Patrik Fitzgerald - The Troubled Musician

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For me I didn’t have a plan at all. Was Polydor a step forward in my career? There wasn’t much thinking involved in the move. At the time to be honest Pete had had enough of doing the label and thought he’d sell off a few assets and make some money and I was an asset. I did feel I was treated as a commodity. I don’t think I even consulted on the decision to sign with Polydor and my stuff was signed to them. I did feel shipped out by Pete from Small Wonder. Then I got a couple of managers and they dealt with Polydor. It all became quite corporate. From then on that’s where the whole thing largely died for me because it became like a business. In the 80s it changed back with Red Flame.

   
With Polydor I didn’t understand how things worked and they didn’t understand me. They signed up people and were prepared to throw out 50% off people to the knackers yard. They would sign up everything that moved then you would be expected to play the music game, get a PR person to get in the papers and shell out money to get yourself in the charts so you could stay on the label. That wasn’t why was I doing it. I did it for enjoyment and I naively thought if it was any good then it would sell and if not then it won’t. The reality was very different.
   
My first experience with Polydor was an eye opener. They came to see me and the Jam play in Portsmouth Guildhall and afterwards one of the people from Polydor asked me ‘what’s my image? That was the first and only question. I said ‘I don’t have one. My songs are my songs.’ They obviously thought right ‘we‘ve got a real one here.’ Very similar to my experience with the music publishers earlier. Later I got a big lesson in how labels can kill you stone dead by owning rights to songs and publishing rights. They can refuse to license tracks or demand huge amounts of money that makes it not cost effective to release them. All that kind of crap.

I don’t know if I sold more records with Polydor because I’ve never seen figures. I consider myself quite lucky in that lots of bands came out of contracts with massive debt whereas I didn’t but most of what I’ve done between then and now could be termed negative equity. I don’t see anything by way of royalties or figures for sales. It seems to be a secret society. Even now it’s the same; things don’t change. You would want to wonder why anyone would want to get involved in a rock star life.

All The Years Of Trying

All the years of trying, all the many interviews,
To get your views across, but they always got lost
You always 'nearly made it'
Your records never sold as many
As your record company hoped they would
And you never made, you never
Never made the top thirty

But you did sell some records
Sold them to the ones that wanted them
Who'd treasure them, and keep them with their other souvenirs -
Never to be sold

All the years of trying, all the many interviews
To get your views across, they always got - lost
You always 'nearly made it'
Your records never sold as many
As you hoped they would.
But now you've made that one
That elusive one
Now you are a failure
And you are a success

And after all the years of trying.

(Patrik Fitzgerald, 1978)

 Indeed you would and you sense from Patrik that he was never quite sure what he wanted. The only thing definite was he wanted to perform and to express and articulate his thoughts, feelings and ideas. As a loner and a misfit at an early age, impressions was one way to elicit a reaction. Later the stage was that opportunity. The showbiz baggage and expectation that came with the music biz always sat heavily with him.

World domination for PF. What was it all about? I don’t know. Things just happened to a large degree. I was always good at shooting myself in the foot and if there was any chance to become successful I would always make the wrong decision but for fairly good reasons. If I had gone on to be mega popular it probably wouldn’t have been what I wanted to do anyway. I don’t know. It was a chance to do something I liked doing and that was as far as it went.
   
Anybody that gets on stage has to be looking for some kind of attention on a reasonably big scale or why bother really. When I was a kid I used to imitate people and it would make my parents and relatives laugh and forget they didn’t like me. Suddenly I would get relatives and old school friends who wouldn’t associate with me before because they thought I was total scum, now suddenly being my best friend. I would think OK what’s changed. All very strange. I could see that anything to do with music is bit of an act. I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with performance. A lot of it is just total fake.

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