“I think it was in my mind that the Loophole, which seems so prevalent in society in general, represents a way out. Or a shortcut,” explains Mick Head, when setting out to discuss the title of his new and 11^th studio album. “Someone said to me, around the time we were coming out with Dear Scott: “You know, Mick, it’s like you’re in a bubble, nobody can get to you!” and, you know, all I could say was “The bubble’s boss for me at the moment!”

Head’s recent past is a redemptive story of as many tight bends and no fewer complicated turns for Head than the mazes he’s had to find ways through over the past four decades. It was a treacherously low ebb, facing the deadest of ends, from which Head could find a path to his defiant, love-filled present. Dear Scott, his universally-acclaimed second album with The Red Elastic Band, released in 2022, arrived in the world alongside its bewildered author at a time of still precarious fragility. Even with new light tantalisingly within reach, and in the midst of a new wave of attention, perhaps adoration, Head was still in a self-preserving bubble. In his loophole.

The inner sleeve to Loophole, his new album, a collection of 12 new tracks that bounce like dice over the snakes and ladders of the sunshine, love, loss and jeopardy in the life of Michael Head, is dressed with 17 words – from Addiction to Detox, Pills and Music to Danger and Love. Carefully chosen, they provide the emotional and factual orientation points of the album to the listener. The album is the story of his lives, those far in the past, the one lived in the passing shadow of more recent, alcohol-related tumult and that which has only just begun.

“I was taking anti-depressants after rehab,” Head says, going back to a moment of epiphany. The parting of clouds when he decided to do away with the crutches he’d been handed. Escape from his bubble and break out of the Loophole. “People used to say to me “you’re on those things for life!” and even then, I was like “we’ll see about that!” So, I started reducing the dose myself. The next doctor’s appointment I had, I told him what I was doing and he said: “Do it then, come off them!” At that point, I was really scared.”

That determination over fear led Head to love he always knew was there. Married in late 2023, to a companion he first met at the heart of a 90s rave, the romance that so many have found in his music has been made real in his world. His decision to return to living independently, feeling ready to take the leap at the tail end of his initial recovery, was heavily motivated by the need to reconnect with his children, daughter Alice, now also his manager, and sons, Sonny and Arlo, with the latter the artist behind Loophole’s artwork. They have both accompanied their father on his way back to health, seeing his face more regularly than ever on birthdays, on bike rides and on stage.

Happenstance preoccupied Head on Dear Scott. That album’s first single and lead song, Kismet, dealt with the unannounced kindness of strangers. Reminiscing on rehab attempts in the 1990s, Head remembers that they ended with being abruptly shown the door – “They wouldn’t even call you a cab. Next minute you’re in your flat, on your own…we know what happens next.” – leaving no mystery why it didn’t work at the first or fourth attempt. He couldn’t do it alone and a chance meeting with a fan of Shack in rehab, his famed, post-Pale Fountains band, proved that, if he’d ever achieved anything through his music, it was touching at hearts that overflowed with goodwill and a want to help him when he needed it most.

“A lad and a woman passed me and he said: “Alright Mick, love the band!” and that was it, we went back to our rooms. Bit by bit, we met again, went for walks and detoxed together, he was the only one I talked to. His wife is a nurse and, after I’d had a bad fall, they turned up at the hospital and offered to take me back to their house. I agreed and got a full dose of reality from them, because suddenly I was living with them like a family. It was a wake-up call. Because she was a nurse, she knew how to reduce the booze. She broke it all down for me, took me through it, the insomnia and everything. Step-by-step.”

Lovingly, and with every breath of authentic scouse affection, Head refers to the couple as ‘Angels in boss trainees’ given their proximity to divinity and obsession with sports shoes. When he decided to leave them to go back to his own flat and stand on his own two feet once more, the pair would continue to leave hot meals on his doorstep. They are on the guest list for his hometown shows whenever they occur.

