Hitmaker Adrian decided the time was right to step back into spotlight
Jewish Telegraph, November 2024
IT’S almost 25 years since rock star Adrian Gurvitz last released an album in his own name. But in that time, he has been involved in creating countless hit songs for other artists, as well as contributing the song Even If My Heart Would Break for the multi-million selling soundtrack to the film The Bodyguard.
“I missed my own art,” he told me as he released his new album Blood Sweat & Years.
“For the last 25 years, I’ve been a producer and songwriter for many artists, and I also developed artists like Andra Day. I found artists who had great voices, and then I produced them, wrote their albums and did everything for them to bring them up to the forefront of the music industry.
“And I got really bored with it, to be quite honest, because people never give you back what you give them, especially in the music industry, and I just felt that I was being taken for granted.
“I didn’t want the ending of my career to be based on what I did for other people. I would rather it ended with me doing my own art. So I made Blood Sweat & Years.”
But let’s go back to where it all started for Adrian — seeing Eddie Cochran performing live, thanks to his father Sam Gurvitz.
“When he left my mother, me and my brother Paul, he sold 8x10 photographs of pop stars in Blackpool,” Adrian explained.
“He got to know Cliff Richard and The Shadows and decided to change his name to Curtis as he thought that he’d get on better without a Jewish name.”
He became the tour manager of Cliff Richard and The Shadows and “took me one night to one of the shows, and Eddie Cochran was on the bill.
“I was about 11-years-old and I saw Eddie Cochran, and I said to myself, ‘I’m gonna be a rock star’.”
Adrian added: “When my dad left home, there was a broken old guitar and I used to sit and play with it every day, every night, hold it, cuddle it, and one string, two strings, three strings, etc. I taught myself guitar.
“Again, it was nothing that he helped me with. All he ever did was give me the vision of ‘you want to be a dustman or you want to be a rock star’.
“So I chose being a rock star, and I was just a chubby little Jewish boy with frizzy hair who had no chance of being a rock star, but I did.
“I played my guitar every single day for years.”
His father also managed The Kinks, who said they wouldn’t tour America in 1964 unless he was with them.
And despite his absence from Adrian’s life, the budding guitar hero was able to use his dad’s name for his own benefit.
“I used to go to the music stores when I was about 15 and say ‘I’m Sam Curtis’ son, can I borrow an amp or can I borrow a guitar or can I get a cheap thing’ because I had no money.”
He took his first steps to stardom as a 15-year-old — although it wasn’t as glamourous as he had hoped.
He told me: “I used to sit in a little coffee bar called the Gioconda. It was a tiny place in Denmark Street in London’s West End.
“People had told me that musicians come in to look for musicians, so I would sit all day with a cup of tea, the same cup of tea, for about three hours because I couldn’t afford to buy a second cup.
“And then one day, Tony Dangerfield came in. He was the bass player for Screaming Lord Sutch.
“He asked, ‘Is there a guitarist?’. I said I was and he said, ‘Well jump in the van outside to go to Scotland to play guitar for Screaming Lord Sutch. You’ll get five pounds.
“I did a lot of dates with Screaming Lord Sutch. He was a complete lunatic.”
Adrian — who was managed in his younger days by jazz great Ronnie Scott — shared stories of Screaming Lord Sutch’s antics, which are not for the delicate ears of our readers.
He added: “So it led to other artists coming after me, like Billie Davis and Crispian St Peters.”
In 1967, Adrian released the single Reflections of Charles Brown with his band Rupert’s People.
The song was a hit in Australia, but failed to chart in the UK.
But real success was just around the corner for Adrian.
“My brother came back from Germany with his band, The Knack, and they let me jam one night,” he recalled.
“When he heard me playing guitar, I think his eyes popped out because I was better than anyone in the band.”
In 1968, the band became Gun and enjoyed a big hit with the song Race With The Devil, written by Adrian.
“So within six months of joining the band, I’d written a top 10 hit single and got us signed to CBS,” he said.
The song became a heavy metal staple with covers by Judas Priest, Girlschool and Black Oak Arkansas to name a few.
