Graham Nash: 'I love playing in Cork and my late mother came to a show there'
Graham Nash is currently touring in the UK and Europe. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)
Graham Nash looks the picture of health when he pops up on our Zoom call. "I feel good for 83," he admits.
Born in Blackpool but raised in Salford in Manchester, what does Nash makes of fellow Mancunians Oasis touring America after a long absence?
"God bless them," he says. "They have overcome difficulties and come back so strong. My publicist thinks we might be related, as my mother's maiden name was Gallagher.
“I don't know where my Irish roots are from, but I love playing in Cork and my late mother came to a Crosby, Stills and Nash show there… it was a great show," says Nash of their appearance at Live At the Marquee in 2009.
With the recent death of Terence Stamp, our conversation turns to the English actor's role in 1999 film and its use of his song
That track had sent Blackpool-born musician’s career in a vital new direction decades earlier, but it was also a factor in his split with The Hollies.
"It wasn't that they didn't like it," he says of his then bandmates in the 1960s’ harmony group. "But it only got into the Top 30 instead of the Top 10. We were playing in a town called Split in Yugoslavia and I was on my own at night when I wrote it. Ron Richards, our producer at EMI, added the orchestra. It was a very psychedelic record."
The band were also unimpressed with Nash's very literal song about a Moroccan train journey.
He discussed the fall-out with American musician David Crosby who was visiting London. "David said to me, 'That's a very decent song, those guys are the crazy ones'. Between those two songs, I realised I was moving away from The Hollies.”
Nash played his final gig with the group on December 8 1968, and two days later he flew to Los Angeles to join forces with Crosby and Stephen Stills.
Despite Nash's departure, The Hollies continued to be successful. "I was both glad and pissed they were doing well," Nash admits before adding with a smile: "I was pissed they had three number ones after I left."
Leaving The Hollies – among them Allan Clarke, his best friend since primary school – and his home in England was a wrench for Nash. But when he began to on the tune he was swept up in what would soon become material for Crosby, Stills and Nash's self-titled debut album in 1969.
"Can you imagine how it felt when we first did that song on the first record?" he asks. "When they first sang it, I thought it was such a beautiful track and again, I realised I wasn't crazy. I realised how long Stephen could hold a note, and I'd watch for David's body language about whether he starts or not.
I said, 'Sing it one more time,' and 45 seconds in, three bars, it was magic, and we all knew it. At that moment, all our lives had changed. The Hollies, The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield were pretty decent harmony bands, but when we made our three voices into one, it was magic."
That first performance took place at Joni Mitchell's house. The three musicians would become part of a community that shared musical and political values. Neil Young would soon join a new configuration of the band, and the Canadian would play a significant role in the 1970 follow-up album
Nash's romantic relationship with Joni Mitchell would inspire an abundance of songs, including "When I was in The Hollies, I learned to write melodies that you probably couldn't forget if you heard them two or three times, but when I got to America and heard the songs that David, Stephen, Neil, and Joni were writing, I realised if I wrote better words to my melodies, I'd have better songs.
“Joni was in the studio making at the time, and quite frankly, I would leave her alone when she went into that void of writing. I never would have tried to write songs with her. But for her and about her, absolutely."
and Joni Mitchell's from her 1971 album were retrospectively written about the relationship. Nash also suggests Neil Young's (1970) was written about the couple. "It was a song that Neil wrote for Joni and me when we were going through mountains of joy, and sometimes things a little darker. We were arguing about something, and Neil wrote that song.”
The Kent State shootings, which saw four students killed by the Ohio National Guard during a Vietnam war protest, brought a new urgency to the band. "They killed them because they were protesting the secret bombing of Cambodia. No one has ever apologised or owned up for that. I had a call from Crosby, he said; 'Wait until you hear what Neil [Young] has just written.’
“Neil had seen the cover on magazine [which depicted a dead protester], and he picked up his guitar and walked into the woods. An hour later, he had written and we booked a studio. It was an incredible moment with Crosby screaming 'Why?' at the end of the track. We needed to put it out right away."
The tune cracked the US top 20 and is still recognised as one of the all-time great protest songs.
Despite their success, Young would leave the line up and rejoin sporadically. "We were playing Woodstock and Neil said he didn't want to be filmed. At that point the three of us knew he was going to be a solo performer. It's very much like a marriage.
“I didn't have brothers, but they became my brothers, David, Stephen, and Neil became family, but we were four large egos, and we did fight. We were also four decent writers, singers, and musicians. Of course, there are times when you just don't agree but we overcame that and made music for 60 plus years."
Young may have had tendencies towards also going his own way, but Nash is aware of how the Canadian augmented the group. "Neil brought a darker edge, not negatively but in a positive way because Neil is a darker person."
Despite the first separation, Crosby, Stills and Nash would be called upon to appear on Young's 1972 breakthrough album "Crosby and I sing together on and there's a video of Stephen, Neil and myself singing It's on You Tube and it's a really interesting little piece, because we hold that note for so long at the end, in the video you see Stephen Stills fall on the floor."
With Crosby's death in 2023, Nash insists there will be no reunions with Stills and Young. "When the heart disappears, there is no more band and we know that," he says.
Not surprisingly, Nash isn’t a fan of Donald Trump, and references Bruce Springsteen’s recent suggestion during a gig in Manchester that the US president was running a "rogue government".
"I agreed with everything Bruce said, adds Nash today. "I talk about it every night and during every show, I think a lot of the people who voted for Trump weren't ready for any of the stuff he's doing. He's going to be a dictator."
- Graham Nash is touring through October in the UK, as well as performing several dates in Europe. For details, see grahamnash.com/tour-dates/
