The Doctor Clive Jackson, frontman of Doctor and the Medics, told David Hennessy about 40 years of their number one hit, Spirit in the Sky.
It is 40 years since Doctor and the Medics topped the UK charts with their cover of Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky.
The band are marking the milestone with some special festival appearances and are planning to release a new album later in the year.
Doctor and the Medics never planned for chart success.
The band were founded to win a £5 bet in 1981 and from there, their career was gone on to last more than four decades.
Lead singer Clive Jackson, also known as the Doctor, took time to chat to the Irish World about the crazy journey it has been.
It is 40 years since Spirit in the Sky went to number one, can you believe it?
“It’s really weird with anniversaries being in a band because when you reach five years of doing anything, you think that’s big news.
“And then over the years, those little anniversaries start to get old, you get a bit blasé.
“But this one has made me think a lot about how the band’s still going.
“It’s kind of been a kick up the backside to put us into action and it has been quite lovely doing gigs at the moment.
“Our next big one is Brit Fest and they’re making a fuss of it being the 40th anniversary.
“It’s nice to announce it on stage and yeah, I am appreciating this one a lot.”
Has it ever been anything but a joy to play the song?
“No, it hasn’t.
“One radio DJ once said to me, ‘Do you ever get bored singing Spirit in the Sky?’
“And I was like, ‘No’.
“I said, ‘If you get bored singing any song, you shouldn’t be allowed on a stage’.
“Most gigs now I’ll always get people coming up afterwards and telling me that that song means something because their dad had it played at their funeral and you suddenly realise that it means that much to someone.
“For us back in the 80s, it was three minutes and 40 seconds of a pop song but it now means that much to people, I think you’ve got a certain sense of responsibility.
“We do love playing any song but especially that one because you get such a warm, amazing reaction both during the gig and after the gig as well.
“It is a bit of a special song.”
There are a few different tales of where the idea to record it came from..
“I’m sworn to secrecy because I do a show called The Doctor Will See You Now, Life as a One Hit Wonder? which I wrote in lockdown.
“But during that show I say, ‘Look, there are two stories about why we did it but I’m going to tell you one of the versions now and it’s up to you to decide whether it’s the true one or the false one.
“However, I do give a clue.
“I say, just remember the truth is actually the weirdest of the two.
“The story: We were recording the album and I had a dream that I was walking through Lavenham in Suffolk and there was John and Yoko walking through the village.
“We went in the pub and as I’m buying them a beer, there’s this bloke in the corner playing acoustic guitar, singing and it’s Marc Bolan and he’s singing Spirit in the Sky and John Lennon says to me, ‘You should play that’.
“The next day I went in the studio and I told the band.
“They all had a laugh and said, ‘Oh, you dreaming hippie lunatic’ and Craig Leon, the producer, just happened to overhear it.
“He said, ‘That would be a brilliant song for you to play’.
“So I said, ‘Well, let’s give it a go’.
“We recorded it that day and it sounded like it could be a single.
“But here’s two cluses.
“When I sing ‘When they lay me down to rest’ in the 80s, you used to double, triple, and quadruple track your vocals to death.
“I hated doing it and I was singing ‘When they lay me down to rest’ about 100 times so I thought, ‘Okay, let’s say thank you to Mark Bolan’.
“So in a couple, and if you listen very carefully you can hear it, it says, ‘When they lay me down T Rex’.
“That is the story.
“Whether it’s the true one or the false one, I can never tell anyone but that’s the only story you’ll hear from me and it’s up to you and your readers to decide if it was the true one.”
You said it sounded like a single but were you expecting it to be as successful as it was?
“No, absolutely not.
“Older music fans will remember that you had the indie charts and it would be mainly the alternative artists.
“We saw that as our niche.
“We were hoping to have another number one in the indie charts.
“When this record hit the shops and the record company hired a promoter we thought, ‘Oh, what’s going on here?’
“And the next thing is we’re on Saturday Superstore and it’s gone in at number 40.
“And we honestly thought, ‘Well, that’s brilliant, top 40. Who’d have thought Doctor and the Medics- Top 40’.
