and she said to me, I’ve never been awake to see the daybreak. And I just thought, wow, I could hear a melody in my head when she said it.
And I just thought to myself, that’s going to go great with that little magic chorus that I wrote. That’s awesome. Oh, that’s what we say here in Australia.
I guess in America, too. That’s awesome. Perhaps I should charge that now.
That’s magic. Oh, it’s awesome. It doesn’t sit quite as well with you, I think.
No. Oh, oh, oh, it’s magic, even that. I’ve never been awake, never seen a daybreak.
Dreaming of my pillow in the morning. Lazy day in bed, music in my head. Crazy music playing in the morning light.
You know, never been, you know. Root Pilot was formed in 1973 in Edinburgh by David Payton and his friend Billy Lyle, both being substitute members of the Scottish group the Bay City Rollers. David says his songwriting process has been fairly unpredictable.
Sometimes I can come up with a line in my head and it leads to a song. Sometimes I’ll sit at the piano or sit with my guitar. That was how the song came into my head, and I started to picture the whole thing.
I could hear the la-la-la’s. I could hear the hand claps. I started to play a guitar solo, and I thought, this is going to work great.
I just couldn’t wait to get into the studio to do it. And lucky enough, I was in the studio within a week. But we kind of wanted to emulate the Beatles in a way.
Magic was recorded in Abbey Road Studio 2, and there was always Lennon McCartney. No matter who wrote what, it was always Lennon McCartney. So we wanted to emulate the same thing, and we did that for the first album.
We called everything Payton, Lyle, regardless of who wrote what. But I wrote Magic. Oh, oh, oh, it’s magic, you know.
Never believe it’s not love. It’s magic, you know, not love. I took up guitar when I was 11 years old.
I went on a vacation with my family to Spain. It was during the time of the running of the Bulls in San Sebastian. And the Bulls came, and I took refuge in a shop doorway.
And as the Bulls passed and all the noise and commotion died away, I could hear a guitar playing. And I looked, and there was a young lad my age sitting on a windowsill, and he was playing Spanish guitar. And I just sat down on the sidewalk and listened to what he was doing, and I thought, this is what I want to do.
At last, I found something that I want to do. So I rushed back to the hotel and told my parents I wanted a guitar. They bought me a Spanish guitar.
It went in a cardboard box in the hold back to Edinburgh, and it made it in one piece. And that was me. I was dedicated to the guitar.
I was never dedicated to soul work in the way that I was to guitar because I felt that I was really achieving something with a guitar. I very quickly managed to get a tune out of it, and that was just so satisfying to be able to do that. So I started with the guitar, and my first band, I was the lead guitarist.
My second band, the lead guitarist. It wasn’t until just before Pilot when I joined another band, and there was a guitar player. He said he was willing to play a bit of bass, so we swapped.
We would do one song with me playing bass, another song with me playing guitar. And eventually I just swapped to bass completely when Pilot began. In fact, we were auditioning bass players and guitar players when Pilot recorded their first album.
We were just a three-piece band then. We didn’t have Ian Berenson, who eventually joined me in the Alan Barson project. Talking about Magic Still, I believe it’s just been covered now by a band in Jersey City, I think, called The Milers.
You’re pretty chuffed with the cover version they’ve done. Oh, yeah, it’s quite punky, isn’t it? Yeah. It’s very energetic, you know, and I love that.
So I had to say something. I’ve heard lots of versions of Magic, and some of them are dreadful. My publishers send me these versions of Magic and say, do you approve this? And sometimes I just say, no, it’s awful.
You know, don’t forget about it. Sometimes they’ll take notice of me and sometimes they won’t. But, yeah, I thought their version was really, really good, and I listened to it two or three times, and I thought, what a great treatment they’ve given the song, brought it still alive.
You know, it’s great to hear. There’s been various versions. Even Selena Gomez had a minor hit with it as well.