Adrian’s friend Jimi Hendrix even played the song’s riff during his song Machine Gun at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970.
Another feather in Gun’s cap was that their debut album was the first to have its sleeve designed by Roger Dean, who has become legendary in the field.
“When we were very young, Paul had gone to Germany. So when he let me into the group, I’d grown up. I was 18, he was 23.
“When I had my first hit Race With The Devil, when the record label or the press asked, ‘What’s your name?’, I’d say, ‘Adrian Curtis’.
“But by the second album, Gunsight, in 1969, I changed back to Gurvitz.”
Adrian and Paul released a number of albums in the early-1970s as Three Man Army.
Signed to Reprise and Warner Brothers, their debut album featured several drummers, including Band of Gypsys drummer Buddy Miles.
Shortly after Hendrix’s death in 1970, Adrian was invited to join the Buddy Miles Express on its American tour, which lasted two years and they played in front of 50,000 people a night.
Adrian also performed on Miles’ 1973 album Chapter VII.
“Buddy Miles was an incredible singer and an incredible drummer,” Adrian recalled.
“He’d been in one of the best bands of the 60s, Electric Flag, and Band of Gypsys.
“He telephoned me at about four in the morning one day from America.
“He asked, would I like to come and play guitar. I was only 21 so I moved to America, and I took the job as his guitarist.
“I lived in Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
“I rehearsed every day and then flew all over America with Buddy, which was an incredible experience.
“He was very good to me. I was like his little kid, you know, like a sidekick. He put me up front all the time.
“Unfortunately, he was very much into drugs. He loved everything. He loved coke. He loved weed. He loved elephant tranquilisers. He took everything under the sun — and he used to try and get me into it before the show.
“He’d be like ‘have a line of coke or something’. Then I did. I took a few lines, and I didn’t really like it, but he got me kind of used to it.”
Adrian continued: “I spent two years with him. He was a real character.
“He used to love me coming up to San Francisco, where he lived and I was a great cook. So he made me cook him shrimp.
“He’d say ‘Come on, let’s go get some prostitutes’, and he’d take me with him, but I would always just stay in the limousine because I didn’t want to go.”
After a bust-up at a show in Hawaii, Adrian decided it was over.
“We carried on for about three months, and in that time we did a show with Ginger Baker called Battle of the Drummers.
“And that was where Ginger saw me play guitar.
“When I came off stage, Ginger told me to look him up when I got back to England, which I did.
“And that was the way The Baker Gurvitz Army was formed.
“Within one week, we were in the studio making the first album.”
The group issued three studio albums between 1974 and 1976.
Anyone who has seen the documentary Beware of Mr Baker will know about his reputation as a wildman, but Adrian points out that the drummer was “completely different to Screaming Lord Sutch”.
He said: “Ginger was in Cream, one of the greatest bands in the late 60s to early 70s. Cream were phenomenal.
“When Cream ended after a very short period, that was a lot to do with the fact that Ginger was very difficult.
“He was the most phenomenal drummer, but he was rude.
“He would drive cars at over 150 miles an hour down a one-way street. He would do anything. He was mad.
“At the same time, he was an absolute genius and phenomenal.
“I loved my time working with him. I never had a fight with him ever.
“Ginger carried on being nasty and burned bridges everywhere. Eric Clapton didn’t want to know him.
“Ginger was his own worst enemy, and he left a cloud of nastiness, which eventually took him down.
“He died a really lonely, bitter person.”
Adrian then joined Moody Blues drummer Graeme Edge’s self-titled band.
They made two albums, Kick Off Your Muddy Boots and Paradise Ballroom, which both charted in America.
In 1979, Adrian launched his solo career with the albums Sweet Vendetta and II Assassino.
But it was his third album, Classic, in 1982, which gave him tremendous solo success — but it also caused a rift with his brother.
“I adored him,” Adrian said. “I looked up to him. He was my big brother.
“We had a great relationship all the way until Classic.
“When I did Classic, he helped me produce it, and he helped me in the studio, but I think he was looking at it being the Gurvitz brothers, but it really wasn’t any more, because he’d been living in America, and he only came back once.
