David Balfe has had quite a life. In the Teardrop Explodes, he took amyl nitrate on The Old Grey Whistle Test and acid on Top of the Pops. As a music publisher he’s been involved with a multitude of bands from the KLF to the Proclaimers, and his record label signed Blur when they were called Seymour. However, he’ll probably be most remembered as the man immortalised in their 1995 smash Country House. “Balfey” actually lived “in a house, a very big house in the country.”
“That’s going to be the first thing mentioned in my Guardian obituary,” he chuckles. “I’m aware that the song isn’t exactly a paean to my greatness, but I’m genuinely proud about it. It’s the one thing you can casually drop into a dinner party and everybody goes, ‘What the fuck?!’”
Flattering or not, Balfe admits that the song’s description of a “professional cynic, and my heart’s not in it” is a “very accurate portrayal” of his situation at the time. By the mid-90s, after two decades in music, he was depressed and disillusioned, so he sold up and bought the “very big house” (in rural Bedfordshire) to raise a family. Now, though, he’s back, with Late Transmissions, a new collaboration with former Dalek I Love You bandmate-turned-film score composer Dave Hughes and glamorous Liverpool-based singer Eve Quartermain. The trio’s vibrant mix of 60s pop, film music and orchestral trip-hop is his first venture in music for over 25 years and his first as an artist in over 40. “But if you think about how difficult something is you’ll never do anything,” he says in a quiet pub in the ’pool. “I’ve always tried not to let anything stop me.”
Now 67, Balfe grew up nearby in Thingwall, on the Wirral Peninsula. In 1976, he was playing in a pub covers band with local pals Alan Gill and Keith Hartley when his younger brother came home with the Sex Pistols’ debut single, Anarchy in the UK. “I sneered at it the first time he played it,” Balfe remembers. “But by the end of the weekend I was ringing up Alan and Keith saying, ‘We’ve got to go punk.’”
The covers band hurriedly became Radio Blank: “The only punk band on the Wirral. You’d literally get beaten up for cutting your hair short and wearing tight jeans, so there were fights at every gig.” Then, as punk shapeshifted into post-punk, Radio Blank morphed into synth outfit Dalek I Love You, whose early line-up contained the future members of OMD. Balfe also played in Big in Japan, which included Bill Drummond who formed the KLF, Holly Johnson who started Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Ian Broudie who became the Lightning Seeds and Budgie who later joined Siouxsie and the Banshees. Balfe and Drummond formed Zoo Records to release and produce Echo & the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes, by which time they were at the epicentre of the region’s most explosive pop scene since the Beatles.
“It was exciting,” Balfe admits, “but we were all basically cobbling things together with our mates. We didn’t know what we were doing – there were no YouTube instruction videos in those days – so it sounded a bit fresh. Suddenly people were saying our ideas were revolutionary.” He chuckles. “Now people call us ‘legendary’, which we’ll never turn down, obviously.”
In a scene full of competitive characters, the Teardrop Explodes were particularly fractious. In his inimitable book Head-On, singer Julian Cope suggests that resentment towards Balfe started because “he shagged his way into the Liverpool scene”.
“Strangely, for a guy who’s not particularly good-looking, I was quite successful with women,” Balfe concedes, drily, “but as this new 19-year-old blond guy who was thrust into this scene, I had a unique chemistry with Julian. Being the band’s label head, manager, producer, publisher and keyboard player led to a lot of conflicts. He was the band leader, but I kinda outranked him, but he only punched me once. In fact, we’re very affectionate with each other these days.”
Back then, their high jinks were fuelled by hallucinogens. Cope has suggested it was Balfe that gave him the first tab of LSD which began his journey from “drug puritan” to the “acid king”, who subsequently appeared on a record sleeve wearing nothing but a turtle’s shell. But according to Balfe, “Dalek I Love You were inspired by surrealism and were talking about a new way of approaching acid. So I think Julian suddenly felt it should be his thing.” However, Balfe insists he was the only Teardrop tripping during their infamously berserk Top of the Pops performance of Reward: “I was so anaesthetised by acid that I didn’t notice I was banging the trumpet into my mouth, so I was bleeding all over it.”
After the band split, he moved to London, managing one hit wonders Strawberry Switchblade, whose song Trees and Flowers “suddenly went viral last year among teenage girls. Hundreds of thousands of people were downloading this obscure track.” His more modest successes aside, Balfe has always believed that “if you keep bumping into the right people, great things will happen.”
In 1987 he signed the Proclaimers to Zoo publishing after spotting them on Channel 4 show The Tube: they then sold millions. “For me it was obvious that Letter from America was an all time classic song,” he says, “but nobody got it.” Through going out with a secretary he met Andy Ross and they founded Food Records, scoring international success with Jesus Jones. “Andy played me Info Freako. They wore skateboarding gear so had a really powerful image. We saw them, took them out to dinner and halfway through the first course we signed them.”
With Seymour – Blur – he needed more convincing. “They had a pop side and a weird side. We went to eight or nine gigs, suggested they change the name, told them what worked and eventually it came together.” But not, longer-term, for Balfe, who sold his and wife Helen’s 75% stake in Food two weeks before the release of Parklife. “I made a lot of money, but I’d have made much more money if I’d stuck around,” he sighs. “It’s one of the great fuck-ups of my life, but I was suffering from depression. I thought that was confidential, so it was maybe a bit insensitive of Blur to sing ‘blow me down, I am so sad, I don’t know why’ and so on, but I’m a big guy. It didn’t really bother me.”
Between 1996 and 1999, he briefly returned as general manager of Sony Music and Columbia Records’ head of A&R – “I thought I’d see how the professionals did it rather than us pretenders, but there aren’t many secrets” – then left music.
Since then, he’s been a creative writing and screenwriting graduate and even a Labour councillor. “Because of Jeremy Corbyn. When Starmer kicked Corbyn out I left.” Meanwhile, Late Transmissions bandmate Hughes has had his own stellar career writing scores for films such as Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. “The film work was almost a substitute for not having a hip band,” he says, joining us in the pub. “The deadlines are so tight you almost kill yourself, but it keeps that muscle going.”
The pair had remained in touch and after starting work on songs inspired by Shirley Bassey, Dusty Springfield, John Barry and Scott Walker, they wondered who could sing them. “The internet is full of fucking singers,” Balfe says, “but then we found Jo.” That’s Joanna Brown, the torch singer who adopted the name Eve Quartermain after Hughes dreamt it. She joined the creative process and inhabits songs such as I’m Done With London [“… but London’s not finished with me”] with a mix of glamour and grit. “I’m an up person,” she says, “but I’ve had my share of tough times and tragedy to draw from.”
Late Transmissions have clearly rekindled Balfe’s enthusiasm, but he’d just like to put something straight. “The house wasn’t that big,” he insists. “A manor house. Three acres of land. Nowhere near as fancy as the one used in the video. But Julian Cope wrote a song about Bill Drummond [Bill Drummond Said] and Bill Drummond wrote a song about Julian Cope [Julian Cope Is Dead]. 99.9999% of the population aren’t even aware of those songs, but everyone knows the song about me.”