The name ‘Western Star’ is synonymous with Rock n Roll in the UK, but founder Alan Wilson’s association with the music we love goes back much further than his studio’s founding twenty five years ago.

“As a kid, my parents were really interested in music as they were of ‘that’ era, you know, rock and roll was their thing. So I was surrounded by rock and roll as a kid, whether it be in the car on one of those eight track cartridge players, or at home. They’d play Buddy Holly records or whatever. I became a Teddy Boy in the 1970s as a teenager. When I was about fourteen, me and my mate tried to sneak into the local rock and roll pub on a Thursday night and pretended we were old enough to drink, and I can remember walking nervously across the town square in Bath and the door opened to the pub as a Teddy Boy walked out. The sound of Johnny and the Hurricanes came flooding out onto the street and echoed all across the square, and there was that guitar solo in ‘Rocking Goose’ by Johnny and the Hurricanes. At that moment I remember thinking ‘Fuck me, this is fantastic’.

Just being into that music in that era when it was the rock and roll revival, this would have been sort of ’75-ish, I guess, ’76… in them days, if you threw a stone in the air, it would land on the teddy boy’s head. There was that many Teds. It was a massive scene, you know. So to be part of that and to see it building up and to feel like you’re a part of a scene… it must have been the same a few years later for the kids who got into the two-tone, you know, the ska revival thing. It was huge. The Ted thing was huge in the 70s. When I look back, that is kind of a pivotal moment when I just thought, this is what I’m into. This music is really what I’m into. I like that stuff, and I still like other stuff. I’m a very luckily, broad-minded person with my music taste, but rock and roll is the core for me, and it always will be, and it has been since I was a tiny kid. That moment, I can remember just thinking, ‘it doesn’t get any better than this’.

The Ted lifestyle has come back into Wilson’s life in recent years in the form of a weekender.”It’s in Drayton Manor up near Tamworth, and it’s in November. It’s called The Teddy Boy Tempest. We’ve done a couple of Teddy Boy Tempests, and they went really well. Do you know those old Teds? They know how to have a good time.  The Ted events have been absolutely banging. And I really like those guys, and I think it’s pretty cool. They’ve stuck with it all those years, you know? So me and Dave Yates are putting on this Weekender, and with the lineup we’ve got, it’s incredible. We’ve also got a sort of surprise special guest coming as well, which we haven’t put [online] yet, but Teds are going to go mad for it when they find out.

I’ve got a lot of respect for that whole Ted scene and the fact that they just kind of… they just come out and support the bands. They drink like you’ve never seen! When the Psychobilly scene started, it was kind of anti-Ted because the Teds were telling us ‘You can’t wear this, you can’t do that’. So in my experience, the Psychobilly thing was kind of like, almost like a rebellion against the Teddy Boy scene. But you know what? when I go to gigs now – I go to a lot of Weekenders, Rockabilly Weekends, Psychobilly Weekends etc. – the Ted ones are the wildest. Everyone else seems to have calmed down a bit, but those Teds, they’re like, they’re fucking lunatics! They’re still loving it. They know how to live, they know how to have a good time.

I like doing the Weekenders, I like promoting and I like doing stalls at Weekenders, because that’s basically watching the live bands and selling stuff while chatting to people. I enjoy all that. I’ve tried to cut down in recent years on the studio sessions, because that’s the ‘intense’ part of what I do. So if I’ve got a choice of doing a Weekender where I’m having a drink and watching a few bands, or being cooped up in a small building with five blokes farting and coughing over me for a week? Easy choice!”.

Of course, The Rockin’ Roundup is the festival we mostly associate with Western Star. “Well, the Roundup I do with a friend of mine, Ian. Our philosophy there really is to give people the best possible weekender we can, for as little money as possible. That’s why it sells out pretty much every year, it’s because it’s a fantastic weekender for not much money. As I said, I do stalls at weekenders, I do twenty odd weekenders a year. Some weekenders it’s blatantly obvious to me that the promoter just wants to take money off people, and doesn’t want to give a lot in return. Whereas we’re not that money-oriented, we get off on seeing people have a great time.

