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Still hanging in the air
John McCoy was interviewed by the Rock Daydream Nation podcast. It is supposed to be a long form chat, of which an excerpt has been posted. Here John speaks about the demise of Gillan band and the bitterness that it left behind.
Thanks to Uwe and steve4422 for the heads-up.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
I have always liked John McC’a way of playing the bass.
But this interview is a bit ‘he say – he say’
I don’t know what happened for real.
Truly sad though that they couldn’t agree to get along.
June 2nd, 2025 at 09:50Always thought he was the odd looking bloke in the band 🤷🏻♂️
June 2nd, 2025 at 11:49John is – to adapt a phrase from Paul Simon – still bitter after all these years. All ex-GILLAN members seem to be with the exception of Janick Gers and we now know why: He had a different contractual arrangement and was likely just on a wage.
Between John’s bitterness about allegedly having moneys withheld from him (which I consider somewhat delusional/wishful thinking as GILLAN was never near Rainbow’s or Whitesnake’s international success, GILLAN was irrelevant in the three largest record markets: US, Japan and Germany) and Ian’s (not the most economic mind as certain events in his life have demonstrated again and again – have you ever heard that Roger Glover ran out of money before he rejoined Ritchie in Rainbow like Ian repeatedly did before 1983 when he found a good deal with Sabbath?) “I couldn’t finance this out of my own pocket forever”-stance, it seems fair to me to assume that Ian and his management did certainly not handle this well or with the transparency warranted to address his band colleagues’/co-shareholder’s concerns (even if based on shaky economic analysis).
Far from accusing Ian that he stole from his bandmates, I think he co-created/let happen a situation that headed towards disaster once his initial subsidies ran out. That said, John’s thinking that a few TOTP appearances and sold out clubs & colleges circuit tours in the UK are an indication of a band actually making enough money to support five members well is incredibly naive.
PS: I’m not aware that Ian appeared at gigs in a Rolls Royce (“cause it’s good for my voice” —> Marc Bolan), I saw him in 1982 in a right hand steering vintage Jaguar Mk II with Brit license plates
https://m.atcdn.co.uk/a/media/w600/b49b8c04946441b493d91ce149516944.jpg
a nice enough vintage car, yes, but hardly a demonstration of affluence (or of deeper knowledge on the reliability of cars for that matter, my first wife once owned an E-Type Mk II 2+2, I speak from traumatic experience regarding the horrors of British car technology 😌). John McCoy taking that to be a “Rolls Royce” would be akin to him deeming TOTP gigs as evidence for a good cashflow of a band. Looks can be deceiving.
June 2nd, 2025 at 12:31I guess we will never know the absolute truth but for my money , the truth lies somewhere in between what they both say .
June 2nd, 2025 at 13:34It is strange how it just sort of ” collapsed ” after that last gig at Wembley in 1982 ( I’ve got a bootleg of that show and they play brilliantly)
I know for a fact that Ian planned to have his tonsils out after the Magic tour and take a six month break .
I do believe there is some substance and truth to what John McCoy is saying though . However, for my money, I suspect Gillan was fed up with funding it all and all the others moaning about money all the time ( he has said as much himself) and when the Black Sabbath thing came along…he jumped at the chance to have some fun again , knowing the Purple thing was just around the corner .
It really would be interesting to get Colin Towns views on it all …but I doubt he is that bothered considering he is now a very successful TV and film composer !
McCoy says the Gillan band was big everywhere and played big big arenas earning lots of money..Well..thats not exactly true
June 2nd, 2025 at 13:43the last few years of Gillan they were big in Britain, popular in most European countries and the rest of the world didnt even know they existed.. and sayings like Gillan himself came to the gig in a Rolls Royce or a fanzy sportcar is pure nonsense..
I dont know if John was high on something during the interview…
If Gillan was a money thirsty guy he wouldnt have supported the “everybody gets the same share” from the writing credits that Purple reintroduced after Blackmore left.
Im not saying Ian Gillan is a saint.. far from it.. but most of what McCoy spits out I choose not to believe.
