Welcome to a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. Hello and welcome to the show, I hope you’re doing terrifically well. There are a few bands that have left a mark on Australian music, quite like the Little and today I’m just delighted to welcome the band’s original drummer, Derek Pellici.
In this episode, Derek takes us on a fascinating journey from his earliest days discovering music through to the rise of one of the nation’s most successful bands and into the exciting new chapter that he’s enjoying today as a songwriter. It’s a warm, funny, honest conversation filled with some fabulous stories, remarkable memories and plenty of insight into a lifetime of music. I know you’re going to enjoy hearing from the rather enigmatic Derek Pellici.
Sandy, it’s lovely to be here. Thank you for having me. If it’s okay with you, are you happy to walk me back and tell me how it all started for you and where you first got your love of music? Absolutely.
Well, I’ll try and give you the potted version. I was born in London in 1953. We emigrated to Australia in 1961, 10 pound poms.
We came to Australia on a ship full of migrants, of course, and I think the deal was that if you wanted to go home in under two years, you had to forfeit and not only forfeit the 10 pound, but you had to repay what the original fare would have been or the total fare would have been, whatever it was in those days. So you were forced into two years tenure in Australia to see how it went. And I remember that as kids, we were pretty excited because we’d never seen a blue sky before.
My brother and I, it was wonderful. Never had any aspirations of being a musician. In fact, we only had a little transistor radio in the house.
Wasn’t a real musical family. But what happened was all of a sudden I heard that Tom Tom entry of She Loves You by the Beatles and my whole world changed. I kid you not.
It was like an epiphany. She told me what to say. She said she loves you and you know that can’t be bad.
She loves you and you know you should be glad. She said you hurt her so. She almost lost her mind.
But now she says she knows you’re not the hurting kind. She said she loves you and you know that can’t be bad. She loves you and you know you should be glad.
A few weeks later, my brother said to me, the Beatles are here in Melbourne. And because we were in Nicholson Street, that’s just a short walk into the city. And we turned right and there was an absolute wall to wall sea of people.
It was like a Berber rug of people. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. 20 minutes later, they came out onto the mezzanine and that was epiphany number two.
I kid you not. I cannot make more of this for what it did to my life. I saw the Beatles up there and I thought I’m going to do that.
You know, like John Lennon tells the story that he saw Presley. Well, a generational change. I saw the Beatles and went, that’s what I’m going to do.
And I said to my brother, well, ring goes little. I’m going to be a drummer. And a few weeks later, my brother bought me this drum kit and then I was off and running.
I don’t know if kids did homework, but I certainly didn’t. I just came home from school and I jumped on that kit and I played until dinner time. And then I played a little bit after dinner time before the neighbours yelled out, shut up.
Well, I was going to say, weren’t your parents upset with the racket you were making? My parents let me put the drum kit in their bedroom, not mine. So then I did my little thing like everyone does. You know, you play in one band.
My first band was called The Recital. I think the bass player got the name of the band from his mum’s hair colour packet that was on. So we were The Recital and we did one gig.
And then I joined a band from Adelaide who were quite well known called The Music Express. And they had a big hit with a song called Jack instead. In my last year of secondary school, we moved to an island called King Island and it had an open cut mine there.
And I thought that’s the end of my music career because this island has nothing. No radio, you couldn’t get television. I’d left school by this time and I said to my mum and dad, would you mind if I go back because I really want to pursue this music business.
And I’m still 16. Had you taken your drum kit with you to King Island? Yeah, I took my drum kit. We met a lot of interesting people on King Island and there were a family, three daughters who came straight from England.
These girls were so trendy. They were so Carnaby Street. Because they found the island so boring, they started to run their own dances.
So going back, my very, very first gig was playing along to records at this disco that they ran. Was like, you know, Wild Thing by the Trogs and all the songs of the 60s. That’s how most of us learned to play drums.
Playing the record, putting it on 33 if you had a 45, slowing it down. All the things that all musicians talk about doing. For sure.
Come on. I escaped King Island and I came back to Melbourne. I went into another famous local band called The Plum, who were a bunch of English guys, again, all very trendy.
They worked at a discotheque. So that was my first professional paid gig. They were going to record a song by Brian Cad and Don Moody from the group Marshall’s Portable Music Machine, which ended up getting recorded by Robin Jolly.