I like that version. Oh, oh, oh, it’s magic, you know It’s magic, you know I’ve never been away late I’ve never seen a day late Laying on my pillow in the morning And I’m listening to music in my head And crazy music is playing in the morning In my life Oh, oh, oh, it’s magic, you know Never been with magic, you know I’ve never been away late I’ve never seen a day late Laying on my pillow in the morning Never been away late I’ve never seen a day late Laying on my pillow in the morning Does it feel good to have a song that’s coming to life again? Yeah, it feels, it’s great. It’s great for me as a writer who wrote that song how many years ago? I guess when you wrote it, you could never have imagined that it would last this long and be covered so many times.
Never. No, I never imagined it. You know, I have had some bad versions, and I decided to do a YouTube video of me sitting playing a guitar and playing all the correct chords, and I even said, you know, I’m sick of hearing my song played badly, so here are the correct chords that everybody can play it the way it’s meant to be.
Are you flattered, though, that so many people do try to learn that song? Oh, absolutely. And, you know, for a songwriter to get, for a song of yours to get that much attention from various generations, you know, older people, younger people, they all know the song. Yeah.
And I can say with confidence, you know, if I’m in somewhere, if a builder comes to my house or anything, we’ll say, oh, you’re a musician, yeah. Have you written any songs? I know, well, I wrote a song called Magic. Oh, I know that song.
You know, it’s just fantastic. It was huge. Yeah, it was one of the biggest hits of the 70s.
And so the 70s was the time for music, wasn’t it? I think so. Well, it’s what I relate to. Yeah, I don’t think there’s been a time since the 70s that’s come anywhere close.
Great, that’s good to know. I mean, I was a huge Beatles fan, so that was a big influence on the way that I wrote. But I also liked bands like Yes and Genesis and King Crimson and, you know, lots of these bands.
So all these influences were coming into me and they came out just in my own way. You wouldn’t say, oh, that sounds like Yes, or that sounds like, well, maybe a little bit like the Beatles. I don’t know.
Fortune, just a happy new day Happy to know I started Do you agree that the 70s was the best time for music? I think I was born in a good era and having good influences with all that Tamla music. There was lots of good influences then and I think a lot of writers, when they’re writing a song, their influences come out in some way. Maybe listening to Magic, you hear a little bit of the Beatles influence from me.
La la las, you know, things like that.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. There are bands that I like nowadays, but they tend to sound more like bands from the 70s than the new stuff that all has the 120 beats per minute.
The stuff that I like is stuff that people haven’t heard of, you know, like the Brothers Landreth. That’s a band that I really like, but they’re playing music that could have been written in the 70s or the 60s or whatnot. Just good bands.
If music’s good, performed well, written well, I’ll enjoy it. It starts out slow Let’s go ahead and go The rain’s stompin’ It starts out slow It goes on and on For way too long Ends on a bad note If you could dance it off, you’d dance alone It goes on and on The quiet behind that slamming door The break of a heart that won’t break Get away, wheels in a straight line Serenade of a maid of mine Let’s move up a little bit with Pilot. In 1975, you were totally on top of the world.
You had two major hits and some people were referring to you as a two-hit wonder. By 1977, it was all over. How come? I did explain a little bit that we had a lot of management problems and, you know, it is part of the apprenticeship to get ripped off a little bit.
But the good thing is we were all very musical, the whole band, and we were being asked by other artists to work with them. For instance, Alan Parson’s project and Kate Bush and Chris de Burgh and Chris Rea, Paul McCartney, they all came to me asking me to play on their recordings. So, in view of the fact that a lot of the earnings from Pilot were just empire building our management, I decided to put all my energy into working with other artists and I really enjoy that.
I was never a happy front man. I hated the attention, believe it or not. Really? Is that right? Yeah, I didn’t like it.
As you know, I was in the Bay City Rollers in the late 60s. I was the lead guitarist for a period of about a year. But I must say, there was a lot of guys in Edinburgh who went through the Bay City Rollers.
