Bruce Nockles (trumpet) interview

21 May 2025

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Q: How did you get the Strawberry Switchblade session?

It’s a long time ago so I’m not completely certain, but I think what happened was there’s a composer called Andrew Poppy who did one of the arrangements [the conclusion of 10 James Orr Street].

There was a group in the early 1980s called The Lost Jockey. I don’t know how you’d describe it, about 25 people, sort of avant-garde classical music but pop music at the same time, it crossed genres a lot. Andrew and I were on the fringes of that, we knew people in common. There’s a composer called Glyn Perrin, I think it was him that put me on to Andrew. Then Andrew got me into the Strawberry Switchblade session. I think!

Andrew was signed to ZTT around that time [his album The Beating of Wings was released in 1985]. I think he and David Motion may have worked together on that, but they certainly knew each other.

I suspect the Andrew Poppy part is the very first thing that I will have played and then Motion got me in for Who Knows What Love Is?

[Nockles’ records show these recordings took place on 14 and 15 May 1984]

Q: So Andrew Poppy got you in to play on 10 James Orr Street and perhaps David Motion then said ‘that’s good, maybe we can make that guitar break into a trumpet solo for Who Knows What Love Is?’?

I think that would have been the sequence of events.

But the intro for Since Yesterday, it’s got that Sibelius 5th thing on it – that’s French horns, I’m not playing on that.

I always thought I was on Since Yesterday, but the beginning certainly sounds more like French horns. The only possibility is in the chorus when something is playing the Sibelius 5 horn motif, very low in the mix, not horns this time. It could be trumpet, but is more likely a synth.

My memory is of course probably deficient and it’s more likely that because I know I played for Strawberry Switchblade and Since Yesterday is their most prominent song I’ve simply put the two together and mis-remembered.

Q: How did you get into music in the first place?

I started playing piano when I was four, didn’t have piano lessons until I was five, so my dad sort of helped me. I started playing the trumpet when I was nine and then I went to the Royal Academy of Music for seven years.

Then when I went to university in York I played in a jazz-funk band called Best Friends. That was set up by someone called Simon Best, I think he had a record label and he managed the Gang of Four, so he was a kind of wheeler-dealer in that kind of world. I was always interested in jazz as well as classical music, and I learned to play pop music type things in that band.

When I left university and came down to London, I went to the Royal Academy again as a post-graduate, and then went into the business. So I left Best Friends.

The trumpet player that replaced me in Best Friends was Enrico Tomasso, now a very distinguished jazz musician. He later played on a Marc Almond record, Tears Run Rings. For the video they wanted two tall trumpet players so they got me and John Eacott – he was in Loose Tubes, a jazz collective that was big in the 80s and 90s – and we mimed Enrico’s parts!

Q: Was the Strawberry Switchblade session your first contact with David Motion? You worked with him on several things afterwards including Red Box and the Orlando soundtrack.

Oh, it was Red Box was it?

Q: Have you forgotten what records you were on?!

I’ve done a lot of recording, film recording as well, and often they put stuff in front of you and you don’t know what it is!

The pop things were a bit more involved, I met Red Box. But I can’t remember whether I met Strawberry Switchblade. I have a strong image in my mind of what they looked like with the polka dot things.

I don’t think I did actually meet them, though. My wife is Glaswegian, I’ve married into a Scottish family so I go to Glasgow a lot. I don’t remember a Glaswegian accent, that tells me that I probably didn’t meet them.

Q: So David Motion would have got you in to do a thing when they weren’t there?

I think so, yeah.

The sessions for David Motion I don’t remember as well, because I did a lot of other things for him, they all kid of blur into one thing. Whereas the Phil Thornalley thing, as far as I know I only did two things for him. One was Strawberry Switchblade, another was for Zeke Manyika [House of Memory, one of two tracks Thornalley produced for Manyika’s 1985 album Call and Response].

Q: It seems extraordinary that you’d do two sessions for the band and yet not meet them.

I was on the Zeke Manyika record too but I never met him either! Or maybe I did?

Q: Who Knows What Love Is? was re-recorded with Phil Thornalley, did you come back and do a second session?