I met up with a guy called Kristen Barker, who was in a band called The Ash. They had a song called Avignon. Their claim to fame was they played on stage completely naked.
Did they? In those days. In those days. And the police didn’t come and drag them off.
It was unbelievable. I ended up going into The Ash and we recorded a song written by Doug Ford from the Masters Apprentices called Midnight Witch. It showed up the fact that my drum kit was really crappy and we just couldn’t get a good sound on it.
And when I listened to Midnight Witch now, I think, oh my God, I mean, it just sounded like sauce and licks, you know, it was really awful. From being a bit of a pop band, I kind of became a bit of a heavy rock drummer. And so I started to do a lot of filling gigs when drummers got sick, like that band Black Feather, who had a big hit called Bopping the Blues.
I remember working with Barry McCaskill and the bass player was Yark Harrison, who was in the most famous lineup of Max Samaritan Meteors. So Sydney started to introduce me to some seriously good musicians. And of course, it meant that I had to start lifting my game.
Can you describe the music scene in Australia at that time? Because that was when it was at its most vibrant, wasn’t it? Oh, look, the music scene was incredibly exciting. I think the two Australian acts that really had a big impact on me were Normie Rowe and the Easybeats, of course. There would be lunchtime concerts and you would see the Town Criers or, you know, you would see The Expression or, you know, I used to go see Izzy Dye.
I remember when we first went to America and we were talking to all the bands because they were saying, how did you guys get this good live, you know? And I said, well, in Australia, you actually get paid for playing at all these pubs and stuff. And I grew up playing in pubs. In America, I discovered, you often had to pay a promoter to play.
If you wanted to play Guzzaris on Sunset Strip or on the Troubadour, you often had to pay. The band paid the promoter so you could do the gig. Really? You’ve jumped ahead.
Let’s just go back a couple of steps and we’ll get back up to there. In 1972, you got a break with a band called Mississippi. Absolutely.
Well, what happened was Ash had folded. Here I am, 18, 19 years old. I’d met my future wife and I was working at a clothing boutique called The In Shop.
I just loved it. I thought, well, maybe I won’t go back to music. And then the most incredible thing happened was that Beeb Birtles came in as a shopper.
Beeb had been the bass player in The Zoot. Incredibly famous band in Australia. And he got talking to me.
He didn’t know me from Adam. And it came up that I was a drummer. And Beeb said to me, I’m going to join this band called Mississippi.
And he had the album that they did. He left it with me. Now, he could have taken the album and gone, but something made him leave the album with me.
I took the album home and it blew my brain. I had never heard an Australian band sound like that. The harmonies were incredible.
It was as good as America or Crosby, Stills and Nash. All the bands that we’d all grown up with, the Hollies, all the harmony bands. I thought these guys are incredible.
So I went for an audition with them. I walked in and they all had beards. So not only did they sound incredible and sound like an American band, they looked like the band, you know, up on Cripple Creek.
And so I felt like a real young punk with these guys. You know, they just looked so advanced and clever. The rehearsal went fabulously.
And so there we were, you know, I was in Mississippi. Wow. And as we all know now, Mississippi morphed to become Little River Band.
Yep. We went off to England. We got an expenses paid trip to be on the Fair Sky, which ironically… Was the same ship you came on.
You know, I got an invitation to the captain’s cocktail party and everyone in the band was saying, how come you’re the only guy that got an invitation? And I said, oh, his name was Rodolfo Pontanzoni. And I said, maybe it’s because I’m an awog, you know, maybe I’m Italian, you know, which was ridiculous. And I didn’t make that connection till years later, that it was because I’d been on the boat before.
And if you were a second time user, then you got invited to the captain’s cocktail party. But it wasn’t the same captain all those years later, was it? No, no, it wasn’t the same captain. But so we played and I always remember things by a song hallmark.
I remember we rented a Volkswagen van and we drove up from the dock stand there at South and driving up to London, which was so exciting for me to come back to England after all those years of leaving. We put the radio on and Bad Company’s I Can’t Get Enough of Your Love was on. And of course, I knew Bad Company morphing from Free and I loved Simon Kirk.
And I looked at the band and I said, we’ve come at the wrong time. These guys are incredible. And little did I realize that not only was that kind of wrong, but it was right because punk had just hit.
