As Eric Goulden concedes, the last few years have been rather a mixed bag. On the plus side, his most famous song, Whole Wide World, enjoyed yet another of its periodic leases of life. It was the first song he ever released, in 1977, one of a succession of classic punk-era singles that came out on the celebrated indie label Stiff. It didn’t make the charts but, thereafter, Whole Wide World simply refused to go away. It’s been covered by everyone from the Monkees to the Proclaimers to Green Day. It’s been translated into Italian and Finnish. And it has appeared on umpteen movie soundtracks – Will Ferrell sang it in Stranger Than Fiction.
This time, it turned up on a TV ad for travel company Expedia, starring Ewan McGregor. The commercial debuted during 2022’s Super Bowl, which was watched by 200 million people, with the inevitable knock-on effect: Whole Wide World’s streaming figures soared to over 16.3m on Spotify, 16m more than everything else Goulden has released in the intervening 46 years. “It’s fantastic,” he enthuses. “I mean, I could get very churlish and moan about it – ‘I’ve got all these other songs!’ And I have done in the past – ‘It was all downhill after that! I’m so much more than that!’ But thank God, because without it, I’m dead in the water. I love that I have it.”
On the downside, though, Goulden very nearly died, in an incident he has turned into something approaching a comic monologue, but which clearly wasn’t terribly funny at the time. He was battling long Covid when he went to visit some friends near his home in upstate New York and started feeling “freaky”. On the drive home, his wife and sometime collaborator, American singer-songwriter Amy Rigby, suggested he might be having a heart attack, but Goulden demurred. She drove him to hospital anyway.
“They’ve got an oxygen cylinder and a wheelchair,” he recalls, “and they’re going, ‘We’ve got a positive Covid test coming in! Suspected heart attack! Take him to room seven!’ They’re carrying around electrodes and jamming in needles and IVs. They did a Covid test – the equipment was like something you’d use for artificially inseminating goats, very agricultural. I thought it was so exciting: we’d been in lockdown for two months, nothing to do, so bloody boring. Now there’s people coming in to take my temperature wearing space suits! My heart was 100% blocked on one side, 40% on the other. They definitely didn’t think I was going to leave there alive. Then they asked me if I wanted to see a chaplain. I go, ‘Fuck off! That’s the last fucking thing I want!’ And one of them goes, ‘I think he’s going to be OK.’”
Three stents later, Goulden did leave hospital. At the age of 69, he has lived to make another album – Leisureland, his 19th – and to recount the whole story in a way that has me howling with laughter. As anyone who’s read Goulden’s hugely entertaining blog knows, this kind of thing is par for the course: it’s drily funny about everything from the brakes on his car failing while he was driving at 70mph to his old friend Wilko Johnson’s hair loss (“He went from loco black-haired Ken to slack-jawed punch-drunk boxer overnight”). In person, he’s a great raconteur, an apparently bottomless font of self-deprecating anecdotes delivered in a slightly nasal voice.
It’s a state of affairs aided by the fact that, all downhill since his debut single or not, Goulden has enjoyed a genuinely extraordinary career. He is, one assumes, the only person in rock history to have written a Cliff Richard song (the singer covered Goulden’s Broken Doll), been part of the riotous 80s Medway garage rock scene that spawned Billy Childish, and enjoyed a doomed spell working as an artistic consultant to the French ministry of culture, heading up a company called Solutions Créatives Artistiques Mediatiques, which, he notes, abbreviates to Scam.
He has written a vast succession of wonderful songs – Leisureland is packed with them – but has a tendency to depict his career as an uninterrupted stream of mistakes and disasters, a life in which nothing has panned out as intended. That includes his decision to call himself Wreckless Eric, a nickname he earned in the days before he got sober, when his “idea of a balanced meal was a bloody mary and a packet of peanuts”. Goulden explains: “It’s always been a mixed blessing: it’s definitely noticeable, but it’s a pain in the arse. You always get someone going, ‘Doesn’t look very Wreckless to me.’ And I think, ‘No, but I was an absolute fucking maniac when I was younger.’ But you don’t stay that way. You’ve got to remember that back then we were all on the dole, so you weren’t ever going to do anything under your actual name.”
