Out of the Blue

Now the Bishop Auckland-born producer talks to Viv Hardwick about finding time to release his debut album, Gold, which is out next month.

MIKAL Blue is just about to release the debut album of a lifetime, which is not bad for a Bishop Auckland born and raised pop producer who has spent the last 20 years guiding the careers of others in the US.

"The album is important because some of the tracks date back to when I was a kid in Bishop Auckland. So it's spanning my whole musical life," he says, laughing about standing on the threshold of becoming that rare entity, a pop star from Bishop who was once known as Michael Waggitt.

"It all started back when I was 14 and got my first guitar and, by 16, I was playing on the North-East club circuit with a young band who were venturing out in a treacherous area," he says of the his first bid for stardom with Quintessence.

"Everyone had trouble saying our name in the clubs, particularly the comperes," he says of the outfit inspired by Squeeze and The Beatles. He recalls playing an oldstyle turntable belonging to his mother with six Beatles' vinyl singles, such as Eleanor Rigby.

"From that point onwards I bought everything to do with The Beatles and although The Cure, punk rock and Bowie were fashionable I took a picture of The Beatles on my bag to school. When I got the guitar I got a Beatles songbook and learned it from cover to cover." He lived in Bishop until he was 19 and grew up next to Etherley Lane Primary School and went to Kings James I School "I try and go back there a couple of times a year," Blue says. He moved his parents out to his Californian home town, just outside Los Angeles, in the mid-1990s. It's a little English-looking area called Thousand Oaks, where he became a US citizen to get his family a green card. "My parents, Raymond and Thelma, moved out here in 1996, but I still think of England as my home because I've still got a lot of relatives and friends there. When I come back it feels like I've never been away. In Thousand Oaks they've pretty much banned palm trees so it looks pretty English here," he says.

His father still lives in the US, but Blue's mother died five years ago of leukaemia. He brought his girlfriend, Jennifer, over to Bishop Auckland during the hot weather in May. "She said Why don't we move here' but I told her that by some miracle it was like this because the weather wasn't typical. But looking across at the rolling fields from my old home, in Blagden Grove, towards West Auckland and Evenwood, it did look absolutely gorgeous."

He changed his name to Mikal Blue after being persuaded he wouldn't make it in the music world with a surname like Waggitt. "Then I found I had to change the Christian name as well because there was a musical arranger called Michael Blue and I set up my name on AOL because I couldn't use the other one, so it kind of stuck."

His closest brush with fame in the UK came when he reached The Band Of The North TV contest final. "I was devastated when we didn't win that, but we just 16 and up against established bands," he says.

His career switched to busking and playing in clubs before a yacht cruise organiser hired him as an entertainer. "I ended up working in a ski resort in Austria and learning to ski which led to a ski visit to Aspen, Colarado, and I ended up in 1988 playing in one of the top clubs and opened for acts like Billy Idol, Sheryl Crow and Allman Brothers.

In 1992/93 I moved out to California and built my own recording studio. I was lucky enough to work with the Offspring before they were big.

Three months later they were worldwide and that gave me the bug," he says.

After that he worked with Gary Jules (of Mad World fame) before seeing a contract with A&M Records come to nothing. Blue moved from Orange County to his current home and built another recording studio and became known as a producer and took a string of promising bands under his wing, including One Republic.

"In the last four years I've got nine artists signed to major labels at a time when it's really quite difficult to get a deal. The hardest part was hanging on to these bands after they were signed because the labels had the producers that they liked to use.

My biggest success as a producer was with Colbie Caillat who sold 1.6m albums in the US but she can't seem to sell an album in the UK.

"Living over here for 20 years means that I see a real difference where, in the UK, Amy Winehouse is the mood rather than the manner of the charts. I find that American audiences like rock songs with a simple format."

Two of the songs on the album, Gold, are dedicated to lost loves with Paige having particular sentimentality because it features a girl he once loved and lost just before she died.

His biggest battle will be getting the airplay required to launch the album. So far, he admits, his record company hasn't definitely agreed on a single but it may well be the album track, All I'll Ever Need.

Blue says: "After seeing Collbie become a huge success in the US and not flying in the UK I have no idea about the album. Hopefully someone will like it somewhere, otherwise I'll just have to keep doing what I'm doing as a producer. It's been a breath of fresh air getting out there again and remembering why I'm doing this in the first place.

"I'd love to just come and tour the UK as I'm 42 and kind of left it late to go back to being a performer. I've had three record deals over the years which didn't pan out for whatever reason. I've never let it get me down and just kept on doing what I'm doing. Ironically, it's taken my success as a producer to get these songs out there. I'm ready for anything at this point."

And he adds a quote to warm the hearts of journalists on the North- East's best-known morning newspaper: "I really did grow up with The Northern Echo, it was the only paper in our house and my father and I still check in on-line with the Echo's website. I'm quite excited that people might be checking me out there."

* Mikal Blue's debut album, Gold, is released on July 21