And a band that sounded like an American harmony band just wasn’t the right time. We played some gigs around London and stuff. But, you know, I remember going to the 100 Club or, you know, whatever in Oxford Street and seeing people slam dancing and spitting at one another and everything.
And it just wasn’t the right time. So we did some gigs for a few weeks and then we broke up and we all kind of just disbanded. I went to work at a boot shop that was selling boots to Gary Glitter and all those guys, high platform boots.
Once again, you know, always in disperse with a little gig back in retail and sales. And in this time, Beeb and Graham had met with Glenn Wheatley. He was a road manager for the New Seekers.
Glenn had come to see one of our last gigs and he came back and said to us, you know, you’re a five piece band. I think you need a lead singer. And we went, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
So Graham and Beeb sang with Glenn Shorrock and said it was the most incredible experience they’d ever had.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. Glenn was singing background vocals for Cliff Richard and doing various background vocal gigs and was just starting to think about coming back to Australia again.
So once again, you know, it was all fortuitous. I hadn’t met Glenn at this stage. So we all said, we’ll meet back in Australia.
And Glenn Whitley said, I’m going to manage a band from Australia, but we’re going to take America by storm. This time we planned it out much better. Sometimes I think I’m just a crazy cat Running around, don’t know where it’s at Getting confused with my way of life That’s when you say, now you cut that guy right now Right now You keep this flame, I have a light in me And with this cat, it’s curiosity That keeps me hanging all night and day Surprisingly, again I hear you say, yes, why Once again, just like when we arrived in England and I thought that I Can’t Get Enough of Your Love was kind of going to elbow us out a bit.
We arrived back and everyone was talking about this band, The Skyhooks. And The Skyhooks were just huge. And I thought, can we fit in here? So ironically, Kristen Barker, who had been the lead singer of The Ash, his brother Adrian was a promoter and Adrian had a gig.
And that was the first gig that Little River Band played. We were still working as Mississippi because Glenn joined us, me, Graham and Beeb in reality. And then there’s that famous story in the press where we were driving down, I think we were going down to the Ocean Grove and Glenn looked out the window and saw the Little River exit.
We were driving down in a car, obviously. And I think he had his acoustic in the back and he was mucking around trying to use Little River as a song title. And then he said, I’m in the band now.
It’s not Mississippi. We should have a new name. And so we christened ourselves Little River Band.
With every day of my life I can surely see now where I am going And every day of this year I can clearly see I ain’t wasted any time No time at all With every day of my life I’ve tried so hard to keep it on go How can I keep it on go But there are people around Keep on dragging me down to the ground Drag me down With every day of my life I am slowly growing tired of excuses And every question I raise Getting left in the hurt and abuses From your mind Your mind at all Out of my head We probably did a half dozen gigs or more as Mississippi, but then the Little River Band moniker took over. And did it take over or what? Because you ended up scoring 13 top 40 hits in the US. You were Australia’s greatest export ever.
Yep, it was amazing. It was just amazing. We were like kids in a toy shop, you know.
The thing that hit Americans was our accents. They really felt that because we had an accent that we spoke a foreign language. Oh, look, I love the Americans.
I know that sounds like a put down, but they did. They thought, where are you guys from? And, of course, on all of our road cases later on when we got really famous and had road cases in our own production, we had Little River AUST and everyone naturally thought that was Austria. And so I’m quoted as saying that we forged this eight-lane highway into America, which is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but we were the first band in, you know.
Way before INXS, way beyond Men at Work or Air Supply, you know, we were in there and it was wonderful being the first guys in. I think we drove past a McDonald’s sign before they’d even sold 100,000 burgers. That’s how early we went into the States.
When you received Will right from the get-go? Right from the get-go. And you know, the way that happened, which is folklore, is that an American DJ from Jacksonville, Florida had come to Australia and I think he’d met a girlfriend and she turned him on to all the Australian music at the time. And he took back our first album with a batch of Australian albums and started playing It’s A Long Way There as the Toilet Break record, you know, as you did back then.
And Sandy, it just grew from there. I mean, this was years before music television, MTV. And so what we did was we were out on the road and we were like a ping-pong ball in a ping-pong machine.
Our agent would call us up and say, you guys are breaking on Nashville radio. And so we’d try and hustle up a gig and go down to Nashville. We were open for Linda Ronstadt in Nashville and then we’d open for the Doobie Brothers in Chicago.
