From Entourage-inspired rock anthems to atmospheric electronic detours, Lancashire-born musician Ian Gregson isn’t particularly interested in staying in one lane. I had the chance to chat with the creative force behind Mr M & The All Nighters and veteran tv/film crew member about everything “Johnny Drama,” the new album Flying High, his eclectic songwriting process, and his love of Thin Lizzy.
JG: “Johnny Drama” is a particularly fun inspiration for a song, drawing from the Entourage character, but there’s also something quite poignant about the character’s endless pursuit of success. After several decades of working in Vancouver’s film industry, what parts of Johnny’s story felt especially familiar to you?
Ian Gregson: Frustration. I wrote that song when the show came out. So, it’s been sitting on my computer in various forms for quite a few years. And I’ve been involved in the industry here since ’92, on and off. I had a real job for a while; I didn’t like it. Cubicles didn’t work for me. There are a couple of different shows that I would always recommend to my fellow film workers, and that were Entourage for the American scene, and Ricky Gervais’s Extras for the British side of things. Both are very accurate in my book.
On Entourage, Johnny Drama stood out as someone who’d been in the industry a long time and had limited success, shall we say. He achieved recognition in some ways, but at the same time, never quite made it to that level where he wanted to be. And I think that is a common thread for people who are in any profession, wanting to go to the next level and finding there’s a bit of a ceiling for them. That’s why it kind of appealed to me. And the song kind of just evolved.
It’s based on a Thin Lizzy tune called “Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed” from the Johnny the Fox album in ’76. I’m a big Thin Lizzy fan. And yeah, so, yeah, I put two and two together. Then when I started working with my saxophone player, Manny, I thought, “Well, I should revisit some of those old tunes that I did years ago.”
Thin Lizzy’s record label released a box set of their albums. It had all the demos, outtakes and whatnot on this CD collection. And that song was on it, “Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed,” but a very basic version of it with no vocals, just stripped-down with very basic drums. That gave me the impetus to get it going again, too. And so it was a little clearer what they were doing in the song and how I would use it in my own song. I could never get the drums like Brian Downey’s drums, which was a mistake, because I do it in Logic whereas Brian Downey’s a real drummer.
JG: The entertainment industry can be an unpredictable beast, whether you’re working behind the scenes in film and television or trying to make your mark as a musician. Has your experience changed the way you approach music and the music industry?
Ian Gregson: One of the things about the film industry is that it fluctuates. Here in Vancouver and everywhere else, a lot of factors come into play. Tax credits, what the industry is doing with technology, streaming, AI, it all comes together. That’s what the music business has been about too.
I don’t go at it full time. I dabble here and there, shall we say. So, it’s been interesting over the years just to put it all together. This is my studio right here. I have the comfort of working from home. It’s basically a cottage industry for me. There’s some stability in that because I can’t really afford to go to a mainstream studio like Bryan Adams’ studio in Gastown or something like that and put a band together. I find it much more convenient and affordable to do it at home. And it seems to work. Especially when you’ve added an organic instrument like a saxophone, which I’ve done in this last recording.
JG: On the new album Flying High, you pull from a remarkably diverse collection of influences. You already mentioned Thin Lizzy, but you can hear bits of Portishead, Ultravox, and Nick Cave. It really runs the gamut. How do you bring those seemingly disparate musical worlds together while maintaining a sound that feels cohesive and distinctly your own?
Ian Gregson: That’s a very good question. I honestly don’t really know, but I’ll have a guess. It’s all in your head. It comes in the ears and goes through the eyes, and it’s like a tumble dryer, you know? It mashes up inside and then out it comes. I do have a radio show on houseofprog.com. I’ve always been interested in DJing. Not in a club, but in a radio sense.
I was involved in student radio back in the ’80s up at Simon Fraser University, which I’m still involved with indirectly. I’ve always wanted to expand my musical knowledge. That’s always been the frustration with the musicians that I work with: they don’t have a great musical knowledge to kind of rely on. One of the purposes of being a DJ is to explore music, right?
I always want to play new stuff that I’ve never heard. My model for that would be somebody like John Peel, who was one of the great British DJs. He would just play music that he’d never heard before and just throw it on the turntable and play it. So many new performers and bands are credited to John Peel breaking them. He’s always been my model.
JG: When you are putting together a song and songwriting, do you tend to begin with a particular story or emotion or a melody and then build around that? Or can a musical idea sometimes take you somewhere completely unexpected?
Ian Gregson: Both. They both can happen. Usually my main inspiration for an instrumental song will be a song that I’ve heard. I’ll give you an example. We’ve just put out a single called “I’m Not Scared,” and that’s based on a Thomas Dolby tune from 1983. I listen to it, I listen to the chord structure, I listen to the beat, I listen to the tempo of it, and then I say, “Okay, well, this is going at certain beats per minute. It’s got a feel to it. What instruments in it can I use that I have available to me?” And just go from there.
I’ve always challenged anybody to say, you know, “Listen to this original song that I’m borrowing and listen to what I’ve done. Can you put them together?” And I’ve yet to have anybody tell me, “No, I can’t. I don’t see what you’re getting at.” You know? And so that’s what it’s about. It’s about listening to something, developing it, and having the skills to put it onto the computer and then create something new. Musicians have been doing that for centuries.
JG: What do you hope listeners take away from Flying High?
Ian Gregson: It is a mixture of vocal rock tracks, which is where the Thin Lizzy and more rock side of things come from. Then there are the instrumental tunes with the saxophones. Some are quite up-tempo; some are more of a trip-hop kind of thing. It really depends. Hopefully, it’s diverse enough that people can capture both sides.
Because artists do that, right? You can listen to whoever and they’ve got up-tempo tunes, rocking tunes. Thin Lizzy were like that too. You know, I go back to them a lot. Some of their tracks were very chilled out and very quiet and almost in rock ballad territory. I wanted to capture that in some way. Then the vocal tracks are a bit more up-tempo. The instrumentals are a little bit on the quieter side.
Flying High is out now on Bandcamp.
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