Paaarty on! Another year, another star-studded birthday bash for a long-dead icon of that wonderful stuff they call whiskey..

Yes indeed. The good folks at Jack Daniel’s have been throwing birthday celebrations for their namesake founder for almost a decade now, featuring the likes of Flaming Lips, Hugh Cornwell, Roisin Murphy, Tim Murphy, Patti Smith, Frank Black and Juliette Lewis. Nowadays, Jack Daniel’s tends towards studied cool, creating once-off unusual musical matches. Last year saw Brett Anderson, John McClure and Carl Barat playing alongside The Silver Cornet Band. This year’s celebrations took place on October 7 and found a trio of UK stars – velveteen crooner Richard Hawley, former Pulp frontman turned acclaimed DJ Jarvis Cocker and pop star of the moment Ellie Goulding – joining forces with legendary Tennessee guitarist Duane Eddy at the Clapham Grand in London.
Hot Press was privileged to attend the rehearsals for the gig the previous day, but what happens in rehearsals stays in rehearsals. So to the upstairs bar of the Clapham Grand, where Jarvis Cocker, Richard Hawley and Duane Eddy held a press conference with a roomful of journalists and TV/radio crews (a tired and emotional Ellie Goulding literally fled from the room when she saw the size of the press posse).
Here are some of the highlights...

RICHARD HAWLEY: “It’s a great honour for me and Jarvis to be here. We love Duane’s music. The first record I ever got given by my dad was a copy of Yep!, which had ‘Three-30 Blues’ on it. And my dad said to me, ‘If you can be half as good as that, you’ll be ok’. So it’s great to be sat here with Duane now.”
DUANE EDDY: “He ended up ten times as good!”
RH: “Duane’s got a special talent. He’s the hardest curry eater I’ve ever met. I took him out to this curry house in Sheffield, and I couldn’t believe it.”
JARVIS COCKER: “Often when you play, when you write songs and stuff like that, you might say to someone, ‘It needs a bit here – do a Duane Eddy bit’ or something. It’s like the shorthand of songwriting. It’s amazing to think that before he made that sound, it didn’t exist. That’s quite a thing. From a guitar-playing point of view, he really moved things on. Without a doubt, Duane’s influence was as massive as Bo Diddley’s or Chuck Berry’s.”
RH: “Originally the plan was for the show to be a lot more polarised because we’re three different entities, but then we all started playing together and it just worked immediately. I think that’s because the basic core of mine and Jarvis’s music comes from Duane. It just seems to fit.”
HOT PRESS: Richard, you were in tears listening to Duane playing at rehearsals yesterday. Does his music often have that effect on you?
RH: “I’m as soft as shit, but when Duane started playing that track, ‘First Love, First Tears’, it had me in tears. It’s just the way that he plays it. I always loved listening to it anyway, but just being there sat on the sofa with Jarvis as he played it, I just couldn’t handle it. It was just great, really tender playing.”
HP: Duane, in 1960 you ousted Elvis from the No 1 spot as the NME’s ‘World Number One Musical Personality’. Was he pissed off?
DE: “No, he wasn’t. I met him several years later. He didn’t refer to that but he did refer to the thing with Disc magazine, and said he’d been No 1 for 15 years in a row. I thought back and thought that 15 years also covered the NME thing. I don’t know if he was trying to tell me something, but he was very proud of all the awards he got. It was a big honour for me, but I never looked at music as a sport. I always looked at it as an art. So contests and so forth really don’t impress me that much.”
HP: Did you know Elvis well?
DE: “I met him several times. The first time we spent the whole evening talking and going back to the very beginning. And he got out his briefcase and showed me his badges and things.”
HP: Did he show you his DEA badge?
DE: “Yeah, he did. The reason he had that was because, like he said, people would come into the backstage dressing room in Las Vegas or some other big city and start bragging about some huge cocaine deal they had going down. Because they’d want to compete for the girls – you know, there’s Elvis Presley standing over there – ‘We’re gonna bring in 40 million pounds tonight’, and all this kinda stuff. And Elvis was standing there listening thinking, ‘I wish there was somebody I could call to put them onto these guys and put a stop to this’. So when he got to the White House and met the director of Drug Enforcement, he asked him about it and they gave him a card with numbers to call in all the major cities, so if he saw something, he could call them and alert them to it.”
Richard, are you still working with Lisa Marie Presley?
RH: “I’m still writing with her. We’ve been writing for about a year. We’ve written some – what I consider to be really good – songs. There’s no great plan to do anything apart from write at the moment. She got up with me when we played Shepherd’s Bush Empire, which I thought was really brave of her as well. It was quite disconcerting for me, looking at Lisa Marie Presley every time I turned around on the stage.”
Any advice to people who want to make a living as a musician?
RH: “My advice to anybody who’s gonna set out to make music is: don’t think that it’s gonna be your career. It’s kind of a way of avoiding having a career. The most evil word in the English language for a musician or any artist is ‘compromise’. If you compromise you might end up being successful, but what you’re successful with won’t be something that you really love and that you’re telling your truth. If you compromise, you’re making music for other people – and never try and second guess what audiences may or may not want. You’ve just gotta do what you do, and stick to that and don’t veer from it.”
HP: Jarvis, what are your feelings about shows like The X-Factor?
JC: “I’m hooked. I feel like I’ve got some terrible addiction. I was at me sister’s the other night and I watched it – both Saturday and Sunday. I know I’m not supposed to like it. But it’s not about music. It’s about celebrity and fame. It’s really obvious with this one because, as has been in the papers all this week, two of the girl singers can’t actually sing. They can cry. But I understand that: that’s part of the thing that attracts people to music in the first place – wanting to be famous. But X-Factor kind of marks this thing that it’s just about being a pop star. There’s other stuff that’s about making music. Tonight’s about making music.”

