Manfred Mann is an understated South African-born musician. He was the keyboardist and founder of Manfred Mann, a rock outfit that performed from 1962 until 1969. He later formed Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, utilising the keyboardist’s fondness for the synthesiser. A brief hiatus notwithstanding, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band have toured regularly since the 1970s. Some of Manfred Mann’s notable hits include “Fox on the Run” and “Pretty Flamingo“, and some of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s work includes “Blinded by the Light“, which incorporates an intro the musician is very proud of.
“Let’s not talk about me,” Manfred Mann says. “Nobody knows what I’ve put out or is interested in that now. Of the artists around, I do like the best of Taylor Swift very, very much. I think she’s an incredibly good writer: quite a complicated writer and a very good musician.”
This is an odd way to promote oneself in an interview, but Manfred Mann’s trajectory stems from vacillation. During our Zoom conversation in July of this year, he applauds the Police for their efforts. “A band like the Police were genuine,” he says. “We had some good writers in [Manfred Mann], but not enough, I didn’t believe, to succeed. From “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy“, we didn’t write our own songs. Generally speaking, I feel I have been over-rewarded for my abilities.”
Manford Mann has been around long enough to witness the ebbs and flows of rock. AI technology, he confides, is “still in the Dark Ages”. He notices my Munster accent: “My mother became Irish very late on in life because she married an Irishman.” The keyboardist initially says his stepfather came from Clonakilty but corrects himself: “Somewhere near Mallow. Not Clonakilty, because that’s where Noel Redding lived.”
“My mother presented me with three fathers,” he chuckles. “My third father was Dónal.” Mann is calling from Sweden, where he is a resident. “I learned a phrase in Swedish, which has been a total failure: jag talar inte svenska. It means ‘I don’t speak Swedish.’The trouble is you’re saying it in Swedish, so they think you do speak Swedish.”
Manfred Mann is erudite and speculates on whether the Beatles worked with a synthesiser. “I don’t think there were any synthesisers on Abbey Road.” Clarifying the year, he says: “I wouldn’t have thought they had them in 1969, because I bought mine in 1973. I may be wrong.” Intrigued to discover more, he types Abbey Road ballad “Because” into a search bar before looking up the information. “I would be surprised if they had one,” he admits. “Making sounds on a synthesiser isn’t playing it in my view. I’m talking about playing it as an instrument. If you’re going to go [imitates maniacal sounds].” He sighs and shakes his head. “There may have been some early moogs at that time,” he concedes.
He happens upon a discovery that pleases him: “The earliest use of synthesiser is Vera Lynn in 1939. That’s hard to believe. Early polyphonic synth. Those sort of things where you might call electric productions of sound, they were horrible instruments, those things.”
Manfred Mann prides himself as a synthesiser player. “The harder you hit a note on the piano, the louder it sounds,” he explains. “On the early synthesisers, you had no touch response; no matter how hard you hit a note. It’s different [now]: you have controls, and can move those controls on a synthesiser while you’re playing. It just so happens that I developed a style on the synthesiser which is a style that is me; the moment I play, you know it’s me.” He reiterates that he doesn’t consider himself “the best player in the world”, but highlights his trademark playing. “I’m not down about everything I do at all,” he chortles.
He doesn’t regard the original band’s arrangement of “The Mighty Quinn” as an artistic highpoint. “Are you talking about the 1960s version?” he asks.”It’s not a good record if you listen to it now. It’s a good song, and we did some overdubs, but the Earth Band did a way better version in 1978.” He has mixed feelings about many of the singles from the 1960s. “They were successful,” he confirms, “and some of them have stood the test of time. I don’t think ‘The Mighty Quinn’ does. ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’ stands the test of time, I think. ‘Pretty Flamingo’ survives as a good record.”
He says he enjoys being an “anti-1960s person” and recognises that his comments might upset “those who remember [‘The Mighty Quinn’] as the soundtrack of their lives.” However, Mann uses “The Mighty Quinn” as an example when it comes to AI technology: “The verse ‘Everybody’s building..’ is not much of a song, but the chorus [makes it]. Go to AI: This is the chorus, give me some verses. It could be tricked into helping songwriters with verses.”
As it happens, “The Mighty Quinn” stems from Bob Dylan’s catalogue. “There was some Basement Tapes that had not been released to the public,” Mann admits, “and the publishers, whom we knew because we’d done some Dylan stuff, played us these tapes. I think we chose ‘Please Mrs. Henry’, or some other song, but it didn’t really work out. I can’t remember why it didn’t, but there was this other song, so I went back and listened. I thought, ‘Mighty Quinn? That sounds ok.’ The verse isn’t particularly melodic, which might be why we missed it the first time.”
“I hate to be negative,” he informs me, “because I’m positive about so many things, but you’re coming up with things I don’t particularly like at the moment, so I’m coming across like a big misery here.” He does take the time to say that “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy” is a “great record full of energy”, but there are albums closer to his heart. “The only album of mine I could ever listen to is Plains Music, which is based on North American Plains Indians melodies, which I recorded in South Africa.”