Cheers!!
@4
“However, for my money, I suspect Gillan was fed up with funding it all and all the others moaning about money all the time”
– well, for my money, this sounds about right!
The other band members may have thought that he had stuffed the mattresses with all the money he had, but as we have established over and over again, he has spend the most of his money on other projects.
On the other hand, I do find it pretty selfish to expect Ian paying for everything all the time!
June 2nd, 2025 at 16:02@3
“GILLAN was irrelevant in the three largest record markets: US, Japan and Germany”
– well, well, well, do we really need to go down that road again Uwe!?
June 2nd, 2025 at 16:04Gillan was VERY popular in Denmark 😃
And maybe we’re not as great as our big brother in the south, but we matter!
@5
“I dont know if John was high on something during the interview…”
– well to me John McC seems genuinely hurt 😞
In love-relations (and I am not suggesting anything ‘in love in Ian’ from John’s side, but a deep friendship torn apart can hurt as much as a ruined love affair) sometimes people tend to forget reality and start to remember things as they weren’t.
I sincerely hope John will heal, cos he is a magnificent bassist, and to me he seems like a good bloke (aside from the Gillan-thing).
June 2nd, 2025 at 16:12I think Ian is a saint with best intentions that eventually ran out of money to do good things, hiding that fact from his bandmates for as long as possible. It happens.
GILLAN was NOT commercially successful as a band, period. TOTP appearances mean nothing (you don’t get paid for them) if you don’t have corresponding sales. Not a single GILLAN album or single went gold anywhere in the world. Except in the UK where they chalked up two meek silver records (nothing to write home about for the ex-singer of an album sales behemoth like DP), the band had nowhere else even respectable sales. And the UK album market, though culturally very relevant, just doesn’t shift numbers: To attain gold status in Germany you needed sales of 250.000, in the UK only 100.000 (which GILLAN never had).
This whole “GILLAN was very successful” is a UK-centric myth sans any backing in sales figures, as (un)true as the statement “Jag E-Types were reliable cars”. Fuck all they were. 😂
June 2nd, 2025 at 16:29Uwe, Glory Road went to #3 and Future Shock to #2 in the UK. So they were more than a club act 🙂
June 2nd, 2025 at 17:13I don’t think that McCoy lies here, he likely believes in his subjective truth, he just has little idea how rock band economics work. Things like that it gets hard (to close to impossible) to run a profit if you (i) have zero radio airplay in the largest rock radio market in the world, namely the US, (ii) never even tour the US and are not willing to do the hard work as an opening act (like Rainbow did for REO Speedwagon or WS for Mötley Crüe even when they had released 1987 already), or are not spectacularly successful (and I mean Status Quo-spectacularly successful) in the rest of the world to compensate for your lack of a footprint in the US market.
I’d be surprised if GILLAN ever had better sales than, say, Dr Feelgood in their mid to late 70s heydays, Dr Feelgood was largely a Brit phenomenon as well, meaning very little in other markets and totally irrelevant in the States except maybe in some college dorms among a few specialists. McCoy‘s suspicions that treasures have been hidden from him just don‘t rack up.
Now Karin can say her little sentence how GILLAN‘s all eclipsing fame in Denmark should have seen them through! 😂
June 2nd, 2025 at 18:00@10: They were still playing clubs despite chart positions. 🙂
June 2nd, 2025 at 18:17Very sad to hear this and it’s not something anyone would want to take to the grave.
June 2nd, 2025 at 19:33Some people say when you die your whole life flashes in front of your eyes
My advice is to always pay what you owe as no one escapes death.
It’s not too late to reconcile and clear the air.
Money goes to money
Yes it always returns
Finds its way back to the big house
Where it lives all alone.
Peace ✌️
@9 Correlation is not causality and yet… There seems to be a weird similarity between the business dealings of certain hard rock and metal singers. They all would start another stage in their careers with a tight bunch of talented musicians who were promised a good share in the future success. When the success materialized, though, those musicians would all be shown the way out and be replaced by hired guns. Pure coincidence, I’m sure. I won’t name the names, either. We all know’em.
