Known to many as the extremely talented guitarist with rock legends Ten, Chris Francis is rapidly becoming a legend in his own right as a successful a solo artist.  After hearing his most recent release 'Studs n' Sisters' (the review of which you can find elsewhere on this site), we just had to find out more from the man himself ...  
 

MM - What bands/artists did you grow up listening to and how have they influenced the way you approach your music today?
Chris - I grew up listening to pop from the 80’s – Michael Jackson, Madonna, etc. but it wasn’t until I was in my teens that I really got into music and it was definitely rock and hard rock all the way for me.  I was really into Bon Jovi from about the age of 12 and when I was about 14 or 15 I was getting into Guns N’ Roses, who were about the biggest thing going at the time, but it was really hearing some Van Halen (‘Hot For Teacher’ and ‘Poundcake’ as I remember - It was a Wayne’s World special on MTV). 

At around this time I met my good friend Rich Barnard and he was really clued up when it came to the good shit and introduced me to a lot of great rock bands.  It was stuff like Poison, Cinderella, Tesla, Winger, Aerosmith, Slaughter, Ratt, Warrant, Extreme, The Quireboys, Danger Danger – all this stuff I never would’ve been exposed to.  1992 was a VERY strange time to be getting into this stuff.  It was like arriving at a party and being far more interested by the people leaving than those who were there for the night. 

I hated the grunge thing and the alternative scene that was going on at the time.  It was obviously a reaction against something but I hadn’t had a chance to enjoy what it was a reaction against.  So in the early nineties my taste was sort of underground.  A little later as I reached my twenties I started to really get into stuff like The Rembrandts, Del Amitri, Jellyfish and more singer/songwriter type of stuff, but as a musician, guitarist and fan I was always a hard rock nut.

My favourite guitarists are Eddie Van Halen, Nuno Bettencourt, Blues Saraceno, Warren DeMartini, Andy Timmons, Steve Vai, Steve Stevens and Brian May.  Influential albums are Van Halen ‘1984’, Extreme ‘Pornograffitti’, Blues Saraceno ‘Hairpick’, Aerosmith ‘Pump’ and Jellyfish ‘Spilt Milk’.  I’m really moved by inventive guitar playing and melodic composition.  As far as how I think any of it has influenced my music, I don’t think it’s for me to say.

MM - You are working with TEN and you are also working as a solo artist. What kind of work do you personally prefer? Solo or with a band?
Chris - My solo career is all about my own material and I have 100% control over it so it’s going to be special to me for those reasons.

MM - What’s new on the TEN front?
Chris - There’ll most likely be a new album next year.

MM - What part of writing, producing or playing do you think brings out the best in you as a musician?
Chris - Probably writing and producing, which I love.

MM - You also do some lecturing at Thames Valley University, how do you find time to fit everything thing in?
Chris - I really enjoy doing that.  It’s something different and it’s rewarding to get a positive reaction from the students.

MM - How do you like to relax when not out on the road or recording?
Chris - I love comedy, so I enjoy watching DVD’s of shows and programmes as well as going to live gigs.  Going to the pub is always a good use of time, I find, as well.
 

MM - What made you go for a solo career as well as playing in TEN?
Chris - The solo career actually came first.  I always loved writing music as well as appreciating and playing it so a band, solo career or both was always going to be important to me.

MM - I found your ‘Studs n’ Sisters’ album very assessable as a non playing music lover, was this your intention from the off or did it just evolve that way?
Chris - It was definitely my intention.  I don’t really think of it as an instrumental album as much as I do a melodic rock album.  It is in no way aimed specifically at guitarists/ musicians, just rock fans. 

MM - The album boasts a very unlikely cover of Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’, why did you choose this particular song for the album?
Chris - I am a child of the 80’s and it’s a great pop song.  It was a lot of fun to do.  I had to use a talk box to emulate the effect of the male backing vocals and recreating the strange little vocal yappy dog-like sounds and stuff that she does in the original was a good challenge.
 