It wasn’t a steady line-up back then before they became famous. And in fact, it was only the Longmuir Brothers that I knew that went on to become famous. The other members, I didn’t know at all.
We had enough of it then, you know, but even before they were known throughout the world, they were huge in Scotland before they had a record deal. Yeah, we used to get a lot of attention. Lots of them.
Yeah. You didn’t like that. That kind of thing.
Didn’t like that attention. I wanted to be successful, but I didn’t want to be famous. And that sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not.
I enjoyed my art. I live for my art as a musician. And I wanted to be taken seriously in the 70s.
But unfortunately, our record company decided they were going to promote us as a teeny band, which we grew moustaches in rebellion. Girls hanging with moustaches. I guess you knew that.
I’m very fond of girls. Keep on dancing to the rock and roll On Saturday night, Saturday night Dancing to the rhythm in our heart and soul On Saturday night, Saturday night I, I, I, I, I just can’t wait I, I, I, I got a date Saturday night, Saturday night I, I, I, I, I just can’t wait I, I, I, I, I just can’t wait Saturday night, Saturday night I, I, I, I, I just can’t wait Saturday night, Saturday night The pilot was really what I wanted. And I was lucky enough to get it.
I could have left the Bay City Rollers and gone into oblivion. Initially, when I did leave them, they were going to sign with Bell Records. I thought, this isn’t the path I want to take.
I don’t want to be in a teeny-bop band that weren’t writing their own music. I wanted to write my own songs. And I could see the record company wanted to promote the Bay City Rollers as a teeny band.
And I thought, no, that’s not for me. I was listening to Genesis and King Crimson and Yes and bands like that. That’s the way I saw myself going.
Although pilot, probably a million miles away from that. But, you know, we were writing our own songs. And we were well-respected as musicians.
I worked with Paul McCartney. I sang on Mulligan Tire. He just came into the studio one time.
We were recording an Alan Parsons project album. And the door opened and Paul McCartney walked in and said, I know there’s some Scottish voices here. I’m doing a song.
It’s very Scottish. I’d like you to sing on it. And if you sing on it, I’ll give you a little dram.
We were all delighted to do that. And that’s one of these moments where you want to pinch yourself. Because I’m standing there with McCartney.
We’ve all got our headphones on. And we’re all singing Mulligan Tire. I kept looking at him.
I was just overwhelmed. This is my hero here. And I’m singing on one of his songs.
It’s the kind of thing you dream about. Mulligan Tire On me strolling in from the sea My desire is always to be here On Mulligan Tire Far have I travelled And much have I seen Dark distant mountains With valleys of green Past painted deserts The sun sets on fire As he carries me home to The Mulligan Tire Mulligan Tire On me strolling in from the sea My desire is always to be here On Mulligan Tire The members of Pilot had joined Alan Parsons in the making of many project albums. David Payton played bass on every Alan Parsons project album up to 1986’s Stereo Tommy.
David was simply everywhere. In the mid-80s, he also played on both Andrew Powell’s Best of APP and the Ladyhawke soundtrack. In addition, David was a member of the short-lived band Keats.
Other credits include bass and backing vocals for several albums by Rick Wakeman. From 1985 until 1995, David worked as both a studio and live band member for Elton John and was included on his performance at Live Aid. David says this period of time was probably the best in his life.
That was fantastic. I was just getting phone calls from record companies saying, you know, can you work with this person or that person? Yeah, great. And this is what happened with Elton.
It was the office that phoned me up and said, are you available on, say, the 14th of March? Yes, I’m available. Can you be at the studio at 12 o’clock? OK. And then the last question from me was, who’s the artist? And she said Elton John.
And I thought, oh, wow, I’m a huge fan of Elton John. I’m going to enjoy this one. So that was fantastic to work with.
It was a bit like being in Disneyland for three years. I kind of get that. Getting to work with the people that you have admired most is really a privilege, isn’t it? Oh, it’s something else because I get starstruck as well.