June 2nd, 2025 at 20:56They certainly weren’t playing clubs in the UK…in fact, pretty much the same venues as Purple played from 96 to 2007 …don’t forget , their last ever gig was Wembley Arena ! …and they headlined Reading festival..at least once ?
June 2nd, 2025 at 21:07And Gillan loved to tour , UK tours would often involve 40 plus dates !
I’m not defending anyone….just saying exactly what they were doing …and they were definitely big in Japan and the far east.
A lot of people equate chart placings with continuously strong record sales, gold status or filling large halls, none of this needs to be the case however. You can be #1 and not have a gold record in sales, GILLAN’s chart placings were snapshots and perhaps showed a devoted core of fans pre-ordering the album, it didn’t mean that their albums were huge sellers or that they were making inroads with the general record buying public.
SLADE had an incredibly long series of top five hits in the early 70s and were selling out Wembley Arena in the UK, yet after two years of unsuccessfully trying to crack the US market they limped home skint and were soon relegated to playing working men clubs once more until they again rose to fame when they had the chance offer to replace a scheduled Ozzy at Reading (he wasn‘t ready to perform yet) and used that opportunity to remind everyone with aplomb how good a live act they were – by that time they had technically already dissolved.
Peter Grant demonstrated it to all: Wrap up the American stadium and arena circuit for you and you have a sound economic basis to tour efficiently, generate money and popularize your records – Led Zep played fewer gigs than DP during the first half of the 70s, yet they mostly played them in the US and in very large venues – the economies of scale in a huge country with many venues and excellent (back then!) infrastructure. GILLAN didn‘t have those economies of scale at their hands (and with all due respect: Phil Banfield wasn’t Peter Grant) and they were never really on a forceful upward trajectory like, say, Def Leppard who went from Sheffield garage band to US megastars in the course of a few years and a recorded output of only four studio albums.
John McCoy is hanging on to a delusion IMHO, it has become an obsession, GILLAN were as a commercial venture never more than between C and B league for a scant four years. I don‘t know from where he is dreaming up that supposedly withheld money, he would have earned more as a professional wrestler. In Germany, DP‘s core market, GILLAN releases (unlike Rainbow or WS) were not even anymore regularly reviewed in German rock mags between the late 70s and early 80s, DP had faded from memory (how I hated that!), Ian was regarded as a has-been and even among the metal brigade GILLAN weren’t deemed as cool and promising as Iron Maiden, Motörhead, Saxon, AC/DC, Scorpions or Judas Priest. None of this was really justified by the quality of GILLAN‘s music, I know, but a gold digger‘s dream that band wasn‘t.
June 2nd, 2025 at 21:38Liebe Karin, Danish women may be the best cooks (and coffee maids) and Danish men the best lovers in the world, but there are just not enough of you (true quality is always scarce!) to support a rock band operating internationally! 😂
June 2nd, 2025 at 21:48@ 5 – Wiktor, I don’t recall John saying anything about “big big arenas:”is someone else ‘high’ here, I am not sure?………………Has this article been dug out just for an excuse for a pile on……hmmmmmmmmmm. It is good to hear the other side to a story though. Two similar peas in that same pod again with two ex DP members eh? Anyway, it was Ian Gillan’s band, I am not justifying anything untoward should be accepted at all, but that is usually what happens with certain people who are the main act and have certain control over proceedings isn’t it? Thankfully not everyone behaves that way. The interview needs a day job me thinks, gossip tv good morning am or something similar. Cheers.
June 2nd, 2025 at 21:49No one came from miles around, and said, who’s he?
June 2nd, 2025 at 21:53Ian Gillan told me years ago that he had his accountants investigate McCoy’s claims and they were unfounded.
June 2nd, 2025 at 22:20I suppose the truth lies somewhere in between.
I did see Gillan in Trondheim (Norway) i March 1982.