Mann, who immerses himself in music during daytime hours, explains why Plains Music stands out in his canon. “I like it because it isn’t trying to be catchy,” he says. “It’s not trying to succeed, and it’s all totally different. Atmospheric and played naturally. I did an African album before Paul Simon called Somewhere in Afrika in 1983 [sic]. It was a bit anti-apartheid, and I tried to make it as musical as possible. [Simon’s] Gracelands is a great use of African sounds mixed with American songwriting. It’s a tremendous album; really excellent.”
The musician, who grew up with many sounds that typified South African music, is sorry to see the growth of computers as a vehicle of instrumentation. “African music has lost a lot of its unique quality,” he ruminates. “When I was growing up, African music sounded like African music, and now it sounds like Western music.” He notices a similar “drum sound” that is utilised on songs across the globe. “Singing remains the same,” he elaborates. “They sing in African; nobody sings in ‘Computerese’. It’s the instruments: everyone was using a penny whistle in South Africa during the 1950s, but when I went back to record there in 1991, I couldn’t buy what was the standard kind of instrument. Eventually, we found one, but finding a pennywhistle in 1991 – what had been a mainstay of African music – was difficult, and that’s a long time ago.”
Despite technological advancements in music, Mann believes that “everything sounds the same”. “I think the drummer in a live band is unbelievably important. Half the time now, people are playing click-tracks, and we don’t know what is live and what isn’t. I have fundamental differences with the world about a live performance. Live performance is an event, as far as I’m concerned, and it does not have to sound like the record.”
He thinks live performance is more exciting when it doesn’t sound like the source. “But people are playing to click tracks to get it to sound like the record,” he sighs. Mann highlights technological deficiencies – “the computers are not good enough!” – which dictates that a computer has to follow a drummer onstage. “The computer with all that it knows,” he says, “and for all that we’re living with technology, we’re just living in the old days.” He says AI technology – which should aid musicians in their creative process – still “fails to follow a drummer.”
“The technology’s appalling,” he mutters. Mann’s idea of a good concert, he repeats, is one where there is palpable excitement in the room. A gig that follows procedures dictated by the record (“technically correct”, he notes), does not interest him. “A concert to me is where things happen that didn’t happen last night,” he concludes.
Manfred Mann admits he is “out-of-date”, but envisions a time when people will look back and ask, “Did people really have to play in time to a computer?” “In concert, I don’t use anything but playing,” he notes. “I have tried to use AI: I tried to use Taylor Swift’s voice on a thing. But it doesn’t sound anything like her.”
Mann refers to a video he found on YouTube of Frank Sinatra purportedly singing “Smells Like Teen Spirit“. “The whole arrangement sounds like Sinatra, and you think: ‘That’s AI.’ It’s almost soundalike in the first place, and clever people do the arrangement.” He doesn’t think AI could have created the track without human assistance. That said, Mann feels AI could be very valuable to songwriters searching for a verse alongside their dynamic chorus.
What genres of music interest the musician? “I am a pop fan, really, and I like good pop music. Weird psychedelic is easy; you put on some weird, backward guitar. That’s easy, but to do good pop music is extremely difficult. Pop that avoids being corny, and what Taylor Swift does is quite complicated.”
“I’m an extremely good synthesiser player,” he continues, “and that I’m not at all [disparaging about]. But I’m not known for that, and you wouldn’t be talking to me if I just played synthesiser. I’m very proud of a lot of things I’ve done, and I think I play in a way no one else does. For the last forty years, I’ve been playing very different music. You’re talking to me about stuff I put behind me in 1969 [laughs]. Hard to be enthusiastic about that stuff.”
He sees Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s incendiary arrangement of “Blinded by the Light” as a personal triumph. “I occasionally see people saying on YouTube: ‘Top 10 intros.’ I listen through it and think, ‘surely ‘Blinded by the Light’ will be there.’ You instantly know what record it is. In a way, I was imitating Supertramp: they were playing that kind of piano on ‘Dreamer’. That influenced it, but ‘Blinded by the Light’ is a very good piano part; integral to the whole song.”
“Some of [his] records are ‘cutesy’, nice records,” he concedes, “but they don’t reflect me. What they reflect is me trying to be successful.” Mann says he wouldn’t listen to much of his early work if he didn’t make them.
“I started playing piano in South Africa; there were no synthesisers then. There was a piano in the house, so I started playing piano because it happened to be there. I was about six years old, and it was easy to wander over and play. I started playing ‘boogie-woogie’. I didn’t do proper classical lessons.” Mann denies the importance of classical training for musicians, saying that it is “not a good thing to do.”
Music still has a draw on him, and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band are set to play at Open Air, Waltrop in September. Dates across Europe will follow.