And to work with Elton and, you know, I was in the studio just talking to the drummer and the drummer looked to my right-hand side and I looked over and there was Elton at my shoulder. You know, it’s just a strange experience when all the time you’ve seen somebody on the telly and then suddenly he’s there right beside you. And he was so… And was he good to work with? Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. Actually, the drummer had a cup of coffee, went out of the studio and I went over to set up my bass guitar and Elton sat down at the piano in the studio. There were just the two of us and he started playing a chord sequence that I didn’t recognise but I thought, oh, here we go.
He wants to test me to see how good my ear is. So I played along with him and we played together for about 20 minutes and then he said, that’s great. He said, I think you’ve got that song.
Let’s record it. It’s called Nikita. And that was the first song I played with him and that’s how it came about.
So you’re on the recording of Nikita? Yeah, that’s me playing my fretless bass. Nikita is a cold Look all around the world You can roll around the globe Never find a warmer soul to know I saw you by the wooden soldiers in their robes With eyes that looked like ice on fire A cold and hard captive in the snow Oh, Nikita, anything of good feels to hold you Nikita, I need you so Now, you also worked with the likes of Jimmy Page. Oh, I know.
That was another surprise. That was the first time I’d worked with film. It was for the film Death Wish 2 and he had written the score for it.
I was invited to the studio and he said, we’re going to be working, you know, to the film. So everything was strict timing and whatnot. This piece has to be 35 seconds or whatever.
And he was very inventive. Had me doing lots of strange things with my bass guitar, like taking a penny out of my pocket and running it down the strings to create an eerie noise. So you learned a few new tricks from him.
Yes, I was doing things that I would never think, well, I’d never get the opportunity to work with such eerie music. You know, to me, it was pop songs. And here we are experimenting with everything.
Not only with the bass guitar, but the drums and his guitar as well. I think the last time we saw you in Australia, the 80s with Elton John, and then you came back in 2007 to do The Countdown Spectacular. How were you received then? Oh, fantastic.
I was amazed when the first concert we did, I stepped on the stage and I just started to sing. And I realized I could hear the audience. Maybe we were playing an audience of 10, 15,000.
I can’t remember. I sang Magic in January and I was really knocked out by the audience response. They seemed to know all the words, all the words to January, all the words to Magic.
And they really helped me out to sing the songs. And I could hear them louder than I could hear myself. So I just stopped singing and just let them sing the first chorus of the song.
I was overwhelmed with the reaction in Australia, but they knew my songs. You know, it was just a great thrill. Life gets me higher.
I can show, I can go, I can wake up the world. Little world. Gotta know you.
Gotta show you. Magic had been a hit and I started to write the song. And I had this verse.
Life gets me higher. I can show, I can go, I can wake up the world. It was because of the success of Magic that I wrote these words.
I thought the world’s going to hear this song, you know, and I was elated with that. And then again, my wife, she was reading a book and she says, the lead character in this book, her name’s January. Isn’t that a lovely name? I said, yeah, it’s a great name for a girl.
And again, I go to my piano and I sit down. All of a sudden it comes January. It happened to me all the time.
I hope you are sharing in the profits. Yeah. Another one that got stuck in our heads for the next 50 or so years and still there now that you bring it up.
It’s one of those earworms that just stay with you. Is that what makes a song last so long? If I knew that secret, I’d still be writing songs like that. Well, maybe I am, but nobody’s listening.
January. Don’t be cold, don’t be angry to me. You make me sad, come and see me.
Oh, January. Don’t go, don’t go. Time, it’s a fire.
Sunny day, fire away. English summers are gone. So long.
Gotta go. It was like being in Disneyland. It was just, you know, everything was really exciting.
Everything I turned to, it was just over the top and kind of got swept away with it all a bit. You know, we call it living the dream. I suppose that’s what we did with Pilot.
We lived the dream. Want to know what David didn’t enjoy? Hang in to find out.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. It was not all plain sailing for me.