– Talked to Jannick Gers, he arrived with the roadies
– McCoy, Towns and Underwood arrived in… a Rolls Royce
– Gillan himself flew
When the Rolls arrived I noticed that the windscreen was gone. A few minutes after the guys went into the hotel, Gillan appeared with a temporary windscreen (plastic/metal slats). Got a few words with Gillan, nice guy! Great concert also!
June 2nd, 2025 at 22:25I do hope John is ok health wise as he looks and sounds a little frail in this recent interview. Mind you, I have not noticed him for a long time in any media articles, it could be just that. He needs to air the story of Gillan as he would realise there is only a certain amount of time left, for us all. And as that popular saying says ‘there are two sides to every story’. Regarding his past musical journey, I didn’t realise John had briefly played with Curved Air and was asked to join the band back in the 1970’s. An interesting musician and all round good guy, good luck to him. Cheers.
https://dmme.net/interviews/mccoy
June 3rd, 2025 at 00:43At the core of all this is that Ian jettisoned the whole band when he could no longer support them financially. And he tried to camouflage that with pro forma reasons such as his voice issues because no one likes to admit that he is skint and approaching bankruptcy. He went back to being an ex-Purple with royalties flowing and a contract as a well-paid hired hand for Messrs Iommi and Butler, the other guys had the rug pulled from underneath them. McCoy, Tormé and Underwood never found suitable employment again. Janick scurried via Bruce Dickinson’s band eventually to Iron Maiden and hung on for dear life there. Colin forged his own career outside of the fickle rock and pop business with soundtracks, television work and by arranging jazz concerts for radio orchestras in a heavily state-subsidized environment. That even he remains bitter about how Ian ended GILLAN speaks volumes though. Badly handled.
If Ian and Phil had divulged figures and told the other members, look this is what Ian did in the past, we were never even close to break-even, but he can’t continue doing this, then the views of McCoy & Co. might be different today.
That said, I doubt whether “official accounts” the band members craved for would have given them a truthful picture of GILLAN’s financial situation. There are lies, awful lies, blinding lies, and then there are the books of touring rock bands, which are notoriously cooked. Most musicians are not really ardent and joyful tax payers and being on the road in the 70s and 80s gave you a multitude of possibilities to channel funds in a way they would not show up in the official books and fall prey to the taxman. Some creative accounting.
PS: Ritchie, when tried in Vienna for kicking an over-eager bouncer in the face, thereby breaking his jawbone,
https://youtu.be/jHvOhuK4mUw
had the nerve to (under)state his income in 1977/78 with “500 GBP weekly plus a house and a car” 🤣 – never trust a rocker’s declarations on his assets!
Needless to say, the Vienna Criminal Court didn’t buy it, but rather “assessed” Ritchie’s proceeds “as bandleader of Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow”. He still got away lightly with damages around 830 GBP to the victim sentenced. His trademark pointed stage boots likely cost more.
June 3rd, 2025 at 00:58Looking on the sites that archive such things, I believe they played Wembley once, mainly doing Hammersmith Odeon / Manchester Apollo / Glasgow Apollo and similar size gigs.
Obviously, they also headlined Reading and Monsters of Rock. I do not know what you got paid for that sort of gig.
But, in the 1980s, touring – especially in Britain – was priced to at most break even, and was seen as a way of selling records. There was so much competition, prices were kept low. Ticket prices in America were always much higher. In 1977, Led Zep were charging £1.50 in Britain and $9.00 (somewhere between £5 and £6) in the USA.
But neither Rainbow nor Whitesnake had cracked the US market – at least for record sales.
At this point, I am not sure if they were outselling Gillan in the UK, though both, Whitesnake especially has sold a lot more since – on the back of the late 1980s success.
June 3rd, 2025 at 08:25Big In Japan, Steve? They didn’t even tour there except very early on when Steve Byrd was still in the band. IGB were big in Japan, maybe their more cerebral music found an appreciative audience there. I remember GILLAN doing a Far East tour of countries other than Japan though, but that struck me as a bit of glorified sightseeing, not a proper tour with prestigious venues like Budokan.