He got his deal with Stiff after drunkenly wandering into their offices brandishing a demo tape, but it didn’t work out as intended. “You should have a manager, some bloke in Terylene trousers and a yellow drip-dry shirt who gets you the record deal. But I had nothing – and it wasn’t in their interests to say I should get a manager, because a manager wouldn’t take their shit.” Nor did his most famous song turn out as planned. “My first album, someone sped it up in the cut, so it sounds like Mickey Mouse. Everything in the key of E ended up in F. They’re using Whole Wide World in some German film next year. I tried to get them to use it at the correct speed, but they had a listen and said, ‘No, no, it completely loses the vibe.’” He rolls his eyes and sighs. “All right then, use the one you want.”
Goulden released three albums on Stiff, which established him as a cult hero, a writer of smart, witty, charmingly ramshackle pop songs: Reconnez Cherie, Personal Hygiene, Can I Be Your Hero? But his relationship with the label curdled so badly, he quit making music entirely in the early 1980s, becoming a sound engineer for aged country star George Hamilton IV. He was lured back when he moved to Chatham in Kent, discovered the area’s burgeoning 60s-obsessed garage scene, and formed the Len Bright Combo. Listening to their two ultra-raw albums, it sounds like a perfect meeting of minds. Both Combo Time! and the splendidly titled The Len Bright Combo Present the Len Bright Combo By the Len Bright Combo are amazing.
But, in Goulden’s telling, that was a mistake, too. “I only moved to Kent because I was sharing an apartment with a prostitute who worked at a massage parlour and she started bringing her work home with her, which was a bit disturbing. Then George Hamilton’s drummer said he could get me a mortgage, but I would have to live in the Medway [in Kent]. They were doing something different, but I was appalled at times by their narrow-mindedness. You couldn’t use any equipment more recent than 1970, that was ungodly. I did a show with one of Billy Childish’s bands and I found the guitarist hiding in this room that was like a cupboard, with a guitar tuner. He said, ‘For fuck’s sake, don’t tell Billy!’ That was what it was like: surreptitiously using a tuning fork once a week. It was quite … limiting.”
In a sense, Goulden really hit his stride when he moved to France. “Near Limoges,” he nods. “You don’t ever want to go to Limoges. It’s dreadful.” True to form, this didn’t work out as intended, but did see him start to record what he calls “homemade albums”, on a Heath-Robinson-type set-up in a spare room. “The more my career subsided, the less money there was to do anything, the less good the studios were, and the less time you had. I used to feel almost ashamed, because people would go, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’ But if I knew what I was doing, I’d know what was going to happen – and if you know what’s going to happen, there’s very little point, because this is supposed to be an adventure. It could be quite wonderful or it could be quite glum. It’s not like I’m disadvantaged. I’m differently advantaged. You know, making up strange rhythm tracks because you don’t have a drummer. It’s like necessity being the mother of invention.”
It’s an approach that occasionally drives him “bloody mad”, he says. “You think, ‘God, I hate this. I’ll just forget about it. Maybe I can walk away. I could move to Cincinnati or Berkhamsted and start a new life.’ But you carry on and break your way through.” It seems to suit him, though, his off-beam, slightly ramshackle songs perfectly framed by an off-beam, slightly ramshackle production. Leisureland – a distorted, psychedelic collection of songs about faded English seaside towns – was partly inspired by Newhaven, the Sussex port where Goulden grew up, and partly by Cromer in Norfolk, where he and Rigby are planning to relocate after a decade in the Catskills. Leisureland is the latest in a steady stream of great Goulden albums: sometimes as Wreckless Eric; sometimes in collaboration with Rigby; occasionally – when the whole business of being called Wreckless Eric has particularly worn on his nerves – as Eric Goulden, or Southern Domestic, the latter also the name of the label he and Rigby run.
Despite his self-deprecating view of how he got here, Goulden seems rather content. He loves touring, albeit in a very characteristic way. “It’s perfect. It’s a cop-out. It’s like you relinquish all responsibility. Gas bill, electric bill, meeting with an accountant – ‘Sorry, I can’t, I’m on tour.’ The gutters are fucked – ‘I’m on tour, I can’t.’ And on tour, your day is preordained. Every day is the same. If you’re a bit on the spectrum, it’s absolutely perfect.”
And, for all that things didn’t turn out as expected, perhaps they turned out for the best. Goulden probably wasn’t cut out for huge mainstream success. “I’ve never been a self-promoter,” he says. “I mean, in everyday life, if a taxi-driver or a curious person says, ‘What do you do?’, I say, ‘Well, I used to be a geography teacher.’ Retired geography teacher – that shuts everybody up. I’m not going to tell anyone I’m in the music business. Because the next question would be, ‘Oh, anyone I would have heard of?’ Fucking kill me now!”
• Leisureland is released on 25 August on Tapete records.
