‘Don’t re-run The Tube’

"DON’T do it,” is the advice to Peaches Geldof from music legend Jools Holland about trying to re-create The Tube on TV, 30 years after he hosted the Newcastle-made show with her late mother, Paula Yates.

“She’d be probably very good at it.

She seems good on television, but I think the trouble is that it’s very hard to re-create things. If you’re going to do it, then do something that’s new and different,” says Holland, who feels that Peaches will be making life hard for herself by being compared to her mother.

“It’s like when they re-made The Ladykillers. You can’t do that. It is what it is. I think The Tube is a bit like that. The sad thing about the whole thing is that when we made The Tube with Tyne Tees it made Newcastle the centre of the map. The Tyne Tees studios were enormous and there were loads of people and it was fantastic.

“Now the studio has been demolished.

It’s all been flattened and now Tyne Tees seems to be operating from a portable building or something.

The Tube was amazing because the studio was specially built for that show. I love Newcastle and have got a lot of friends there as a result of my time there,” Holland says of the five years he worked in the North-East from 1982.

“The show would be very hard to recreate because everyone is trying to save money. The reason The Tube was great was that it was a brand new thing with Newcastle as an important element. The other thing was that, for the first time ever, complete amateurs and hot-heads and loonies were put in front of a camera and made it up as they went along.

Since then, it’s opened the floodgates and everyone is doing it.

“But we were the first. Before then, everything was very professional, but we were making it up as we went along and it was all live.

Rather than people from the outside looking at the world of music it was people from the inside being chucked into it,” he says.

So who would he recommend as the Jools Holland-style co-host alongside Peaches?

“Well you’d have to get Jude Law or Brad Pitt, especially if you’re talking about a bio-pic of The Tube,” he jokes.

Holland brings his big band, plus Sixties singing star Sandie Shaw, to Middlesbrough Town Hall tonight and also plays Ripley Castle in July before returning in the autumn to Harrogate International Centre, York and Newcastle City Hall.

I take Holland back to his first recording session, in 1976, for punk band Wayne County (who later had a sex change and became Jayne) and the Electric Chairs. Did he ever dream of the career he’s had since then?

“Just mentioning that year and those names, what joy it brings to my heart. No, I think with young innocence, you start off not really aware of what’s going on. I think it’s only later that you can reflect on the way things have gone and worked out. If someone had said to the 18-year-old me then ‘oh what you’ll be doing 30 years later is leading a big band plus have your own TV show and touring’ I wouldn’t have believed them,” he says.

Holland is pleased that Sandie Shaw contrasts with his resident singer Ruby Turner “who is a great gospel and blues singer and that’s why I was very excited and kept nagging Sandie”.

“She never tours normally and you’ve got to remember she got into trouble in Russia, before The Berlin Wall came down, with the authorities because the young people were being seduced by the idea of wearing jeans and fashionable clothes. When we play her songs it’s like walking back into those times. She loves it because songs like Always Something There To Remind Me needed an orchestra backing and we can provide that for her,” he says.

His autobiography in 2007, Barefaced Lies and Boogie-Woogie Boasts, gives the impression that Holland is friendly with all musicians great and small – he’s performed alongside BB King, Chuck Berry, Max Wall, Sting, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Bono, Robert Plant, Smokey Robinson, Ringo Starr, Peter Gabriel, Fats Domino, Dr John, Lee Dorsey and Tom Jones.

He responds: “You’re serving the one god, which is the music. So you do your best for the music and egos and things disappear. But you don’t necessarily have to go round with a big cuddle for everybody you’re working with. Although I tend to.

With a big band it’s a big cuddle.”

So what kind of boss is he?

“Somebody was saying that to me on the TV show. I was doing a song on the piano with Gregory Porter, who is great new jazz singer, and we were rehearsing. I said ‘do you want to do it this way or that way?’ and he said ‘you’re the boss’ and I said ‘no, the music is the boss, we’re just both trying to obey’.

“That’s the first thing, you’ve got to realise. Music is the key, not you, and then things work out.

“I’ve read a lot of what Duke Ellington has written on this subject, of someone running a big band.

He felt if you have to bellow instructions at people, then it’s not working.

I’ve had the same people in my band for the last 15 years and when you have that you seem to play with one mind. I don’t have to shout and I’m not a jazz policeman… I haven’t got time for that,” he says.

Is he a man who worries about things like viewing figures for Later on BBC2 or his box office returns from constant touring?

“Not really, if I’ve got a record in the charts I look at that and as soon as you haven’t got a record in there, I’m not interested at all. I’m very sad.

You’d worry if no one was watching or attending the shows, but fortunately people do come and watch it.

“Later isn’t about the number of people who watch it. People who watch are of all ages, all over Britain and a complete mix. You’d never get it on commercial TV because it doesn’t sell to a particular group of people, apart from the group that like music.

“People say how do you do all this and the answer is I don’t. Lots of other people do that. The only way it works is to do lots of shows and to keep evolving. Even Count Basie didn’t start his big band, he took one over from somebody else, and my band has evolved.

“Last year we were in Australia, Argentina and Japan and all these places and it’s terrifying to look at a big queue at the airport and realise that the queue is your band.

“Next year it will be 20 years of Later and 20 years of the full big band and 30 years of me being on the television. I can’t believe all that,” he says.

Has he got anything special in mind for 2012?

“To make the most of it for a start.

I think we’d better do something,”

says Holland.

􀁧 Tour Dates: Tonight, Middlesbrough Town Hall, 8pm, £32.50.

July 16, Ripley Castle, near Harrogate; November 12, Harrogate International Centre; December 20, Barbican, York; December 21-22, Newcastle City Hall.

􀁧 Later Live… with Jools Holland, BBC2, 9pm Tuesdays and 1.20am on Saturdays. Jools Holland’s BBC Radio 2 show goes out at 11pm on Mondays.