The Roundup, wasn’t solely my idea, It was mostly Ian’s. So there’s this amazing venue, it’s on a farm near Western Super Mare, which is about twenty miles from me. A friend of mine, Ian Hibbert, who was drummer in a few bands back in the day, he got married and had his reception there at this venue. I’d been there previously, and I thought, ‘what a great place for a rockabilly all-dayer’. But it just stayed as an thought in my head. One day Ian rang me up and said, ‘I found this venue, I’m getting married there’. I actually couldn’t go to the wedding reception because I had the flu at the time. He said, ‘Why don’t we put on a Western Star all-dayer?’. His idea was to do a joint venture and put on all Western Star bands for the whole day. So I agreed and said, ‘yeah, I’ve been thinking along the same lines’. Then we thought, ‘well, if we’re going to do an all-dayer, let’s do a weekend. We also decided to broaden and not restrict it to just bands on my label. It’s been a roaring success. 

At the start it was a two day thing, now it’s a three day thing. We’ve doing it about nine years now I suppose, and it sold out pretty much every year. It’s become exactly what we wanted. We stand there now and we look at it and there’s five or six hundred people having a great time in a really special venue. Sometimes we say to each other, ‘We did this!’. That is worth more than money”.

When he’s not recording, somehow Wilson finds time to be part of Pat Winn and the Losers. “To be honest, I’m happier behind the scenes than on stage. So, I quite often take fifteen years off from playing live. This is my world where I am now, in the studio. I’ve just done about two or three years playing live with Pat. So, I’m in a band with my best mates, and they really are my best mates so it’s great. When I was in the Sharks, that was a different thing altogether. You were top of the bill being flown all over the world and it mattered if something went wrong! I really don’t miss that. But with this band I’m in now, we’re usually low on the bill, it doesn’t matter if we make a mistake, they’re a great band, no real pressure and we enjoy ourselves. We have a laugh. It’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant. We’re just doing what we want to do. We do quite a few covers live, like Buddy Holly and stuff. But, we’ve just done an album of our own material, which I’ve just released. 

I’d actually like to be remembered most as a songwriter. That sounds a little bit pretentious and I think it probably is, but I’ve always loved writing songs and I’m always up for any opportunity to write or to co-write. So a great thing about being in the band with Pat, apart from everyone in that band is so wonderful to work with, is that we’re all writing together. I really like the new album. 

I’m also in another project with Pat Winn called The Holloway Echoes. We’ve done four or five albums. In fact, we’re just doing a new album now. The funny thing is, there’s one song that I wrote a few years back for The Holloway Echoes, which has become almost a Ted anthem. In the Sharks, I made a career out of taking the piss out of Teds really, but it’s kind of gone full circle. And now I’m putting on a Teddy Boy Weekender!

These days I’m also trying really hard to retire. I’m kind of semi-retired at the moment. I’m doing a lot less than I was. It’s a conscious decision to do less, because I was doing eighty hours a week every week, and I have done for twenty years. So I’m now doing about forty hours a week, and that feels like I’m on holiday, to be honest. 

My philosophy is, it doesn’t matter if you’re into Psychobilly or Rockabilly or what ever. When you look back at the fifties, we all love that old stuff. Yeah, we like Elvis. He’s was all right. But what do we really love? We really revere those no-hit wonders. We really like Billy Lee Riley and so on. We really like all those little nuggets don’t we? All those people that weren’t on Top of the Pops, you know, or the American equivalent. Well I’ve created a vast catalog of no-hit wonders. One day, in years to come, somebody’s going to lift up that stone and look underneath and they’re going to say, ‘oh my God, look at all this’. That’s like discovering a whole new little universe, under that rock. That’s really what Western Star is, it’s it’s own universe. It’s a very long term strategy! You know, like if I was a record label striving for a hit record with big offices and big overheads, I’d need a hit record tomorrow. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in creating and acquiring credible catalog and I’ve got absolute belief that one day, probably long after I’m gone, one day someone, somewhere, is going to value that.”

With twenty five years of Western Star Recordings already available, there’s no doubt that that value will be realised for decades to come.

Kate Allvey

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