“I had managed to get myself a little deal. I’d already done all the preparation for my solo career.
“So I took the limelight because I sang the song and I was the artist who did Classic.
“In some ways, he probably wanted it to be Gun again, which was ridiculous as Gun was in the past.
“So I said, ‘No, you’ve not been here. You lived in America the last year or so, and you just coming back at this moment when I’ve got a record in the charts’. I think he took umbrage to that.
“His little brother was getting more limelight.
“By the time Classic was out Paul was thinking, ‘I’ve got to do my own thing and get on with what I want to do’. And he did.
“He went to America, and he had a very successful career of his own, writing songs and producing songs for a ton of people, about six, seven platinum albums.
“He’d gone to America, and I stayed at home looking after my mother and grandma.”
He added: “And there was definitely a separation between us, and that separation grew even further for reasons I’m not going to mention, namely drugs, and I wasn’t part of that scene.
“I didn’t like anything to do with drugs or drink.
“He lives in Arizona, but we really don’t have anything between us anymore.
“Since then, I’ve got four children and my wife Elaine in California, and we live completely away from anything like that.”
Adrian was also establishing himself as a hitmaker for other artists.
He wrote for Mickie Most’s publishing company Rak Music Publishing, writing songs for Hot Chocolate, and the England 1982 World Cup Squad with England, We’ll Fly the Flag, the AA-side of number two hit This Time (We’ll Get It Right).
Adrian then moved to America and wrote a string of hits.
He wrote The Love in Your Eyes for Eddie Money as well as songs for artists like Steve Perry, of Journey, REO Speedwagon and Chicago.
In 1992, he wrote Even If My Heart Would Break for The Bodyguard soundtrack, one of the best-selling albums of all time.
He then turned his attention to fulfilling his daughter Carly’s dreams of fame.
“She left a note in my studio, saying, ‘Dad, can you make me a star?’,” Adrian told me.
“I initially laughed at the note because she sings like a dog howls.
“I said to my wife, ‘What the hell, she can’t even sing, and she’s asking me to make her a star’.
“But I came up with an idea. She was a fantastic dancer so I found four other girls — Angel Faith, Erin Tanner, Jessica Fried and Jade Ryusaki — and put them in a group together.”
Their cover of Kim Wilde’s Kids in America featured on the soundtrack for the 2001 film Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.
“They were the most sought after pop group in America at the time,” Adrian said. “Michael Jackson wanted to sign them. Interscope wanted to sign them. Warner Brothers, Disney . . . everybody wanted to sign them. Eventually, I signed them to Giant Records,
“And their self-titled album, which I produced and wrote, went to number one on the Billboard Top Heatseekers chart.
“They were on TV every five minutes. And it was crazy. I mean, it was a real frenzy. It didn’t last that long — about 18 months or two years.
“Carly is now married to Janice Dickinson’s son Nathan Field.”
Adrian is just as proud of his other three children.
“My son Ben is an absolutely, and this is not a father talking, incredible guitar player.
“He’s 28 now, and he’s looking to start something musical, and looking for his direction.
“But he is phenomenal.”
“Son Darien is 21 and designs his own jewellery, while my other son Adam is in finance. He does acquisitions.”
Before No Secret, Adrian had released his album Acoustic Heart in 1996 and followed it in 2000 with No Compromise.
In 2011, he produced the song Stevie on the Radio for Pixie Lott featuring Stevie Wonder, on the album Young Foolish Happy, which went gold in the UK.
He also wrote Mr Romeo for Emii featuring Snoop Dogg and Cheers to the Fall for Andra Day.
But he then decided it was time to put himself back centrestage.
He sums up the experience: “I just went to California, and I wrote some songs, and one of them went to number one on the Billboard chart.
“I looked around at myself and said, ‘Wow, that was easy’, and it dragged me into writing and producing for other people, and I had so much success with it.
“And then I had my wife and kids, and I just carried on producing and writing and kind of left Adrian behind.
“So about a year and a half ago, it was like a message to myself that I wanted to make my own music again, not for other people, but for myself.