Instrumentals are notoriously difficult to name so when logging ideas I would just give them working titles to identify them by.  So the system I used was that each one was a ‘bitch’.  ‘Light It Up’ was originally called ‘Disco Bitch’, ‘Used-To-Be’ was ‘Ballad Bitch’, ‘You can Dance Better Than That’ was ‘Shuffle Bitch’ and so on.  The heavy metal spoof was filed as ‘Death Bitch’ and that title just stuck because I thought it was funny (particularly because it doesn’t actually mean anything). 

When I’m recording/producing I’m just constantly reacting to what I hear in my head, so while I was listening back to the rhythm guitar parts for ‘Death Bitch’ I could hear that it needed some dialogue like clips from a movie over this certain section.  This lead to the idea that the song was from the soundtrack of a fictional film of the same title, which I imagined would be an eighties slasher movie type of thing. 

My cousin Jon is a big film buff and he’s very much into his creative writing so I asked him to write some scenes that we could record, add atmospherics and sound fx to, and then insert excerpts into the track and make it sound authentic.  So he wrote this great stuff and we hired some actors and created the scenes.  I then kind of caught the bug of this concept and decided that each track would have a movie theme attached to it (though most of them without excerpts). 

My brother Sam works in television and he’s really into writing and showed me a sketch he’d been working on.  I loved it and thought it was hilarious so we worked it into the concept and that became ‘Pickle and Baby Bear’.  By the way, most of the songs were not supposed to be from the soundtracks of these fictional movies; just abstract representations of the films, so it’s all a little strange.  Anyway, my friend, Rich, had given me a dictionary of hipster slang for Christmas and I started using this as a source of song/film titles, thinking the project could take on a 1920’s/1930’s vibe but within a heavy metal context. 

Anyway, so here’s the weird part: I’d read the entry for “studs and sisters” in the book and felt that it expressed the duality of my style; the timbre of power chords and punchy drums married to emotive melody and harmony.  Turns out, it’s not in the 30’s slang book, so who knows where it came from - must have been hitting the sauce.  Originally it was just a song title, but I decided to make it also the album title because I like the sound of things like ‘Sex and Religion’ and ‘Guns n’ Roses’.  There was a lot of great dialogue stuff that didn’t make it onto the final versions too so perhaps that’ll come out at a later time. 
 

‘Studs N’ Sisters’ – A cool, fun, melodic, bluesy track.  Feel-good rock n’ roll was the plan here.

‘Sometime Lady Crazy’ – Maybe if Danger Danger wrote instrumental rock it might sound a little bit like this.  Kind of commercial melodic hard rock, featuring a reverse-reverbed tom hit break-down à la ‘Nothin’ But a Good Time’ by Poison … you’re welcome.

‘Light It Up’ – funky hard, hard funky, funky hard rock.  I had a lot of fun with this track and it’s lifted by some great horn parts giving it the kind of effect heard in a lot of Aerosmith or Extreme, or I’m thinking of 90’s British blues hard rock like The Little Angels.  I was absolutely honoured to have possibly my all-time favourite guitarist Blues Saraceno guest on this one with his always outrageous tone and phrasing.  ‘Light It Up’ gets pretty rowdy.

‘Used-To-Be’ – This is a very melodic, soulful and emotive ballad that takes the listener on quite a journey whilst essentially resting on a simple, fragile, naked melody. 

‘Lift The Dogs’ – A major-key, Van Halen influenced, windows down, driving hard rock tune.  It features my friend and Ten band-mate Steve McKenna on bass.

‘Riding For A Fall’ – This is about as dark as my music gets, but it has rays of light that pierce through in places; It’s a ballad but very unlike ‘Used-To-Be’ and  it features a lot of free, expressive, bluesy, emotive lead playing that I’m very proud of.

