>>>When Judd Apatow discovered Graham Parker and the Rumour as a young teenager, he liked the music—stripped-down, stylish rock tinged with soul, blues and reggae, slightly snarling yet full of melodic hooks. But what he liked best was that Mr. Parker was funny. "I kept buying everything he put out," says Mr. Apatow, the producer-writer-director of numerous movie and TV comedies.

 

Last year, Mr. Apatow decided he wanted to meet him, and they had lunch in New York. For his new movie, "This Is 40," a sequel to "Knocked Up," Mr. Apatow was looking for a aging, low-profile rock star whom the main character, played by Paul Rudd, would sign to a record contract. Mr. Parker, who had disbanded the Rumour in 1981, let drop that he was putting the band back together. "I thought, that's the perfect hook. It was this bizarre parallel reality," the director says.

Not long after, Mr. Parker was on a Hollywood movie set with his former bandmates. "They brought their kids, who'd never seen them playing together before," says Mr. Apatow. "It was a very emotional day." They made an album last year, but Mr. Parker decided to wait to release the album, "Three Chords Good," until Monday to capitalize on the movie, which opens Dec. 21.

"I'm happy that a guy who wasn't getting much is getting attention for playing somebody who doesn't get any attention," says Mr. Apatow.

Mr. Parker, who turns 62 Sunday, has been living in New York's Hudson Valley, raising a family, playing soccer and skiing, writing fiction (including a short-story collection called "Carp Fishing on Valium") and making music. He self-produced records every couple of years while also performing at smaller venues, usually solo.

Mr. Parker talked at Dreamland Recording Studios, a converted 19th-century church near Woodstock, N.Y. Edited from an interview.

How, after 31 years, did you put the Rumour back together?

I'd talked with Brinsleyfive or six years ago and the idea came up and he was like, we were so good, why come back and be bad? He's a professional luthier now—he fixes guitars. Andrewis a librarian in Yorkshire. I was quite happy doing solo gigs, and if I'd thought about it I probably wouldn't have gotten in touch with them—too much trouble. But everybody was very positive about it, and when we started playing I knew it was the right thing.

What were your early musical influences?

When I was a kid in the mid-'60s, I was what's known as a moddie boy, a prototype skinhead. You all had your hair like a crewcut, cropped, with suits or levis with red suspenders, sometimes Doc Martens. It was a thriving soul music, Motown and ska scene, we used to dance to Prince Buster and the Skatalites. It was an underground scene—what made the charts was maybe Johnny Nash, a sweeter version. The first thing I learned on the guitar was "007 (Shanty Town)," Desmond Dekker. After that it was English blues bands: Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, Blodwyn Pig, Savoy Brown. I grew my hair long. John Mayall and Ten Years I left school when I was 16, and a couple of years later I went to Guernsey to pick tomatoes. I got into psychedelic music big-time, Santana, Pink Floyd, David Peel, "Abbey Road," anything that had drug references and was trippy. I went to Morocco, joined a band called Pegasus, ran out of money, went to Gibraltar and worked on the docks, writing songs about the sun and the morning and the birds.

Then I moved back home. My dad was a stoker in a hospital for many years, he'd do night shifts, rolling tobacco with a huge cup of tea and open all these massive furnaces. When he got a bit older they gave him a job driving nurses, they gave him a cushy job. When I'd made it in my career, I retired him, got him out of there. It was one of the best things I ever did. He was a soccer player and the war came along and ruined everything for everyone.

The new record sounds a lot like "Howling Wind." Your music has been remarkably consistent.

To have a certain blueprint, it's like the gift that keeps giving. I don't feel any desperation to go Brazilian on your ass After I went back to England, I started playing music that was totally counter to what was going on around me. Suburban England was still into that progressive music. You'd have long hair and a denim suit, the audience would be sitting cross-legged on the floor waiting for the drum solo, Rick Wakeman dressed in a wizard hat. Then it changed. Before David Bowie figured out he wanted to be a rock and roll star, he wore a dress and played 12-strings at festivals. T. Rex didn't want to be Tyrannosaurus Rex anymore with a guy playing bongos—Marc Bolan was not going to be singing songs about gallons of flowers and hair and unicorns. I saw these guys coming out with this stuff, and I thought, this is what's coming down the line. It's gonna be 3½-minute songs. I started to work up in my old bedroom, playing, writing songs, and it somehow came to me that I could introduce soul music. Nobody seemed to be doing that.