Yes. It was just me and him. I think it was at RAK studios near St John’s Wood. I have a memory of quite a spacious white space and there was just him and me. I did the solo but he sort of composed it. [Nockles’ records show that this was at RAK studios on 17 January 1985]

Usually you’re told to take a solo and you take one and they either use it or they don’t. If they don’t like it you do another one. But that one was all cut together, he took bits from different goes. He’d cut bits out and we’d do another bit around it.

Q: Melodically it’s very close to the one you did earlier on the David Motion version, which in turn is taken from the band’s guitar solo. [You can hear this guitar version on the live recording from Liverpool, 23 November 1983]

On the Motion version, all those long notes in the background on the verse are me as well.

Q: It’s clear Thornalley had listened to David Motion’s version, the arrangement is very similar. Thornalley’s version is dreamier and less percussive. The trumpet solo is more expressive and there’s some sort of echoey reverb on it.

That’s double-tracking. You record it once, then record again playing the same thing and put together you get a slightly blurred version of it. There’ll be echo and stuff on it as well.

The Thornalley version has additional trumpet bits on the intro and chorus. The sound is fuller, it’s got more life in it because of the double tracking. It’s slightly more evolved.

The harmony part of mine, I don’t know how that was worked out, whether that was written down in advance or whether we worked it out together on the day.

The two versions do sound pretty similar, the only thing that really sounds different is the trumpet part, and maybe there’s a vocal harmony that’s not in the Motion one.

Q: Generally it has a thicker feel, and the vocal harmonies are a bit more emphatic. It doesn’t have your long notes under the verses but there’s a bit of shimmery electronics instead, and the chorus has what I presume is the thing referred to in the credits as ‘tippy tappy drums’ by the Cure’s Boris Williams. But overall it is very similar to Motion’s production. Motion prefers his version, as you might expect. He loved those long notes of yours!

Later on I did quite a lot of stuff for him when he did film music and jingles as well. There was a session where he got me in and said he just wanted to record me doing long notes. So I did all these long notes in slightly different ways of playing. I didn’t see him again for years and next time I saw him he said ‘oh yeah, I use those samples all the time!’

Q: Were the Strawberry Switchblade sessions quick?

Yes.

Q: That’s presumably what a producer would want out of session people, you just come in and nail it quickly.

Three hours was common! The arrangement for Andrew [10 James Orr Street] would have been a group of us. But most of the things I did with David it was just me and him, as it was with Phil Thornalley. Just doing an overdub, putting it on the track. I can’t remember many where it was a group of people, mostly it was one on one.

I would have heard the completed version of my bit, but not of the whole track.

Q: Did they send you a record when it was finished?

I don’t think they did, no.

I’ve got an album I played on by another artist, it’s still got the Virgin Records £5.99 sticker on it from when I bought it – and that artist hadn’t paid me for the recording either. I had to pay to be on it and hear it!

I’ve had worse things, though. Do you know the composer Xenakis? Classical avant-garde post-war thing. He was Greek. I played a piece of his which is brass quintet and piano at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, you have to wander round the stage, it’s really difficult. We had 20 minutes’ rehearsal before the concert – it started at 6 o’clock, we started rehearsing at 20 to – it was really hard but we did it. It was a festival organised by the Greek government. We did the concert, but the Greek government fell and the new government refused to pay up. Didn’t get paid for that one either!

Q: How does it feel, listening back to the Strawberry Switchblade tracks and your performance?

I really like it. I thought it was really good, I was surprised when they didn’t go on and do more things.

I played it to my children. My son is older, he’s 28. He’s a musician now, he’s a jazz double bass player in Levitation Orchestra. He’s old enough to have seen me play and know what I do, whereas my daughter – because I’m sort of fading away as a player now – she doesn’t really know what I did. So I play her things like this and say ‘this is what I used to do’ and she said ‘ooh I quite like that!’

It’s something I’ve periodically listened to, especially once the internet started and you could find things again. For old times’ sake!

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Dates, Times, Prices and Mystery

Bruce Nockles still has a lot of his diaries, invoices and other paperwork from the time. They give us a lot of details about exactly when and where recordings took place (and how much he was paid!), but they also raise some new questions.

RECORDING 10 JAMES ORR STREET & WHO KNOWS WHAT LOVE IS?  WITH DAVID MOTION

They show that he was recording for Strawberry Switchblade at Sarm West studio on 14 and 15 May 1984. In his diary, the first day is marked as Strawberry Switchblade, the second as Andrew Poppy.