Ciao Ciao Bambino, the first single released from Loophole, spoke immediately of Head’s reflective headspace, putting the listener by his crib as his mum sang the much-covered, mid-century Italian standard to him as a baby. Announced later that Head was working on his autobiography at the same time, the parallel projects immediately made sense together. So it was that most of the songs on Loophole were written at home while his notepad was open at many of the pivotal stages of his life, remembering what had been forgotten in preparation for the memoir being published.

“Most writing gets done in the kitchen, because the kettle is there. I had started in the attic but it was freezing in there!” he explains. “I found out you need a system, so I’d get up early and get hours done, but then head back up to the attic for a spliff or a coffee, where my guitar is. So, I’d start playing. When it came to ‘Ciao Ciao Bambino’ that just fell out of me. I said to myself: ‘You must have known that was coming’ and, of course, I did, because I’d gone back there for the book.”

The clouded panes of Head’s storied past are clearing, page by page and song by song and Loophole’s songs reflect both the writer’s lyrical candour but sonically, if only for the fact that the playlist of his life – from hearing Manfred Mann drifting from a distant radio as his family prepared for relocation to a new build flat in the 1960s (“We had a bathroom!”) to the first, sledgehammer encounter with Bowie’s music – is playing louder in his head. However, it’s not only other people’s songs that came to mind. Coda puts a line in permanent marker from Loophole to the memory of a dearly-loved friend and bandmate and a cherished song from Shack’s classic HMS Fable album, released 25 years ago this year.

He explains the journey, saying: “The Pale Fountains came back from London in 1985 and Biffer (Chris McCaffrey – co-founder, died in 1989) and I were just sat in his bedroom and wrote a song called ‘G to G’, but nothing happened with it after that. Years later, when we were doing ‘HMS Fable’ I came back to it and it became ‘Comedy’, which became a really important song after we played it live. We play it with The Red Elastic Band, but I’d started playing this riff at the end years ago, not knowing where it was going, but it was the foundation of something… we took it into the studio and now we have ‘Coda’. It completes ‘Comedy’ after all these years.”

For all the sense of kismet in Mick’s life, some things still emerge to him as fixed and non-negotiable, especially in the year that he marks four decades as a recording artist, celebrating the 40^th anniversary of Pale Fountains’ Pacific Street. When it comes to songs, he knows what he’s doing. Going back into the West Kirby studio of his producer, Bill Ryder-Jones, he already had it clear how the album would open. Shirl’s Ghost, a ‘Toxteth ghost story’ inspired by a spirit trapped in his home, would be first. Ambrosia, a conversational walk-through of a trans-European journey with Pale Fountains, leaving tour manager, ‘Eastie’ outside an Alpine pizzeria and having to affect a hasty rescue, while ‘tripping our heads off’ would come second and so on. As with Dear Scott, Head and Ryder-Jones were simpatico.

“Naturally, the more we work together, the more we understand each other,” Head says. “Bill takes beautiful chances, he’s really brave. Other people won’t understand where I am going with my songs more than me, but he’ll go ‘right!’ and then do something that will blow you away. Those strings at the end of ‘Fluke’ (from Dear Scott) or the little riff on ‘You Smiled at Me’… he doesn’t say ‘I’ve had an idea… do you mind?’ He just does it.”

Bill lines up alongside family as a new constant in Head’s life, but so do the members of The Red Elastic Band. Largely intact since the release of 2017’s Adios Señor Pussycat, the seven years of music making and friendship counts for something. In 2024 they head out to play some of their biggest shows together to date, but perhaps none grander than Head’s homecoming to a full Liverpool Philharmonic Hall in December. Could there be a more fitting place to complete the latest chapter in the life of one of the city’s most prolific documentarians in song and, soon, the printed word?

“We’re going to make a beautiful occasion of it,” he promises.

As a man – songwriter, author, bandmate, father, husband, brother and friend – whose reputation is increasingly one of determination and seeing things through, it would only be a fool who would bet against it.

Buffalo Tom

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