ONE OF THE GREAT MAVERICKS OF ALTERNATIVE POP, IT’S TAKEN 40 YEARS FOR PETE WYLIE TO CREATE A DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO HIS SINGULAR WORLDVIEW. SINCE STARTING OUT ALONGSIDE IAN MCCULLOCH, JULIAN COPE AND PETE BURNS IN LIVERPOOL’S FAMED LATE-70s ERIC’S SCENE, VIA HIS WAH! COLLECTIVE WYLIE HAS CREATED MANY FABULOUS VARIATIONS ON MEANINGFUL POP. AS HE NOW TELLS US: “I DUCKED OUT EVERY TIME IT LOOKED LIKE I WAS GETTING A FOLLOWING.”
JOHN EARLS
T his house is called Disgraceland, for obvious reasons.” Pete Wylie guides his laptop camera to give Classic Pop a tour of the living room of his home in Liverpool. It’s a riot of colour, impossible to keep track of the collection of books, Funko Pop dolls and memorabilia on the shelves. There’s a painting of the singer by Pete Townshend on the wall. More of that later.
After first sitting on his remote control – “Don’t suppose you want to watch Doctors?”, asks Wylie as the BBC1 daytime soap promptly starts up – the born raconteur spends the next 90 minutes recounting a life in service to pop music. “If all I had to do was music, I’d be fine,” summarises Wylie of his approach to life. “Some stupid person decided I have to live a whole life as well. Really, that’s the hard part for me.”
That interviewing Wylie is more like being entertained in An Audience With, a performance full of one-liners and unlikely yet plainly true tales from the periphery of the mainstream, will be no surprise to anyone who’s seen Pete – or any of the variants of his Wah! band name – in concert. “I’ll out-heckle anyone who tries to heckle me at the live shows,” he grins. “I talk, joke, mess around. People have told me: ‘That was brilliant. It’s a shame you had to play the songs in between.’”
There’s a serious side to Wylie’s mischief. During lockdown two years ago, he was diagnosed with ADHD. “The diagnosis explains a lot,” Pete considers, whose welcoming humour softens his burly presence. “People have told me: ‘Well, obviously you’re ADHD,’ but they’re just going on the tabloid headlines about what it means. It’s hard work a lot of the time. I can see how ADHD could cripple people, because at times it’s crippled me. But it’s been alright for me in the long run. I’ve achieved things that I’m chuffed about and lost things I might have had.”
He believes his condition might be part of the reason he became a musician: “The b
