Albert Hammond Sr wrote hits for Tina Turner while Albert Hammond Jr plays guitar in The Strokes. The rocking father and son talk to Alex Petridis
Albert Hammond Jr isn't looking too happy. The guitarist for The Strokes has recently stepped off a transatlantic flight to be met by a driver who serenaded him with one of his father's songs, It Never Rains in Southern California. "I was trying to sleep and he kept singing," he winces.
The driver will have had a lot of songs to choose from. Albert Hammond Sr started writing hit singles in the 1960s and apparently forgot to stop: he has sold over 360m records. He's best-known for the vast, slick AOR ballads written after he relocated to LA in the early 1970s: Leo Sayer's When I Need You, Starship's Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now, Tina Turner's I Don't Wanna Lose You and so on. His songs have been covered by everyone from The Hollies to Barry Manilow, kd lang to Perry Como, Julio Iglesias to The Beach Boys. His music was even borrowed heavily on Radiohead's Creep.
Ironically, when Hammond Sr - a small, middle-aged man with dyed hair and a crombie overcoat - enters the Royal Garden Hotel in London, he is immediately mistaken for Tony Christie. His son, by contrast, clad in thrift-store leather jacket, a black shirt and skinny tie, could no more obviously be a member of The Strokes if he walked through the hotel carrying a giant placard with "I am a member of The Strokes" written on it.
The pair are together in London because Hammond Sr is releasing an album, the surprisingly rugged Revolution of the Heart.
It's his first record in 23 years: he gave up performing when Albert Jr was born. "I said, I'm just going to write and produce, watch him grow up and spend time with him. I never had that kind of relationship with my other two children, my two girls. I didn't want to do the same thing with him."
He seems to have returned to the studio largely at his son's behest. "Yeah," he nods. "I made it because he told me to. He's been bugging me for years. He was complaining that he never got to see me on stage. I think he felt guilty that I stopped when he was born."
Now Hammond Jr is helping to promote his father's album, which seems extremely sporting given the number of column inches that have been expended on The Strokes' privileged upbringings in recent years.
"Well, they try to bring it up in a negative way, and I think it's funny," he says, in a tone of voice that strongly suggests he doesn't think it's funny at all. "I mean, I love my dad. I don't know what they think I'm going to say. People assume that you lead a socialite life like Paris Hilton, but when I was 15, I was at home, getting stoned and playing music with my friends. I was a dork. I think people assume I was driving around in a Ferrari."
In fact, Hammond Jr claims he didn't even know what his father did for a living until he took him to London to see the West End musical Buddy: "I was nine or 10 and I came back and I was going, 'Wow, Buddy Holly wrote songs and sang and I wanna do that.' He was like, 'Son, that's what I do for a living.' I kind of knew, but, you know, it's just your dad."
Despite his father's decision to take a background role in the music industry, life in the Hammond household sounds far from normal. Hammond Sr's collaborators and clients made a habit of dropping by: "Roy Orbison was the best one, man," smiles his son. "I'm such a huge fan of his, but at the time I was too young to fully get it. I was pestering my dad, like, 'How long you going to be in the studio for, man? Come on, let's go out!' Sometimes," he sighs, "you look back and you wanna kick your own ass."
The two of them make an intriguing study in contrasts. You suspect it has less to do with a difference in personality than the way the music industry and media have changed in the past 30 years. Hammond Sr is charming in a very old-school showbiz way, and clearly enjoys spinning a yarn.
"They used to call me the Number One Kid in the Sixties," he reminisces. "I used to walk into George Martin's office, throw my latest demo on his desk and go, 'This is the next number one'."
He is also not above the occasional paternal indiscretion: his biography mentions that prior to discovering rock music, his son was a champion roller skater. "It's weird it hasn't come out sooner," groans Hammond Jr. "The weird thing is, I used to skate in front of, like, 5,000 people and I was never nervous, but the first time I got on stage, there were four people there and I vomited."
No less friendly than his father, Hammond Jr nevertheless seems more wary, particularly of questions that he assumes have negative connotations. At one point, I ask if, in his teenage years, the sound of his dad's songs on the radio ever embarrassed him, and he looks so put out by the suggestion that I end up apologising: look, I wasn't trying to get you to say you hate your dad's songs ("It would have been fine if he had," chuckles Hammond Sr).
Later on, Hammond Sr mentions his son's songwriting ambitions - thus far, everything The Strokes have recorded has been written by lead singer Julian Casablancas - and he seems put out again. "I love the band," he says. "I love the songs Julian writes. I love working on them. I've learned so much from every band member. So it's nothing weird."
The big difference is in their career trajectory. Hammond Sr admits his has been "an uphill struggle". Attempting to get a rock'n'roll career off the ground in the unlikely environs of Gibraltar, where he was born in 1944, he was briefly reduced to begging. A string of flop singles followed his move to London in the mid-1960s. He relocated to LA in an attempt to write a Broadway musical, which also failed, while his solo career was blighted by struggles with his record label. By contrast, The Strokes became one of the hottest bands in the world within a few years of forming.
"I look at it, like, my thing was 30, 40 years ago and so it took longer," says Hammond Sr. "Today, with technology, everything's faster. For me to get to England took five days on a boat. For him to get here today took six hours on a plane."
So he was never wary of his son joining the family business? He looks shocked. "Oh no. He called me from university and said he had to choose between school and the band, and I said, 'The choice is made, it's the band'." Hammond Jr smiles. "It's his fault anyway. You told me all those stories." His father nods. "Many stories. One of my first gigs was in a strip club in Morocco: 22 beautiful women stripping all around me and me singing Johnny Cash songs. I was 16. I'd tell him stories like that. I guess I wasn't too surprised when he said he wanted to play guitar."