It was certainly that. More than 1,000 competition winners, journalists and invited guests were in attendance in the Clapham Grand (which had been transformed into a Nashville music hall for the evening) to witness this once-in-a-lifetime musical evening. Having obviously recovered from her attack of nerves, Ellie Goulding opened the show with her hit record ‘Lights’, immediately setting the pace for a memorable night. Highlight of her set was undoubtedly ‘Starry Eyed’, but this lady sure knows how to entertain.
Duane Eddy was up next, dressed in his trademark Stetson and cowboy boots, captivating the audience with some of his most twangingly enduring hits, including ‘Movin’ N’ Groovin’’ and the brilliant ‘Rebel Rouser’. A beaming Richard Hawley joined him for a memorable ‘Girl On Death Row’. At the press conference Richard had told journalists that sharing the stage with his idol was “fulfilling a lifetime ambition”, adding “If I die ten minutes after playing together, it’ll be with a huge smile on my face.” Fortunately, he survived.
Country and blues artist Pete Molinari joined Eddy for ‘The Tennessee Waltz’, before Hawley returned to play his own set, opening with ‘Someone To Find Me’. Other favourites included ‘Tonight The Streets Are Ours’ and the romantic classic ‘Open Up The Door’.
Jarvis Cocker’s arrival was greeted with huge roars of approval, and while his Tennessee-inspired set (beginning with a masterful cover of the Everly Brothers’ ‘I Wonder If I Cared As Much’) went down a storm, the best was yet to come. He brought on special guest Chas Hodge (of Chas & Dave fame) for ‘Memphis Tennessee’, but the absolute highpoint came when Hawley and Eddy returned to help him perform Pulp’s ‘Something Changed’. Lest anyone forget, Hawley was a member of Pulp during their mid-90s heyday. Seeing the old bandmates playing with a living legend – and serious inspiration – was a real treat.
Then, the encore. Ellie Goulding returned to collaborate with Eddy on a stomping ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’’ (which saw the audience enthusiastically pick up the chorus). Cocker, Hawley and Hodge returned to close the night with Eddy’s timeless classic ‘Peter Gunn’. It was an almighty finish to a truly unique show.
All told, another memorable once-off from the good folks at Jack Daniel’s. This one will prove tough to top ... but I’m sure they’ll manage. Until next year!