“Then it went to 17 and we thought, ‘Oh, top 20’ and then to number four and by that point, I think you were thinking, ‘Well, if we’ve come all this way, we might as well go to number one’ so I think we were hopeful that it would get number one but it just didn’t dawn on us at all what was happening.
“We didn’t have a clue.”
If you weren’t expecting it to be such a hit, you probably didn’t know it was going to have such enduring appeal either..
“No, again that’s taken us by surprise.
“I still have DJs come up and say, ‘I still play your record and it will fill the dance floor every time’.
“And 40 years on, that’s not bad for a band that thought they were just going to have a few indie hits and disappear.”
I understand the band all came about from a £5 bet, is that right?
“Yeah.
“I was DJing at a club called Alice in Wonderland.
“I was enjoying it and then a guy in a band, a mate of mine, challenged me.
“If someone says I can’t do anything I just think, ‘Well, hang on, why not?
“He said, ‘You couldn’t form a band, you just play other people’.
“His band were doing a gig in three weeks’ time so I said, ‘I bet we could support you in three weeks’.
“That was a five pound bet and three weeks later we turned up with the name, the band, a bit of a look, just threw it all together, went on stage, and we blew them off stage.
“Someone came up to us afterwards and said, ‘How do I book you?’
“And I can remember saying to him, ‘Really? You want to book us?’
“And he said, ‘Yeah, we’d love to have you’.
“And I was taken aback that anyone else would want us and I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it’.
“And I said to Steve (McGuire, guitar), ‘We’ll just keep doing this as long as people keep asking us to play’, and then they never stopped asking us.
“And the guy who I made the five pound bet with, not only didn’t pay me, he became our tour manager for many, many years.
“He did offer to pay me the fiver a few years ago and I said, ‘No, you’ll break the magic, you’ll break the voodoo now. If you give me the five pounds, it will all end overnight’.
“So he’s never paid me and I’m quite happy about that.”
So there was no grand plan, just a case of forming a band for a bet and keeping on going..
“Absolutely, there has never been a plan.
“I’ve never planned anything.
“In fact we’ve got an album coming out later this year called The Optimal Mystic and I started writing the songs in 2005.
“It’s 21 years but I have promised the band faithfully this year that it will be released.
“I mean one time we had a single and I forgot to release it, that’s how good my planning is.
“I spoke to someone the other day and they just said, ‘You seem so full of enthusiasm’.
“And I said, ‘Yeah, I suffer from terminal optimism and pure blind faith and enthusiasm’.
“That’s what keeps us going and I think that comes across when people see us play, that we love doing it.
“You do get them: A band that go out and begrudgingly churn out the old hit and you can see their hearts aren’t in it but with us, I think it’s that drive and enthusiasm to just keep going one way or another that keeps us going.
“It’s certainly not planning.”
Some bands hate that label of ‘one hit wonder’ but you seem to love it, perhaps because you had those ambitions of having just indie hits..
“We actually had a second hit and it was Burn which reached number 23 but what I say to people is, ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell people we had another hit because otherwise we’d stop being a one hit wonder’.
“I say, ‘They don’t write books and they don’t do newspaper articles on one and a half hit wonders so it’s our secret that we had another hit’.
“We wear our one hit wonder badge with pride, we’re up there with the best of them when it comes to that.”
Many people from Liverpool have Irish heritage, are you the same?
“No.
“Quite interestingly I did the DNA thing and I’m 9% Italian.
“We think it was my grandfather’s father who we think was an Italian sailor, came into the port of Liverpool.
“He met my father’s grandmother and obviously nine months later, my granddad was born.
“So you never know, he may have gone into Dublin or any Irish port as well and done a similar thing so for all I know, I might be related by my great grandfather to someone (Irish) but we’re slowly finding out about this gentleman and it’s been quite a revelation to us.”
Tell us about the writing of the show The Doctor Will See You Now.., what was it like to look back on your career and life like that?
“It was during COVID and people said, ‘You should write a book’.