So we were ping-ponging around. We just kept extending the tour because the best way to get your records played was to keep going to these towns. Look, it was so tiring.
People say, oh, it must be great to be a rock star, you know. I remember talking to my doctor years and years later and they said, you guys really bashed your bodies around. You know, we were sitting in station wagons and we were driving hundreds of miles, sometimes getting there just in time to open for somebody at a stadium, having a shower and running on stage.
And then, of course, you’d be straight out of there onto the next one afterwards. Yeah, another overnighter on the bus. For me, it was like going to university because just about every night without exception, it would be a major five-star act that we would open.
I’d stand at the side of the stage and watch everybody. I’d watch Steve Miller Band, Fleetwood Mac, Santana, Hart. We were like kids in a toy shop.
It was amazing. I just wanna say that I’m feeling fine I’ll be home on a Monday Somewhere around noon Please don’t be angry I’ll be back with you real soon I was hoping to catch a glimpse Of a man from Memphis They told me that he had gone Never leaving a trace I just could never get involved With those one-armed bandits But sure I’m craving for the smile on your face As we got, you know, we got even better and better. Sometimes the plug would get pulled out accidentally.
We’d finish the show to a rapturous applause and we’d get called back for an encore and the power would go out. Because the main act was already a bit peed off with how popular you turned out to be. Yeah, well, we shared the same publishers.
As things got more important, you know, and we got bigger, I think Christine McVie mentioned to the rest of the band, you know, like, have you guys been out there and seen what we’ve got to follow? So that was just so flattering for us, you know. It was wonderful. What was your favourite song that you liked to play most? Oh, probably Lonesome Loser.
There are songs that just stand out, even at the rehearsal stage. I’m not the first to say, it’s a well-worn cliche, but a great song really should work with a voice and a piano or a voice and a guitar. Obviously, there are exceptions to that.
You know, maybe Billie Jean by Michael Jackson doesn’t work on an acoustic. But, you know, when you’re talking about the kind of songs that the Eagles write and we wrote and America wrote, so Lonesome Loser was a song like that. Cool Change was a song like that.
Surprisingly enough, Reminiscing was like pulling teeth. Really? Graham is the kind of guy, you know, he’s an exceptional songwriter and Graham hears everything. The difference between Graham and Glenn Shorrock was Glenn really required the band to deliver the formation of the song for him, whereas Graham pretty much knew exactly what he wanted and sort of dealt out the parts and said, you know, give me this, elaborate on that, but give me this.
But with Reminiscing, he came in and we were playing it and remember that we cut most songs throughout our whole career. We never really cut with more than four people on the band track. Often it was just three.
Often it was me, a bass player and a piano or a bass player and a guitar. And so when you listen to Reminiscing now, it’s almost hard to imagine it in just that Spartan format. Friday night it was late, we got down to the gate And I was dreaming of the night Would it turn out right? Hard to tell you, girl I wanna build my world I’m talking about a lifetime plan Waiting for more Across the room It ended all too soon We kept cutting it and Graham said, oh no, so we’d change the piano player.
We’d bring in another session piano player and then he’d change the piano player again and we’d try it a different way and whatever like that. And I remember that I thought we pretty much had it after we finally found the band track and then all that layering. And then I’d go and take a three week vacation while they did the vocals because they were so meticulous with their vocals.
But I remember Graham calling me and saying, everything’s done on this song, but it’s still not knitted together. And so he said, bring your percussion in and let’s knit this together. And look, I think that there’s a big difference to percussion and drums.
I think that they’re unto themselves. So I came in to see what I could do for Reminiscing and got some congas set up and found a pattern and Graham said, that’s the verse pattern, that’s great, that’s great. He said, just keep playing.
So I kept playing and it worked through the chorus and it worked through the bridge and everyone was leaping around in the control room and Graham said that that last overdub, the congas, and I still to this day think they’re a bit loud in the mix. The congas are quite loud in the mix of Reminiscing, but that knitted it all together. Hurry, don’t be late I can hardly wait I said to myself when we’re old We’ll go dancing in the dark Walking through the park and reminiscing Probably one of the two ultimate thrills of my life was working with George Martin, the Beatles producer.