You were described as an "angry young man."

Back then, irreverence wasn't in the music. I didn't come out of a punk rock environment. The Sex Pistols hadn't happened yet. That changed when "Never Mind the Bollocks" came out and all these kids, they knew they didn't like ELP. They had their own music. I couldn't copy it, I had my own style. People say to me, you've really mellowed out a lot, but that's not true. "Howling Wind" had ballads, some of it I even think is maudlin now. It wasn't, "I'm going to tear your liver out and nail it to the door."

I never wanted to sing in an arch English accent. America is rock 'n' roll, the root is from Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. It's all extrapolated from that, from ska, from soul music, I don't know how I still manage to write songs. It's the same deal now as then. I've got a guitar and I don't know what I'm doing. I never learned music. I'm quite uneducated, and usually I sat in front of the TV, with soap operas on, in England. It was very inspiring for me, I'd done all this traveling around, I came back living with my parents, everyone around me was like they're living in a soap opera. Every Sunday everyone came outside and would washed their cars. It was like "The Stepford Wives." It gave me inspiration, like, I've got to tell these people where it's at. I thought, this will get me out of the suburbs. I wanted to make something of myself, Often, musicians are shy. I didn't want to be one of those—I wanted to grab people."

You came to America twice in 1976.

Our manager said. we've got to get to America, and we did, in a station wagon. And believe me, if you thought England was behind the times, in terms of music appreciation...People really didn't know what we were doing. They though of it as some kind of light pop music. A couple of years later, Arista said the usual thing, we've got to break you in the Midwest, so go open for Lynard Skynard and Journey and Blue Oyster Cult. We'd open for these bands, 10,000 people who hate you. But there are always people who come up now and say, I saw you with Lynard Skynard and it blew me away. I say, "Wow, you're a very odd man." We got big in a hurry in New York and the West Coast. The Midwest was still a mystery apart from Chicago. We didn't really take off.

You get tired of Elvis Costello comparisons.

In every interview or review I have to see his name and Joe Jackson's, as if we hung out at the pub and it all happened at the same time.is one of the best songwriters ever. But what I always think is that seeing as I pre-dated these guys a little, with all due respect, does my name ever appear in their interviews? People forget that for a year and a half, Graham Parker and the Rumour were top dog in this kind of music.

I met Elvis back in the day before he had a deal, he came to our gigs. He had a band called Flip City, I went to see them, thought it was pretty weak. It wasn't til Stiffthat all of a sudden he goes balls to the wall, a whole different thing. He basically reinvented himself with this extraordinary album, produced by Nick Lowe, and now Nick's career is off and running again. It's that time of my life when you do analyze history a bit, you can't help it.

What are you listening to these days?

There's not much, I drive around and listen to alternative radio, band after band with abrasive voices, abrasive guitars, all sort of whining about how nobody understands them , their girlfriends or something. I think, "You aren't alternative, why aren't you dealing with what's really going on? You're just whining about yourself." I hear this alternative music, and and critics are drumming it up to be much more than it worth, perhaps because they have jobs to keep, with all due respect. They can't wait to get the new weirdest band in town and really make a deal out of them. Yeah there doing some weird thing, using those instrument, whoop-de-do, where are the songs? I read a lot. Watch the news a lot. I could be on a desert island and if I had amn Internet connection I'd still be following American politics. It's hilarious.

You write fiction and post it on your website. What are you reading right now?

I'm reading "Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms," about creatures that came from the time of the dinosaurs and escaped extinction. A book on shrimp, two on eels. I just read "Chasing Venus," all about the Transit of Venus and Halley of Halley's Comet, all these astronomers who went around the world in the 1761 and 1769 to figure out the solar system. Incredible stories.