The following is a mini interview I performed with Captain Sensible himself via email 6 Aug 1998:

"'Women and Captain first' started as an unlikely partnership for a punk guitarist and a synthpop merchant but my bird [girlfriend] Cursty had been playing New Musik non-stop in the car and I found myself digging the production noises and atmospheres so we went along to one of their gigs and I asked him if he'd produce some tracks for me. Surprisingly he said yes and so with no budget available we started off in cheapo studios where I was forever badgering Tony to bung on his 'trademark' submarine noises and stuff and we all got on great. Then his dodgy manager found us a nice record deal with A+M so we ended up finishing the record in flashier studios. We had some hits from that album and recorded a second called 'The Power of Love' which was a little more experimental but still commercially sucsessful.

"It was a lot of fun being a 'pop star' for a couple of years but showbiz is a notoriously fickle business and after a couple of flops the label gave me the boot and I went back to doing noisier stuff with my own band (Punk Floyd) and the Damned.

"Tony's a great bloke - likes a beer, has a good sense of humour and is a genius of pop though he unfortunately went right off the 'p' word in a big way by the time our recording sessions were coming to an end. A GREAT shame... cos he was bloody good at it ! [the 'p' word (unmentionable to Tony around 1986) was POP]."

'Cursty' [Captain's ex-girlfriend] sent me this story 30 March 2002: "Did you know how the Captain met Tony, and why? I used to have a good friend called Charlie Harper, from the UK Subs. He gave me the New Musik LP "From A to B" and from then I was playing it everyday, at home, in the car, driving the Captain mad. In the end he began to like it and I was asking him to contact Tony to get him to produce him, because I thought, he is a great producer. I particularly liked the idea of using few and simple things to make a great and full sound. And when I´m determined to get something, I get it. So they got in touch and Tony started producing. I remember one time, I think it was the Old Barn Studios, I was playing tennis with Rob Fisher and Tony was doing "Happy talk" in the studios. I remember him using a Fairfield [Fairlight??] computer, then there were only 600 of them in the world, the first music computer. Captain was somewhere else and Tony asked him to come in and sing the track. Cap had no idea, that he had recorded it, and later on, at Top of the pops, he couldn´t even do the miming, coz he never learned the lyrics. His mouth was moving at the wrong times to the music. Very funny. Another time we where in Whales at Rockfield studios and it was 4 o´clock in the morning, when suddenly there were noises coming out of the monitors, even though no one was playing. Very spooky. Eventually they found out that it was coming from the reverb box, which was burried in the field somewhere, and "Bad Manners", who were also recording there, kept taking trips and were walking about in the fields. Yes, it was funny times with old bruiser Tony. (He hated to be called bruiser, they used to tell everyone who didn´t know him, that he was a very dangerous boxer, and bruiser was his nickname in the ring. Because he looked so harmless, which he really was, everyone was always confused and suspicious and gave him strange looks.)"

Copyright (c) 1998-08-06 Captain Sensible and Jonas Wårstad.

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