When you think about the Beatles were the band that started it all for me, I mean really started it all. And then to get work with their producer, I remember when he flew out to see us and he came into the dressing room and George is dressed impeccably with a double-breasted blue blazer and everything. It was just unbelievable.
A couple of weeks later, he agreed to do the recording and going to the island was absolutely amazing and working with George for six weeks. And what I learned through that, really it was drummed into me, was the importance of a song, the importance of playing for a song, not overplaying, because George had worked with that. And George also taught us that the first thing that you come up with for the song, the first groove, it might be a shuffle.
And he told us the story, I think it was Please Please Me, John Lennon had brought in and he wanted to do it like running scared, like one of those typical Roy Orbison songs. Bum, ba-ba-ba-bum, ba-ba-ba-bum. It was probably George Martin who suggested, let’s do it up-tempo.
We learned a lot from George, even though we looked back and there was a bit of disappointment from us and from the record company, because we were all thinking, this is going to be our Hotel California album. But I think we let George down because we were ill-prepared for Montserrat. I don’t think we went there with a good bag of songs.
And also the whole tension between Glenn Shorrock and Graham Goble was starting to manifest on Montserrat. So we weren’t happy cowboys on Montserrat. We did some great things on there.
There were some good songs and there was some great stuff that we did. The acapella vocal thing was good, but it was too late. The band was crumbling at the edges.
You left the group in 84. You moved yourself to LA. Then you started doing a whole lot of different session work.
You did rejoin LRB in 88 for the opening of Brisbane’s World Expo. And as you’ve already told us, that also featured Glenn Fry of the Eagles. Did you regret ever leaving at that time? Or was that a decision that you still stand by? You know, my biggest regret? No.
And my wife says to me, we shouldn’t have regrets, is I didn’t start writing music or songs sooner. I really do, because the only thing that I showed any interest in when I was at school, I was a terrible student. I wasn’t a dummy, but I just didn’t want to pay attention.
I wrote a song recently with words to the effect that the sky outside was more interesting than the lesson. And, you know, I’d just daydream and look outside and many a blackboard duster would hit me in the head. Wake up, Pellicci, you know.
But the one thing I was good at was literature. I loved it. And when I was in my last year on King Island, we actually had an English literature teacher that walked around with a robe and stuff, you know.
And when I went into his office to say I didn’t want to continue on next year at school, he said to me, please don’t give up the literature because you’ve got a real knack for it. So this is what I said earlier about I thought my thing was drumming. Now, it could have just as easily been literature.
But when I got into drumming, I just let it go. Let it go, of course. I continued writing.
I always wrote, usually funny, silly five line. I could always come up with a silly limerick about a situation. But I stopped writing seriously because I’d always be writing things in my book when I was a kid.
But I just completely stopped. And I remember one occasion when we were doing the Net album with John Farnham, the first one we did with John and the only one I did with John, I remember I was sort of saying to Beeb, I think this lyric could be better. And he sort of handed me an A4 pad and pen and said, give it your best shot.
And I didn’t take him up on it.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. When did you start writing songs, Derek? Well, when I went to Los Angeles in 84, I met a guy called John Capek, and he said, go home and knock out a couple of lyrics and come back after the weekend.
And I went back with three lyrics that I’d worked really hard on, and he wrote a song to one of those three lyrics. So that got me rolling. So then, the band started to record, and I came back with a bunch of songs and presented them for that first Little River Band album.
And even though one got rejected, I wrote a song called The Rhythm King. Music on the radio Glowing in the darkest head Before it settled in his heart Loving was like that rain From that moment, 88, when I started to write, I found it very hard to sit down and write that emotional kind of song that is a great love song. And then when the band folded for the last time, I kept up all of those writing collaborations.
But I always felt like I wasn’t giving the melodist what they were looking for. Because if you want to just be a writer, love songs are your bread and butter. I was writing songs that would have been good for XTC.
I was sort of a punky kind of writer. I wrote about unusual things, and I almost felt like I was being denigrated for not delivering the kind of lyric that was a hit, inverted commas, lyric, you know. More and more, I got discouraged.
And so a couple of years before COVID hit, I thought, yeah, look, I’m done with this. And so I thought, I’m going to give this away. So I just became a bit of a sloth.
I became a real recluse. And I just sat at home and started collecting CDs and hanging around op shops and exercising a lot more because I thought, I’m getting on now, Derek. Get fit again.