‘You Can Dance Better Than That’ – A boogie really, that is made all the more playful by the live brass section, arranged by Rich Barnard; It’s a good-time snappy number.  I also had a lot of fun creating the percussion loop for the intro, which was built up from sounds made by me flicking my cheek and sweeping a brush on the floor among other things.

‘2^nd Base’ – Something completely different;  This one is kind of like 80’s soul, which I don’t really listen to so I don’t know exactly how this came through my creative unconscious, but it did.  Anyway, it became an opportunity to cop a smooth old tone and throw some wrong notes into my melodic phrasing.  My good friend Jon Perry plays a killer guest solo after the first chorus too.  It’s ultimately a pop track – I don’t think that it’s jazz of any kind.

‘Death Bitch’ – How has it taken this long for someone to write a metal tune called ‘Death Bitch’?!  This one’s a short, sharp comic-book heavy metal track, with horror movie overtones.  Again the idea is fun.  There’s a bit of actual shredding in this one too.  Also I lost a bid for a Theremin on EBay so I thought “bollocks, I’ll try to get that sound on guitar”.  I used a Fernandes Sustainer system and whammy bar to get the effect I was after. 

‘Sunday Nite @ The Sauceboat’ – This is again dialogue and is the sequel to ‘Pickle And Baby Bear’.

‘Material Girl’ – The only song on the album that I didn’t write.  It’s just a master class in pop song-writing, and also I just thought it was funny for a guy known for playing in a heavy metal band to record a Madonna hit.

‘Deleted Scenes’ – Gratuitous and reprehensible!  I thought I’d put all of the mindless guitar jamming in one place so I could keep an eye on it and make sure it behaved itself. The outro guitar duel between Blues Saraceno and me from ‘Light-It-Up’ was ‘comped’ down from a full seven odd minutes of trading licks – THIS IS THAT WHOLE JAM.  One for the guitar-heads out there.

MM - I know the two earlier solo albums are instrumentals but have you ever thought of putting words to any of the songs?
Chris - Well, not those that I’ve released – they’ll stay instrumentals, but I have a ton of material in music and lyric form that I’ll be working on in the near future.
 

MM - How long have you as an individual been performing and can you remember the first time you ever played in front of a live audience?
Chris - I’ve been performing for about twelve years and I remember my first time was with my school band Way Cool Junior in the school hall and all of our peers were forced by the school to watch!  Strange in hindsight – I thought that rock n’ roll was supposed to be despised by the authorities – we must have been doing something wrong.

MM - As a musician you probably listen to a wide variety of music, but is there any genre(s) that you simply refuse to listen to?
Chris - I generally hate dance and hip hop music.

MM - What do you think about the current trend where radio/music TV shows can make or break a band overnight?
Chris - I don’t think it’s anything new.  I’m sure radio in the fifties had the power to make and break acts, and music-based reality TV shows are no different from any other reality shite, it’s just about desperately trying to keep viewer attention while getting them to phone in so they believe that the whole thing matters and they matter and they can be sold a cheap thrill, so I doubt that affects the music industry at all.  What is a problem is people not paying for music.

MM - What do you feel has been your proudest achievement to date?
Chris - Continuing to play melodic rock.

MM - What does the future hold for Chris Francis?  Do you have any projects in the pipeline?
Chris - Yes, a lot.  I just need to prioritise and make the time for them, but continuing to put out new music whenever I can is the plan for the future.

MM - What advice do you have for any young up and coming guitarists?
Chris - Stop reading this interview, get off the internet and play your guitar.

MM - Finally any words of wisdom or messages you’d like to share with our readers and all your fans out there?
Chris - I’m hopefully still too young to have words of wisdom.

MM - Well there you have it folks, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from the great man himself Mr Chris Francis.  We'd like to thank Chris for taking the time out to chat with us today and wish him every success with his music.  If you haven't caught his new album yet then check it out, it's major league impressive.

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