I wasn’t comfortable with it at all. You know, I’m quite reclusive, so to be forced as the front man of a band, my face everywhere, I couldn’t walk along the street, I couldn’t go for meals, I couldn’t go to the pub, but, you know, it was all that kind of stuff that just interfered with the happy little life that I had before fame struck. But I adapted and, yeah, I began to enjoy certain aspects of it.
Love is a chance to get by, a time to maybe fly. The heavens above, that’s what I’m thinking of. Oh, love is.
Oh, love is. Love is a time to get high, touching the sky. Our feelings are fine, it’s yours and mine.
Oh, love is. Oh, love is. Love is something more than sunshine.
Love is, love is, love is. Love is gonna last a lifetime. It’s a great thrill for me.
I have a grandson, 13 years old, and he’s saying to me, Pops, you wrote that song, Magic. Everybody in school knows that song. I just think that’s such a compliment.
But one aspect that David absolutely didn’t enjoy was the fact that management had been continually ripping the band members off. In reality, the group disbanded primarily due to financial issues and conflicts with their management. David’s growing success doing session work also contributed to the band’s dissolution, but he never looked back.
He was steadily proving that he didn’t have to be famous to be successful. Well, yes, I suppose, especially with the role I took on as a session musician. You know, I was in the background.
And as I aged, people recognised me less and less and less. Which you like. Now I can go anywhere I want.
That suits me fine, absolutely. It was 1991 when David released his very first solo album titled Passion’s Cry. His second album, Fragments, came out in 96.
In 2003, the album The Search was released, which was a new recording of his lost album from 1980. In 2016 and 17, David, along with Ian Banson, were back live as band Pilot, primarily in Japan, the UK and Germany. And in 2019, David released a follow-up to a Pilot project, The Traveller.
With a few exceptions, David had recorded all the instruments himself. I’m rich and whose troubles are few May come around to see my point of view What price the crown of the king on his throne When you’re chained in the dark all alone Spare me my life only Name your rewards each break I make In 2020, David’s next solo album, Call 2020… We had the whole year off. I had been working with a singer-songwriter by the name of Albert Hammond.
When Covid struck, we stopped touring, so I thought I have to keep creative. So I just went in the studio, and before I knew it, the songs were just flowing. I don’t know where they came from, but before I knew it, I had 14 songs.
And I thought, I better put these out on an album. There were people saying to me, you know, get them out on an album. So that’s how it came about, 2020.
Tell me a little bit about Face to Face. It’s about Messenger and Facebook. It’s about all these social media.
And, you know, I get friend requests all the time. And sometimes they’re legitimate, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes it’s somebody wanting to get to know me better, or offering their availability, if you know what I mean.
And I’ve had that quite a few times, and I just thought I’d write about it. I was actually discussing things with my wife. We were talking about how we got together in the 70s, and it was in a nightclub.
There was no alcohol in the nightclubs back then. It was a coffee bar, and we just met on the stair and had a dance. And then I took her home, and that was it.
But now it seems that a lot of people get together by talking to each other on social media. Online, that’s right. You know, it can be healthy, but it can be unhealthy.
And this is me having a joke about what it’s like to get together with somebody, you know, when they want to meet face to face, rather than just talking on the internet. They don’t know how rich this life can be. They’re falling, heeding, they’re gone to all they can.
There’s a bit of a Latin feel to some of the tracks on the album too, isn’t there? Where does that come from? I’m not sure, but I’ve always written a song on each album, even on the pilot albums. On the first album, there’s another one called Lovely Lady Smile on the second album. And it’s been a theme throughout my life.
And I think, I must have a Spanish guide or something. Have you had a look at Ancestry.com at all? Where is it coming from? It’s strange. It’s in your blood.
Yeah, it’s just the rhythm, you know. I’m just fascinated by rumbas and things with good rhythm. And they’re easy to put together, if you know how, and they’re easy to put together.
And I just love that flavour. And I sometimes like singing a verse in Spanish, although my Spanish is not that great. I have been told by lots of friends that they think it’s my best work to date.
