Pop-Culturalist.com

Frank Musker, Elizabeth Lamers, Jeff Hull, and Marty Walsh are the creative masterminds behind some of the biggest hits in music history. After years penning songs for other artists, the group decided to come together to form the supergroup World Goes Round, taking artistic control back into their hands. The result was a stunning collection that unfortunately never saw the light of day. That is, until now! Thirty years after these recordings were put into the vault, the stars have aligned for World Goes Round. Pop Culturalist caught up with Frank to chat about finally releasing their full-length self-titled album and how these songs have stood the test of time.

PC: Take us back to the beginning. How did you discover your passion for music?
Frank: I was struck by music from an early age. I was about eleven years old when the Beatles happened. It changed everything. Although I was born in England, my parents moved to Australia for a while. One minute you’re looked down upon because you’re a stranger and a foreigner from England, and then suddenly the Beatles happened and there was this whole explosion of culture. It was like that until I went to university.

I always say that I was lucky enough to get a good education, but the people who really educated me were the Beatles. They were like elder brothers. They were about ten years older than me, and wherever they went, we all followed. If they said all you need is love, that’s what we agreed upon. They were brilliant that way because they understood that they had a position of incredible responsibility because they were so popular. They were brilliant at taking the world without preaching, without being political, without getting too heavy about anything. They were wonderful at taking their audience with them. We went from “She Loves You” to “Strawberry Fields Forever” and everything in between. It was an amazing journey. That woke me up to music and made me want to be a musician.

Like every kid at that stage in life, we all had a band at school and it progressed from there. It never really went away. I was at university studying some obscure academic subject and suddenly I met my longtime writing partner, Dominic King, who was at the same college at Cambridge University. We started writing together, and within months, we had a publishing and record deal.

We had this parallel life going on with our studies at university, but also we’d keep nipping off down to London to make demos and records. So that’s how I fell into it. There’s a wonderful thing that John Lennon said, which is that life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans, and that’s what happened to me. I never ever thought in a million years that I would end up making my living as a songwriter or musician, but what a wonderful ride. How lucky am I?

PC: Speaking of that ride, you’ve had a lot of success throughout the years. When you look back, is there a particular moment that stands out?
Frank: Oh boy. A lot of years and a lot of moments. If you’re a backroom songwriter—which is what I was for a large part of my career, even though I wanted to be an artist and always wanted to be in a band—the thing that was working for us was writing songs for other people, which is a wonderful thing to be doing. There’s no greater satisfaction than writing songs and being creative. But at the same time, you don’t really have a lot of input into how the record is made or how the final product comes out.

Occasionally, you get one of those really great covers like when Chaka Khan did “Fate” and Arif Mardin produced it. I remember being in his hotel room and he put a Sony Walkman on my head and played me a rough mix of the track. I got so excited I drank half a bottle of vodka and had to be put in a taxi to go home. I wasn’t in good shape at all. [laughs]

But that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship with Arif, who became a wonderful friend and a great mentor and eventually ended up producing an album with Dominic and myself as the Dukes. That was in the early ’80s. For me, that was like going back to school. We had a good ten years of success in Britain and in Europe. We started to have success in America as well, but working with Arif on an album of ours was taking it up to a whole other level. We were working with the best musicians in the world. We had a say about how things came out as well, which we didn’t before. Before it was just you give them the song and then that’s what happened. You had to accept whatever came out. It was not always good.

But occasionally you get this transcendent version of something like “Too Much Love Will Kill You” where Freddie Mercury sings it and blows it out of the park. To me, that was a real highlight. But I’m lucky. I’ve been very lucky. There are many. I mean, looking back, you’re never satisfied as a songwriter. You always want more. You always want a bigger cover and another situation, and you’re always disappointed if your song doesn’t make the record. I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve had a good run.

This is the luckiest thing of all. World Goes Round is a most extraordinary story but the most unlikely thing that I ever thought would happen. We were making it up as we went along, and that’s what I love about it. We’re with a great record company in New York who let us do whatever we want. It’s such a weird fit because this company is a real hardcore rap, hip-hop label. We’re these West Coast hippies and an English guy. But it’s a good fit. They love the music, and we love them. It’s been a terrific run. We’ve got high hopes for the album.

PC: You’ve said in a recent interview that each of the band members in World Goes Round was seeing individual success, but you weren’t making the records that you wanted to make. How did that ultimately lead you to form this band?
Frank: Like everything, it was circumstance. I was living in Laurel Canyon. I bought a house there. It was pretty much a shack. It wasn’t some great palatial pad or anything. It was just one of the typical Laurel Canyon shacks from the 1920s. It had a huge California sequoia growing out of it. We built the recording studio around the sequoia. It was a very inspirational place to be. We had some amazing sessions there. We had the Seawind Horns. We had people like Randy Crawford. All sorts of people would come up and record because it was a nice place to be. Artists, they’re quite delicate creatures. If you wheel them into these big corporate places, they don’t always perform to their optimum. But in a place like that, it’s very safe and very organic. It’s a great writing place as well.