And then ironically, I just got this buzz one day to write. And then two of these guys introduced me to AI. And literally, the light went on, the penny dropped, all those cliches.
So I thought, I’m going to check this out. So I checked out AI. I literally punched in some lyrics I’d written.
And Sandy, it was epiphany number three. I just couldn’t believe what this gave me. And I thought, gee, I’m going to get some flack for this because everyone’s unhappy with AI.
But I didn’t realize how much flack I was going to get when I finally, my son said, come on, you’ve got to do your own record because you can do it all now. As I said, I’m not a great guitar player. So when the first album went up, I had people contact me and say, oh, look, the lyrics are brilliant.
Why didn’t you use Australian musicians? And I thought, well, Little River Band had a half million dollar recording budgets at the time, which was a lot of money in the 70s. But I thought, if I’m going to do something, it’s got to be as good as Little River Band. Not for my public, but for me.
I’ve been off the scene for 30 years. And if I’m going to come back with something, it’s got to be great. I saw no reason to make an excuse of why I wasn’t using AI because, Sandy, I can say with no disrespect to the band, that I think my music sounds, sonically, every bit as good as Little River Band.
And I’m so proud of what I created. But also, someone said to me, we’d never have to buy a book biography of you because your whole biography is right out there on your album. And I said, it is.
It’s everything that I’ve been writing about my whole life. Now I can just put it out there. I’m not waiting for someone to say this is a hit or where’s the love song? I’m just putting it out there where Derek Pelleci is in 2026.
Sport doesn’t do a thing for him He can’t see one valid reason In cheering for competitors Who frequently get beaten And he knows you’re out there thinking Support through thick and thin But they’re the ones with boots on They should learn to play to win He’s that one in a million Who goes against the grain Forms his own opinions While the rest all think the same The extra benefits That flying solo brings Like soaring high through empty skies Because no one’s clipped his wings What really disappointed me was that, I shouldn’t name names, but one writer who writes for a weekend paper, Joel got in touch with them and said, my dad’s put out an album, it sounds fantastic, will you review it? And he said, it’s not a political decision, but if it’s done with AI, I can’t review it. And I thought, well, that is a political decision. The album’s called Welcome to the Human Race.
Why is it called that, Derek? Well, I’d written a song in the old way of writing. I’d literally write a poem. I’d send poems off to my co-writers and I’d sit patiently waiting for an email to come back.
Will it turn into a song? And I never lost that excitement. It was great to wake up in the morning, it’s come back with a lyric sheet, and it’s a song, and it was fabulous. And on this particular occasion, I was thinking about where the human race is at right now, and I thought, modern times are not going to help us.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s the 17th, 18th, 19th, or 20th century, 21st century, we have to be loving as a body of people on this earth. And so it was like, wake up, people, welcome to the human race. A song usually comes to me as a title, but sometimes there’ll just be that one line that will come to me, but the lyric might take two weeks.
Because another thing I learnt from Glenn Frey, they were living either here in Henley when they first went to LA, were either living above or below Jackson Browne. And they could hear him composing all day, in between breaks of putting the kettle on and making tea. And they said, this guy would just work at it and work at it and work at it.
And we’d think, that sounds great. And the next morning, he’d start over again with a new chorus or a new verse. And I got a lot from that.
And in fact, I even wrote that into one of the songs on the first album. Those great songs are not written, they’re rewritten. And so what I do now is taking on board what George Martin had taught me about never be happy with your first draft, because something better might be hiding there.
And now I do this all the time. Spotlights, border fences Civil rights, meat defences Student protests, flags unfurled Modern times won’t save the world Shaking hands, shared distrust Shifting sands, homes crushed Tainted water, ocean winds Modern times won’t save the world We knew that this was on the cards These solar farms and electric cars Wind turbines and metal drums And praise be to our mobile phones I think a quote from Billy Joel was, I hate to write, but I love to have written. And if you’re a composer or a book writer, no one knows that feeling.
When you think you’ve come up with something, it is so great, but then you have to sleep on it and come back the next morning or the next couple of mornings and say, could I use better words? And John Boylan, who was our producer for all of our most successful records, wonderful producer, he calls great words $10 words, and he’s got great sayings. He was the first one that taught me less is more, little sayings like that, which, you know, they’re cliches, but they mean a lot as a drummer. I live by that, that less is more.