And it’s very varied. You know, there is the obvious pilot songs on there, or pilot sounding songs. But you’ll get that with my voice anyway.
And I’m lucky that my voice hasn’t changed drastically over the years. It’s still recognisable as, oh, that’s the guy from Pilot. So there’s a couple of songs with that influence that will always be with me.
And the reason for 2020 is not just the year, which was a negative year for most people. It was the focus of the 2020 focus I had while I was creating the album. I became fanatical in my studio again.
I was here every day. In fact, I’m still writing. I’ve just finished another song.
And I thought, what am I going to do with this? They keep coming. Because I’ve been out on the road working with other artists, and I do enjoy that, I’ve kind of neglected my own output. Although I’ve put out eight solo albums in the last 20 years or so, I feel like I’ve been neglecting it, and I needed to focus.
So the focus was definitely there from the moment I stepped in the studio and started to write the songs. ♪♪♪ 2021 saw Pilot, now David Payton and Ian Banson, release The Magic EP, featuring four completely re-recorded older songs. In 2022, the follow-up album, The Magic Collection, was released on which the EP tracks were also included.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ That same year, David Payton was approached by the manufacturers of the weight loss drug Ozempic to lend his song and voice to their TV commercials. It is hard to believe, isn’t it? I didn’t think that, you know, magic is still known. So it’s had that longevity.
They’ve been using it since 2019, and they were using session players to sing it. It wasn’t me originally. It wasn’t until 2023 that they contacted me.
Of course, I was well aware of it. It’s not publicised as much here in the UK as in the States, but of course, I was aware of it. My publishers let me know what was going on initially.
They put the proposal to me, and I thought, that’s a great idea. They said, we’ll take you to Abbey Road Studio 2. You can re-record it again, just exactly as you did 50 years ago. And the whole idea appealed to me.
I thought, it’s a great idea. And I went along with it, and I took my wife down to Abbey Road, where I had a fantastic day with the whole crew. They had the lighting crew, sound crew.
They had the whole lot there, and it was just a fabulous day. It’s quite overwhelming, really. It was for me, because we initially signed with EMI Records in 1974.
They owned Abbey Road Studios. And just when they said, right, we’ve got your dates ready, and I just could hardly contain myself. It’s amazing how your voice still sounds the same.
Delighted to hear that. It was a struggle. I’m used to doing a little warm-up before I sing, especially a song like Magic, because it’s way at the top of my range.
And with what was going on in Abbey Road, with the lighting crew there, sound crew, everything was going on, and I thought, where am I going to go so that I can do my warm-up? Because it’s quite an embarrassing thing to do your… …all this stuff. So I didn’t do my warm-up, and then I started to sing, and I thought, oh, my God, I’m never going to reach this. But as I sang it over and over a few times, my voice began to warm up.
And I must confess, it is a semitone lower from the original recording. I find it very hard to sing in the key of G now, so I sang it in F sharp. I played bass on the original recording.
I sang. I played guitar. So, you know, it was only piano and drums that I didn’t actually play.
So when you hear it, I’m sure it sounds very original, which I’m delighted. Looking to get back in your type 2 diabetes zone? Once weekly Ozempic can help. Ozempic is proven to lower A1C.
Most people who took Ozempic reached an A1C under 7 and maintained it. It was a little bit of a struggle, but, you know, you get there, especially the engineer that I used, he was just so spot on. And we do have technology where we can replicate these sounds as close as possible.
It’s every songwriter’s dream to write a number one. Although Magic wasn’t my number one, but January was. It was number one all over the world, except for USA.
The following year saw David publish his autobiography, Magic, The David Payton Story, and 2024 became the year David would unleash his latest solo album, Communication. The website davidpayton.com gives a lot of information. David, thank you so much for talking with us today.
Congratulate your wife for me too. She’s had lots of input into your career and deserves a pat on the back. That’s true.
I’ll do that. Talking to you has just been magic. It’s been a real pleasure for me too, Sandy.
Thank you very much. You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye.