| According to Wreckless Eric himself he dropped into the then relatively new indie record label Stiff Records to hand-over his demo tape. Huey Lewis was manning the desk that day and Eric handed over his tape, uttering the now famous words "I'm one of those cunts that bring tapes into record companies." And thus a punk legend was born. Now 60 years old, Wreckless Eric is still keeping the garage punk ethos alive. When many singer/songwriters of his generation have given up and settled for comfy slippers and doing TV commercials to make ends meet Eric is still touring and writing music and creating art. His iconoclastic rejection of Stiff Records after only 3 albums propelled him into the realms of an industry outsider in true punk style. Uncompromising in his pursuit of his art he even shunned the uber cool American indie record label Sympathy For The Music Industry after the release of his single Joe Meek (1993) by them. In 2012, the painter Peter Blake named Wreckless Eric as one of the most important pop icons of the past forty years, and included him on the remake of The Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s cover where he takes his place between David Hockney and Grayson Perry. |
| On December the 10th, Wreckless Eric headlines the launch of the Hull Music Archive website in the city he wrote his classic hit Whole Wide World, acclaimed as one of the best punk songs of all time. Eric took time out of his busy touring schedule to comment on his thoughts about being asked to play at the Adelphi in Hull to launch the website. |
I'm honoured and thrilled to be asked to launch the Hull Music Archive. Hull is the city where I began my rock n roll career when I came to the Hull School of Art & Design in 1973. I wrote Whole Wide World on a park bench on Cottingham Road, and my band Ruby and the Takeaways played it every Friday night at the Bull pub on Beverley Road, with Graham Beck on keyboards.Twenty five years later I met my American wife Amy Rigby, not 'on a tropical beach somewhere', but in the Bull where we met and played Whole Wide World together. Hull, to me, is very much the 'home town' gig, and will always hold a special place in my heart'.' X
Eric Goulden, somewhere in the UK, 20\11\2014