Brian May, Elizabeth Lamers, and I wrote “Too Much Love Will Kill You” there—literally in the studio staring at this great big redwood. It just felt like a really nice place to be. Elizabeth and I were in a relationship at the time. We were sharing the studio. When we weren’t using it ourselves, other people would come in and use it, so we would be interested observers in what was going on. That’s how we met Jeff Hull. Jeff literally walked into my front door one day on a session with somebody else, and I was making a cup of tea in the kitchen. Elizabeth came in and I said, “Have you checked out what’s going on in the studio?” She said, “Yes, sounds pretty amazing. That guy has to work with us. He’s really cool.”

And same thing, Elizabeth was working with John Denver and Linda Ronstadt. That’s how we met Marty Walsh because Marty was playing guitar with John Denver. They were working on the album together. They did a lot of touring together. So it came together very organically. We were friends. We hung out together a lot, and also Tommy Vicari, who was the producer and pretty much a member of the band as it is now. Tommy was working with people like Chaka Khan and Jeffrey Osborne. He fell into our orbit as well. We got the idea of “wouldn’t it be great to be our own vehicle?”

It’s nice to write songs for other people and to pitch them, but to be honest, there are so many layers of committees and A&R people, lawyers, and accountants. No disrespect to lawyers or accountants. There’s just a real lack of proper music people in the business now—certainly in the corporate world. But the great companies were always the small independents like A&M with Herb Alpert. It goes on and on and on. Atlantic Records was started by a couple of brothers who were the sons of a Turkish diplomat. They’re just fans of music. They love music.

Clive Davis—one of the greatest pickers of hits of all time, who I was very lucky to know and who recorded lots of our songs with lots of different people, Air Supply, Dionne Warwick, lots of different artists—he was a true song man. He didn’t really care who you were, where you came from, what you were about, or anything. If you had the song, you were fine. You were welcomed into the inner sanctum and treated with respect. He had a real regard for songwriters, which is not always the case. I think World Goes Round was born in Laurel Canyon, in that house, basically, which is why it’s such a big part of our story. The story has so many aspects to it. It was so nearly lost forever.

I was traveling with my wife in India last year and I got an email from Marty, whom I hadn’t heard from for years. There were a couple of MP3s attached to it. All he said was, “Hi. How are you doing? What do you think of these?” I wrote back and I said, “These sound great. I haven’t heard them in thirty years. What are we doing? What are we going to do?” So anyway, eventually, when we got back to England, we had a big Zoom call with everybody and said, “Let’s put them out there.” The record company wanted us to complete the album because the album was never finished. We had lots of material recorded, but we only had seven tracks. We needed another three tracks to make it a proper ten-track album, to make it a proper listening experience.

The kids now are the most educated generation about music in history because they’ve got so many different types of music to listen to and they’re listening to it all. They’re listening to bebop. They’re listening to classical. They’re listening to David Bowie. They’re listening to the Beatles. It’s really weird because the Beatles are nearly sixty years old, and you have these young kids who are just turning into teenagers who are completely fanatical about the Beatles. It’s exciting that people are that interested about music still because they’re no longer being swept up on the hype. They’re just looking at the music and they’re going, “I like it. I don’t like it.” That’s how it came together. The interesting thing about it from our perspective was that when the record company said, “We want you to make an album,” we went, “Okay, well, what have we still got in the vaults?”

There were a few songs. There were about five songs. We focused on three, one of which is the current single, “Put It On The Line.” That one just came out. It’s one that Marty Walsh and I wrote. We wrote it about thirty years ago, and it was about what was going on in the world at that time. There were the Iran-Contra hearings going on. The Berlin Wall was coming down. There were all sorts of strange things going on. We wrote it, but what’s really interesting about songs is they develop a life of their own, and this song has been sitting in the cupboard for thirty years. Suddenly, everyone’s very excited about the song because it’s so relevant to what’s going on in the world. I swear I haven’t changed the lyrics. The vocal of the master is the original vocal from the demo. We didn’t revocalize anything.

But of course what’s nice about it is that it’s not just a nostalgia-fest about 1989. This is World Goes Round 2020: recording, mixing, and everybody at the height of their powers. They’re as good as ever. They sound amazing. There’s something lovely about the fact that we just picked up where we left off and you know that Jeff’s arrangement is going to be stunning, Mary’s guitar playing is going to be off the scale, and Elizabeth’s singing is going to be out of this world. That’s the joy of being in a band. We’re all huge fans of each other’s works.

PC: Having recorded a majority of this album thirty years ago, how satisfying is it for you as a songwriter to know this music has stood the test of time?
Frank: It’s hugely satisfying. You never expected what you write to have any real shelf life at all. You hope. You’re casting bread on the water, to use a biblical allusion. You’re making it and you’re putting it out there. You hope for the best. But every now and again, if you’re lucky, the songs assume a life of their own and they go their way. That’s exactly what’s happened with World Goes Round. We thought this album was gone forever. Of course, we all remembered it. We all remember making it and everything else, but we all have such busy lives.

