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If you submitted a film script based on the Shack story, you’d fully expect it to be sent back by the studio with plenty of red ink in the margins, asking you to make it a tad more realistic.

Mick Head, alongside brother John and often in conjunction with a high-quality rotating cast, have been through numerous reinventions and even more dramas. From the psychedelic cult band The Pale Fountains, through the brief but magical world of The Strands and all the way to playing back-up for childhood hero Arthur Lee of Love, the Heads have been wandering minstrels in the finest tradition.

Throughout their story, which started at some indefinable point in the 1980s and which includes their career retrospective Time Machine, the work of Shack remains the lasting testament to the fevered talents of one of Liverpool’s most treasured sons.

But the story is not always one littered with smiles and superlatives. Commercial indifference saw early releases fail to break the mainstream, while the death of Head’s band mate and best friend Chris ‘Biffa’ McCaffrey from a brain tumor cast a dark shadow over the band. After the formation of Shack, with Pete Wilkinson and Mick Hurst now in attendance, the bad luck continued.

Some of the band’s most coherent, mesmerising work to date was put to tape in sessions for the second Shack album, Waterpistol, but the master tapes were lost when the recording studio burnt to the ground. One copy alone remained, but the producer, Chris Allison, had misplaced the DAT in a taxi in the USA and by the time the musical search-and-rescue teams had recovered it the record label had gone to the wall and the album remained unreleased while the band floundered.

Sure, that would make for a belting mid-section in the movie, but even Hollywood would baulk at such an unlikely run of bad breaks.

However, Mick still sounds youthful and, despite the evidence, strangely invigorated. His passion for music, touring (and at one stage the prospect of ruling the world) is infectious. Bad fortune may have played its part but neither Head nor his music has been subsumed by it.

Mick's sunny disposition is not entirely unexpected, though. In 1999, after the reformation
of Shack, the triumphant HMS Fable saw the group shift more units than ever before, as well as some long-overdue fawning from the music press.

Recent times, meanwhile, have seen the band win a ton of plaudits for the off-kilter Merseybeat stylings of Here's Tom With The Weather and ...On the Corner Of Miles and Gil, while Mick's friendship with Britpop overlord Noel Gallagher (who now releases Shack's records on his Sour Mash label) has opened all the right doors.

It might be 10 or it might be 15 years since Shack started (Mick's not certain but what's five years between friends?) but as a band they've managed to come through the bad times in one piece. And if they're still standing now, a play about a pair of George Formby fans who argue over a unicorn surely won't be enough to sink the HMS Fable, though to find out exactly what that means requires up to 30 minutes in the company of Mick Head.

THERE'S A LOT OF PRESS INTEREST WHEN YOU RELEASE A RECORD. HOW DO YOU FIND DEALING WITH THE MEDIA WHEN THERE'S MUSIC TO BE MADE?
I'm busy with press all week, really. I've got a couple of things on a day, but it's not a drag at all. It's part and parcel of the business and, at the end of the day, I'm just talking about music - that's my job. People want to know what's going on.

SO,WHAT ARE YOU UP TO?
Well, Time Machine: The Best of Shack has come out, which is really good.We did a big tour to support it. Mind you, it's not as though we're Iron Maiden or something doing 40 nights in a row across the United States.We're recorded a few new things along the way at the same time because our manager owns a studio, so it all feels good.

FOR SOME BANDS A GREATEST HITS RELEASE IS EITHER A CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATION OR THE END OF AN ERA. IF YOU'RE ALREADY WORKING ON NEW MATERIAL, NEITHER OF THOSE SEEMS TO FIT THE BILL. SO WHY NOW?
Well, the first thing to remember is that it's not a Greatest Hits because we've not really had any 'hits'. It's the best of four or five albums we've been involved with and between the label and ourselves we thought, 'Why not?' Somebody said to me that Shack had been going 10 or 15 years, I think, so from our point of view it seemed right. I wouldn't say it's irrelevant how many it sells, but it's just been good to do. It's a great compilation of songs for people who have not heard Shack before.

WHAT WAS IT LIKE GOING BACK OVER ALL YOUR OLD ALBUMS AND LISTENING TO SONGS YOU HADN'T HEARD FOR YEARS? WAS IT HARD TO DECIDE WHICH TRACKS MADE THE CUT?
It was good. I'm not one to listen to my own albums once they're out, so that was nice. Basically the four of us from the band sat down - and Noel [Gallagher] had a say too.We said to him, 'If you can think of things you'd like on there put them in the hat,' and we decided.We've had people having their say on message boards and things, saying 'why didn't you put that one on there, why didn't you put this one on there' but you've only got 12 or 15 songs, tops.We've put out about 80...more

words: Rory Dollard

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