“I just said to my wife, ‘I’m sorry, but I want to think of the future, what years I have left, in doing my own art, whether it be writing books, writing music, whatever’.
“I just didn’t want to carry on doing that same thing anymore. I was already 75 years old and I didn’t want to spend the next few years producing other people.
“I wanted to get out there and play. So I booked a show at the Water Rats in London and put a band together that was brilliant.
“The Water Rats was sold out. People outside were trying to get in. And it really brought it all back to me.
“The response from the audience was just fantastic. They all loved me and they were lining up for an hour and a half after the gig for me to sign all the albums that I’d done.”
He added: “I’m very fit, and I’m very still playing my guitar like I did when I was 20 years old, even better, way better.”
Blood Sweat & Years took Adrian about a year to make.
He said: “I just stayed in the studio on my own for about nine months.
“The first song that I wrote was the title track. It gave me a direction of what I wanted to do, which was a combination of how I always wrote a new record. But over the years, I’ve learned production very well.
“I used to produce all the records with the Baker Gurvitz Army.
“I put everything that I’d learned into the album. I was in the studio on my own. I never let anyone in there at all. I lived and died by my own decision.
“On a lot of the other records, I had engineers, musicians and people giving me advice, and sometimes the advice was cool and sometimes it wasn’t.
“But on this particular album, I didn’t take any advice. I just wanted to do what was in my own heart and what I gathered up in my heart over all those years and making those records.
“That’s why I called it Blood Sweat & Years, because all of us go through ups and downs, disappointment and happiness,
“And I also wanted to lyrically express where my heart was at in as much as what’s going on in the world, what’s going on with people and what’s going on with me.
“I didn’t just want to sing songs about, like, ‘Hey baby’, I wanted them to have a meaning.”
Blood Sweat & Years is only the beginning of Adrian’s renaissance. He is planning more solo albums and as well as a compilation album of his best songs.
“I’ll re-record some of the greatest songs that I felt I did over the years,” he explained.
“I’m also hoping to do festivals, starting in May, as well as gigs up and down England and Germany . . . I’ll maybe even go to Brazil.”
Adriangurvitz.com
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My mother held blessed Star of David in her hand as she died
“MY mother, Marie Sadie Gurvitz, always encouraged me. She was the greatest woman I’ve met in my life.
“She brought me and Paul up without my dad.
“And she looked after her mother, Diana Press.
“She was a diamond. She bought me my first guitar, which was about £50 pounds, and she paid for it by HP — and that was the guitar I played on Race With The Devil.
“I remember telling her that Buddy Miles wanted me to go to America and she said ‘You’ve got to go’.
“I was always worried about going anywhere because she was ill. But grandma was there; it was a comfort for me knowing that grandma was looking after her.
“When mum was very ill with cancer, I flew to Israel and I bought a Star of David. It had an ‘M’ on it for Marie and I took it to the rabbis by the Western Wall and they all blessed it. And then I came home and gave it to my mum,
“She had breast cancer for eight years and when she died, she had that Star of David in her hand. When she died, she opened her hand and it fell onto the bed and I’ve worn it ever since.”
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Why I was expelled from cheder
“I WENT to cheder but I was listless. When I was in cheder, I was chewing gum, and the rabbi said, ‘Gurvitz, take the gum out your mouth’.
“I told him I wasn’t chewing gum and took it out of my mouth and stuck it in the siddur to hide it.
“So when he walked up to my desk, he couldn’t find the gum and then he opened up the siddur, and it ripped the page.
“I was kicked out of cheder, and from that moment onward I just didn’t have that affiliation to carry forward.
“I was barmitzvah, but it was a nightmare. My grandfather died the day before and he had been due to come up on the bima. My father was not allowed on the bima because he committed adultery. I think my uncle came up there with me.
“My mother didn’t have much money for the party so they did it in the back garden, and there was a bomb shelter in the back garden in Ilford where we lived.
“It certainly wasn’t the same as the ones that I gave my kids.
“They all had the greatest simchas anyone had ever seen in California.
“I was determined to give them all exactly what they wanted, because I didn’t have it.”