You know, I’ve often gone in and done, in the early session days, I went in and replaced drummers on tracks because they were doing too much. They were stepping all over the harmonies. They were stepping all over the melody.
And I’d go in and it would be, oh, here comes Mr. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Are you still drumming to that? Oh, no, look, I think about drumming now. When I see Ringo out there doing it and poor old Charlie Watts, who were two of my heroes when I was young, when Charlie was still playing, I thought, how do they do it? And I think it was David Briggs from Middle River Band, our guitar player, who said to me, they never stopped doing it.
I stopped doing it. You know, I used to have bigger biceps than this. Look, I think about it.
There is often talk of a reunion of Little River Band, which is getting more and more impossible now as we get older. And Glenn’s not well lately, Glenn Shorrock. But I think to myself, look, I reckon I would need three months at least to get in shape.
To get fit, drum fit. Yeah, I’d have to get drum fit. But honestly, Sandy, I don’t miss it.
You know, I feel it’s very rare that the Beatles find the Beatles, that the Rolling Stones find the Rolling Stones, that Fleetwood Mac find Fleetwood Mac. It only happens once. And so I thought, look, I’ve done Little River Band.
It was a fabulous band. When we were on, we loved one another. We were like as tight as brothers.
When we were off, it could be pretty, you know, watch out. We never got the fisticuffs. I’ve been there and done that.
And can I also add that I don’t think I’m the kind of musician who is a gymnastic performer. I’m a drummer that chose drums as the addition to an overall sound. My contribution to music was what drums could do for the music.
So I’m not the kind of guy that has to go and play boogie woogie in a pub or forever be in a band and play. I don’t miss playing, but I want to make that quite clear that it’s not ego that keeps me out of playing with different bands. It’s that I just don’t think I’d get the total experience.
It’s got to be that total experience for me, not just, well, I’m drumming and that’s good enough. Look up here Take time to make time Make time to be there Look around Be a part Feel for the winter But don’t have a cold heart And I love you best You’re not like the rest You’re there when I need you You’re there when I need I’m gonna need you And a lady turned up She made me think now she’s gone And I’m on my own And a love song is coming to my mind So lady Let me take a look at you now You’re there on the dance floor Making me want you somehow Oh lady I think it’s only fair I should say to you Don’t be thinking that I don’t want you Cos maybe I do You’ve also reinvented yourself meanwhile too. Now this is the third coming of Derek Pellicci as a songwriter with his own album using modern technology.
Well yeah, I’ve done this with A.I. I want to be open and honest but don’t discount the amount of work that’s gone into the arrangement and you only get back what you put in and I work very hard on it. I must also give Glenn Shorrock credit. Glenn Shorrock taught me when I first started writing how words flow off one another.
Like the syllable that you come off he said, Derek, the difference between your poetry and lyrics is that I’m going to sing them. And so don’t get me tongue tied here. And so I learned from Glenn words to use.
And when you think about the amount of words that are in a lyric there’s a lot of words that have got to roll in and out of one another. Warren isn’t pompous He’s strictly working class Five days at the factory On the weekend mows the grass At the boozer he is famous For claiming that his glass is always empty Bleeding empty Warren drives a motor That is nearly twice his age The engine’s always boiling And the gearshift won’t engage He fills it full of petrol But according to the gauge it’s always empty Bleeding empty Back in time when everything was full Even Phil Collins, one of the most famous and incredible of all drummers on that famous song where the drums go bum bum bum bum bum all the beginning of that song is a little drum machine bum bum bum bum bum And so I thought well I’m being honest and saying I’m using AI but will everyone out there that’s using pro tools and technology to clean up their vocals and repair their out of time things are they being honest and writing on their album oh I used pro tools on this to tune my vocal no they’re not you know so I don’t often get a bit miffed but I did, I got a bit miffed I don’t think Derek Felici that you’ve got anything to be apologetic about it’s a great album and we’re very excited that you’ve reinvented yourself and that your passion remains for music and continues to grow I thank you so very much Congratulations for all your successes both in the past and for what’s going to come in the future too Well I thank you very much Sandy it’s been my extreme pleasure chatting with you at last Cause it’s a beautiful day You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye It’s a beautiful day That you’re gone away It’s a beautiful day