June 3rd, 2025 at 10:47That’s sad. The band was so rock good. As a big DP fan and a rock fan if I could choose between Whitesnake, Rainbow and Gillan (1979-1982).. I would always choose Gillan as the best option. Especially the Bernie Torme era. I remember the last performance in 1982 … Heavy metal festival in Zagreb, it was Gers on guitar. Gillan were the hosts of the program (Mororhead, with new guitarist Brian Robertson, Uraih Heep promoted the current excellent album “Abominig”, then Budige, Atomic Rooster…Gillan performed along with SOTW and performed first time “Black Night”.
June 3rd, 2025 at 12:07Obviously, without success in the USA, bands could not exist… Blackmore understood that in 1979, Coverdale in 1987.Big Ian is not … although his band was fantastic
Daniel @10: And Dr Feelgood‘s live album Stupidity even went to #1 in in the UK Charts in 1976, yet did not attain silver status, which would have back then required a monetary revenue of GBP 100.000. So the Feelgood‘s legendary number one record did not even generate a revenue of GBP 100.000 before tax and whatever record companies, pressing plants and retail stores claim as their share. Not much to split among four musicians, their publishing and their management, is it?
By the time the GILLAN albums charted in the early 80s, silver status was tied to 60.000 sold vinyl albums or tapes. Again, those are not substantial wealth-generating sales.
June 3rd, 2025 at 15:1340 years of bitterness.
What a waste of time, effort and life.
June 3rd, 2025 at 19:48You can only do without the US as a market if you have one or more major other sales regions under control: Quo failed in the US big time, but were heroes in Europe, the UK and Asia/Australia. Barclays James Harvest had the German market in their pocket in the late 70s and early 80s, but were met with derision pretty much everywhere else and Uriah Heep could support themselves for a long time via their strong German sales and considerable German airplay too. But the UK market alone is not large enough to support a band to the exclusion of the rest of the world.
That is why bands that make it in the UK have to branch out quickly – which they normally do because the British music scene has such a pole position in the world. But it doesn’t always work.
Why GILLAN failed in Germany (by the standards of a DP split group at least) is beyond me. Ian had deity status in Germany in the early 70s, we had Karins everywhere, I tell you! He was deemed handsome and a legendary singer — > Child In Time, Coverdale and Hughes could not establish themselves like that with Mk III (Mk II had a more widespread appeal, Mk III was regarded as “only” a heavy rock group), even critics who joked about DP as such, grudgingly admitted how good he was.
And yet … DC soon eclipsed him from a much less established position (no doubt aided by Jon and Little Ian becoming scales of the serpent, but you have to ask yourself why they preferred joining WS to joining GILLAN or Rainbow).
But when I read that early GILLAN couldn’t get arrested in the UK and had to take up Acrobat’s offer of a record deal while at the same time in Germany even something as esoteric as Nick Simper’s Fandango found a label and distribution, I do wonder whether Big Ian was properly managed at the time. During the IGB era he severed ties with his old management accusing them of embezzlement —> Money Lender on CAT – years later he would sheepishly admit that he was wrong about that and had simply been wasteful with his DP earnings himself. He then didn’t have a proper management at all until he elevated Phil Banfield from tour promoter to manager, a choice that had Bernie Tormé despair and eventually led to their disenchantment with another.
I find it telling that Ian’s one good commercial move outside of DP – joining BS – was NOT orchestrated by Phil, but came about as a chance event after the singer’s drunken stupor. Apparently, even a drunken Ian made economically more wholesome and successful choices than his own manager.
There was no conspiracy against GILLAN and no reason why they should not have – properly produced, properly managed and sent on proper tours – gone as far as Rainbow (not the most resounding success either, but Ritchie could at least pay his musicians at any given time) or WS (eventually a resounding success though it took nine years and many line-up changes to get there). I think Big Ian is simply not very strategic with his career choices and did not have (or chose to not listen to) better advice. He has no one to blame but himself.
Knowing him, he likely prefers it that way. 🤣
June 3rd, 2025 at 20:14