I honestly don’t think I’ve listened to any of these tracks in thirty years. I never listened to it and thought, “That’s so good. I wish that had come out or whatever.” There was nothing calculated about it. It was just a spontaneous thing. We all got caught up in the moment of it.

PC: If you had to select one song off the album that best encompasses who World Goes Round is as a band, what would it be and why?
Frank: You’re asking some difficult questions. I’m not going to dodge the question, but what I will say is that you’ve listened to the ten tracks. They’re very diverse. They all sound like us. We have some country, a bit of country rock, and there’s some out and out funk. There’s some very ’80s-type grooves. I think the one thing that characterizes this band is the groove. We’re about lyrics and groove. The lyrics are important in every song. However simple the song, the lyrics have to be absolutely what the band is about because that’s what we’re saying to the people. To be able to wear these clothes in the right way, we have to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. So the lyrics, they can’t just be filling up space. They’ve got to be meaningful.

From that perspective, I would say “Put It On The Line” or “Big House.” On the other hand, there’s a track that no one’s heard called “Great Talker” which Elizabeth sings which is so funky. Every time I hear it, I just want to get up and dance. That’s as much a World Goes Round track as the ones I mentioned. You need light and shade on a record. If you’re listening to a record as a whole experience, you don’t have to have ten head bangers or ten ballads because that gets amazingly boring.

So what we tried to do was we tried to structure the album like a live set. You come out all guns blazing. Then you have a moment of bringing it down a little bit. Then you build it up slowly again. Then you go out with a bang! The way a good live band would take an audience with them on a journey through a live set.

I think we’ve managed to do that on the album. It’s quite brave to close the album with your first single. When I showed them the running order that I suggested, people are going, “‘Big House’ is the last track on side two. What are you, mad? It’s your first single.” I’m going, “Yeah, but look at it in context. It’s not because we’re devaluing that song or anything else. We’re saying, ‘This is a great track to finish the set with.’” So it’s a slightly different mentality. Maybe people will buy into it. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll think we’re completely nuts. But you have to take risks, and that’s the beauty of being in a band is that you’re able to express yourself and take those risks. If people love it, so much the better. If they don’t, well sorry. You can compare so many different things, but in the end, you have to be yourself. The best thing about World Goes Round is that we’re all being ourselves one hundred percent.

PC: With the album out now, what’s next for World Goes Round?
Frank: Ask me in six months. [laughs] Honestly, I have no idea. We’ve been making this up as we went along. There’s been no serious marketing plan or anything else. We just did it as it came along. We’re lucky we’ve got a record company who let us do that. Of course, there’s a plan now. We’re going to release the record in Britain and Europe in January. There is a momentum that’s happening with the release of the singles and hopefully with the release of the album as well.

So suddenly we’re talking about a real situation rather than just a couple of hopefuls throwing it out there. Now that the album is finished and having listened to it a lot and seeing the whole package in the round, it’s a high-quality project. I’m very proud of that. Hopefully, it will find its audience. I can’t see any other reason why it would come back to life after thirty years if it didn’t have a little bit of destiny about it. There must be some element of fate about this.

The very fact that a month into making the record we were in lockdown, it suddenly worked immensely to our advantage because we had Zoom and WhatsApp. Tommy wasn’t going anywhere because he was locked away. He was locked in his studio. Tommy was so busy normally before lockdown. He had like three movies to do. The problem with World Goes Round was always that we were all just too busy doing other stuff. I hate to say that there’s an upside to the whole COVID crisis, but for us it was a real upside because it meant that all of us could focus on this record and give it everything we got. At the same time, it gave us something to do. It gave us a reason to wake up in the morning. I didn’t feel for one second that this crisis was affecting me personally because I was so involved in this creative project. For writers and artists, that’s all you need.

It was a blessing as well because it meant we had time and the space to get it together. If this happened in 2006, it would never happen because Zoom didn’t exist. We couldn’t have had the conference calls that we’ve had. I couldn’t have done the interviews that I’ve done. I’m just very grateful and very happy. If we get nominated for a Grammy, that would be fantastic. It would be amazing, but it would be the icing on the cake because the real satisfaction always when you’re writing or making a record is the work itself.

So to answer your question, the next step is we’re taking it step by step and seeing how the album goes. Then we have the UK and European release in January. Judging by the reaction so far, I have no reason to not feel optimistic. I hope that we’re in a situation where they’ll be wanting us to do television and live shows. But we’ve been very careful about that, simply because the central message is about this thing that happened in 1989. Now it’s evolved into something which is 2020 as well as 1989, so it has a little bit more presence about it. It isn’t just from the past, and hopefully, World Goes Round has a future. That’s what I would put my money on.

To keep up with World Goes Round, follow them on Twitter and Instagram.