“I remember the words of my manager back in about 1988.
“I said to him, ‘Andrew, If I wrote a book about my life, nobody would believe it’ and he said, ‘Dear boy, if you wrote a book about your life, nobody would buy it’.
“And I kind of thought, ‘Yeah, he’s got a point, so let’s do this show’.
“It was actually quite easy because I just started scribbling all these ideas down and in the end, I was just having to cut bits out.
“Now we’re writing the theatre show for next year.
“However I’ve come across a writer friend who said, ‘Well you’ve got all those bits you’ve written and discarded, haven’t you?’
“I said yeah.
“He said, ‘Send them to me and I’ll write the book’.
“So there could be a book about it just written from all the scripts and the bits I’ve rejected from The Doctor Will See You Now.
“Ironically the book that was never going to be written is going to be written because of the theatre show.”
Are there any shows that leap out for you as a highlight?
“Yes, I think there have been gigs in the past where I’ve looked back and I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve achieved this’.
“Strangely enough we played in Venice, in St. Mark’s Square, in about 2004.
“Only the Italians, love them, would put a gig on in February without a roof on the stage.
“I got there, it was raining, I felt awful (with flu) and I can remember going on stage and St. Mark’s Square was packed.
“I thought, ‘This is incredible’.
“I said to myself, ‘Take a snapshot in your head. You’re in such a special place the fact that all these people have crossed over to Venice to see you and you’ve packed this square out 20 years after Spirit in the Sky’.
“That’s still a moment I can still see clearly in my head.
“I just told myself, ‘Remember this. Look. Smell. Remember it all’.
“That one for me always comes into my head first.”
You have toured with the Damned. In fact you have a long association with them since before even Doctor and the Medics, isn’t that right?
“We toured with them when they had the album Phantasmagoria out.
“The band started coming down the club basically.
“They invited us to go on tour with them and it was a massive step up for us because we’d been playing small clubs and we’d had the indie number one and then we went on tour with The Damned and so suddenly this much bigger audience could see us and go, ‘Oh, that’s what they’re about’.
“It went down really well.
“And then two years ago, we toured with them again which was every bit as lovely as it was the first time.
“We were all a bit older, it’s all a bit more sedate and we all get to bed far earlier but the gigs had the same energy.
“I loved every second of it.”
Emerging bands today don’t have the same venues to tour around the country. You’re passionate about the live music scene..
“I say to bands, ‘You may turn up and your heart might go through the floor because you’re playing to 10 people and a dog’.
“I said, ‘But just remember there was a band called Oasis playing in a club one night and it wasn’t packed. There weren’t many people and a man called Alan McGee walked in and saw them and that changed their lives. Oasis went on to his record label and that was it’.
“You never know who one of those ten people is so just give it your heart every time because it might be the one gig that opens the door to many other things for you.
“Bands have got to have a bit of faith in themselves as well.”
Here’s to many more years of Spirit in the Sky..
“I did dwell on that because I’m 65 this year.
“You think, ‘Well, how long can I go?’
“But then you see Arthur Brown touring and he’s 84 this year and he’s doing an amazing job.
“I think, ‘Look after yourself, keep doing what you have a passion for and with any luck, I may get there’.
“I’d like to get to 80 and still be gigging like Arthur.”
There’s another project you are involved with..
“We’re doing a television pilot called the Whiskey Chasers and the basis of it is us going around the country, and we’re going to involve Ireland as well, visiting distilleries and tasting and sampling the whiskey.
“We’re going to educate people who think they want to know more about whiskey and the current explosion in whiskey.
“That’s something really interesting, something I really want to do so fingers crossed for The Whiskey Chasers.”
Doctor and the Medics play Brit Fest which takes place 2- 5 July. Thebritfest.co.uk.
The album The Optimal Mystic will be out in the autumn.
Clive will also compere Rewind festival on 23 August. South.rewindfestival.com.
Clive also presents a show on rockandgoalradio.com.
The Doctor Will See You Now, Live as a One Hit Wonder tours the UK next year.
For more information, click here.