The invoices show that on 14 May he did two hours for £37.50, on 15 May he did three hours for £80. He explains that higher sums on invoices are more likely to be him playing alone, as these would have been enhanced fees to account for doubling up and multiple overdubs. The lower amounts would have been fixed union rates, so most likely playing as part of a group of musicians.

This suggests that the Andrew Poppy arrangement on 10 James Orr Street was recorded on 14 May 1984, and the trumpet on the David Motion version of Who Knows What Love Is? on 15 May. This squarely fits with his memory that it was Poppy who brought him into the project to begin with, and that he was recording with a group on the first day then on his own for the second day.

RECORDING WHO KNOWS WHAT LOVE IS?  WITH PHIL THORNALLEY

Nockles’ diary shows that he was at RAK studios on 17 January 1985, and his invoices confirm this was working with Phil Thornalley for Strawberry Switchblade, for which he was paid £150. This must be the new recording of Who Knows What Love Is?

It’s notable that his contact from WEA Records for this session was different – this time it was Jean Mulhearn, assistant to label boss Rob Dickins, which tallies with the description of the Thornalley tracks being recorded at the record company’s behest.

RECORDING WITH DAVID MOTION IN JANUARY 1985 – WHAT IS THIS?

Nockles’ documents also show he was recording with David Motion two days earlier on 15 January 1985. The band is unspecified, but it was a WEA artist and his contact at the label was Cathy Doherty, his usual contact for Strawberry Switchblade recording. He was paid £150 for the session.

Nockles was back at Sarm West recording with David Motion for Strawberry Switchblade a fortnight later on 29 January 1985. He took his flugel horn which would have been for doubling, playing both trumpet and flugelhorn multitracked.

It was a very well paid session – £300, double what he was paid for the Thornalley session a fortnight earlier, and nearly ten times what he got for the first session – so he must have recorded numerous parts. But as Motion’s work on the album had long been finished, this session’s existence is somewhat odd.

Maybe there was a last attempt by Motion to get a version of Who Knows What Love Is? that WEA would find acceptable. Then again, perhaps the most likely possibility is that it was for the short penultimate track on the album Who Knows What Love Is? (Reprise). This was produced by Motion and is just drums and percussion overlaid with Nockles playing lots of overlapping long notes.

It may well be that the 15 January session was for the reprise (perhaps recorded as a compromise/compensation to Motion for removing his full version of the track), and they thought a flugel horn would be good so arranged the 29 January session for that. The high rate of pay for the latter session might be the recording of the catalogue of long notes that Motion later mentioned to Nockles as being so useful.

This is all called into question by Motion having a white label test pressing of the album with its original running order which is listed as including the reprise (it has neither of the Thornalley tracks, the inclusion of Poor Hearts that was eventually left off and later released as a B side). If it does include the reprise and is the original intended track listing pressed for release early in 1985, then the reprise would pre-date the January sessions with Nockles.

But Nockles’ paperwork positively showing he was working with Motion for Strawberry Switchblade on 29 January 1985, and his confidence that he wasn’t on any other tracks apart from the two versions of Who Knows What Love Is? and 10 James Orr Street means that recording the reprise in January 1985 still seems the best fit for the evidence we have. Even if his wisp of a memory of playing on Since Yesterday were true, that can’t be the January 1985 session as it had been released in October 1984.

MORE STRAWBERRY SWITCHBLADE SESSIONS, BUT NOT ACTUALLY DOING ANYTHING

Nockles also has paperwork showing he did two further sessions with Strawberry Switchblade on 10 May and 23 May 1985. It’s not wholly clear what these were, but we can take a good guess. This was around the time Who Knows What Love Is? was released as a single. The first session was for Celador Productions Ltd which is a TV company, and the second was for the BBC. The latter doesn’t tally with any known radio sessions.

The most plausible explanation is that they were TV recordings that didn’t actually happen. For a period in the 1970s and 1980s, for some UK TV shows artists had to record their track anew (which is why some old footage you find online has songs sounding a bit weedy and wrong compared to the music you know). Quite often the artists would sneakily use the proper recording, but then they had to pretend to have made a new version which meant booking studios and paying musicians so the paper trail looked credible.