Drummer Mathew Priest from Dodgy told DJ Leona Graham on The Leona Graham Podcast the unbelievable story of how he first called Ian Brown of The Stone Roses ‘King Monkey’ for a joke in a press interview, which led to Brown coining the nickname and titling his first solo album ‘Unfinished Monkey Business’.
He also says that Dodgy’s hit song ‘Good Enough’ was written by accident by songwriter and frontman Nigel Clarke, who made a mistake when playing around with a sampler, and revealed how one awkward pub gig led to them setting up their own residency:
“I think it was after one disastrous gig, either The John Bull in Chiswick or The Greyhound in Fulham and it was literally one man and a dog. Literally. I know it's a cliche, but it was that, and we just thought, ‘f' this, we can't do this.”
Transcription of the full interview below.
A Side.
?Now it's the return of dodgy. What's been going on? Where have you been for the last 10 years? What's been happening?
We've been playing. It is just that the last album we released we were really happy with, well, most of it, ‘What Are We Fighting For.’ But things have changed so much since when we first started releasing albums in the nineties. And, you know, you release albums in the nineties…we were very lucky, you'd have an album and it would last a good year afterwards, you'd have singles released off it and tours but now people release albums, and it just drops off a cliff. It goes. I mean, even the big bands, you know, and that kind of like puts you off a little bit of recording albums. But we've been playing together nonstop, really. We don't stop 'cause we love playing with each other and we have a good time. But then we started talking about making some more music. So yeah, it's great. And, you know, it feels like the best one we've done. It really genuinely does.
And of course you're touring that at the moment?
We’re touring the new single, ‘Hello Beautiful.’ We're going out on tour for that.
And then the actual album's not coming out until May 1st, next year, 2026. But we're going on tour with Black Grape as well, which is gonna be good fun, in December. So a UK tour, then a month off, and then on tour with Black Grape.
Okay, brilliant. Can we go back to the beginning? How did you guys meet? I mean, how did it all start back in, was it 1990?
Well, me and Nig, we were in rival towns out in the suburbs of Birmingham. He was from a place called Redditch. And I was from a place called Bromsgrove. Well, I'm not from that place, I’m from the black country originally. And they were rival towns. They used to fight each other, Redditch and Bromsgrove, but Redditch was essentially built - its birth came about because Austin Rover was there. I mean, in its peak it had 40,000 people working for Austin Rover, and it was an overspill town. It was for people to live in for Austin Rover. But anyway, we met up. I was in a band and we needed a singer and in sort of 1986, and it was around the time of the cult and U2 and all that kind of stuff, he turned up looking like Billy Idol. He looked amazing. He was like six foot with blonde spiky hair, he had this kind of gravelly voice, and we bonded over The The ‘Infected’, I dunno if you know that album. It’s a phenomenal album. And he couldn't believe that a kid that was a couple of years younger than him knew this album, you know? And I couldn't believe a bloke that looked like Billy Idol knew The The. And we bonded and from then we formed a band, and then he gave me an ultimatum. I was, as I said, I was a few years younger than him, and he was already on the path. He had a fiance, he had a car, he had a job at Austin Rover. Quite a good job at Rover. And he said, ‘no, I'm going, I'm leaving. Do you wanna come with me Math?’ And I was like ‘But my mom, she thinks I'm going to uni,’ you know? So I had to convince my mom, and I convinced my mom, and that's it. We moved down to London and within a year or so we met Andy, and then we got signed.
Your mum's like, ‘oh, goodness.’
Well, she was so against it, you know. I didn't go to uni.
I can imagine your mom not being too pleased with that.
No, exactly. You know, I was the first kid in the family to go to uni, all that kind of stuff. I mean, I didn't do too well, at my A Levels because I was so in the band. My head was elsewhere.
And where did the band name, Dodgy, come from?
We were living in Hounslow West and it was a peak of hedonism, you know, the whole dance music and Primal Scream. And we went into London one night and, let's say we were “enhanced” and we thought it would be hilarious to call ourselves Dodgy, you know, dodgy t-shirts, dodgy records. And at that time, it was the whole loss of ego thing, because of the psychedelics and all that kind of thing. And calling yourself - being self-deprecating was kind of the thing, you know, well it was to us anyway. Not to be pretentious. That's why the whole rave culture ecstasy thing came about, it was about not being pretentious and having a good time and having good fun. And we were certainly coming out of that. And it stuck.
I've just completed a massive thing where I work as a radio DJ for Britpop, Brit Pop Summer, and obviously Oasis coming back has sparked a lot of Britpop bands to come back. How do you feel about that? Would you consider yourself part of the Britpop movement?
Well, it's a weird one. We didn't know about Britpop until we did an interview in Germany. We were on tour in Germany, would’ve been about 94, and they said, ‘so what is this Britpop?’ And we were like, ‘What? Well, we dunno. What do you mean?’ And it had taken hold as a word and as an idea and it took hold quite quickly. And we didn't know anything about it. So yeah, we were happy to surf that wave because there was a lot of excitement about it. But you look back on it and it's a bit of a misnomer because the nineties was about the Prodigy and the Stereo MCs as well, and the Manic Street Preachers and Radiohead and loads of fantastic bands that you couldn't necessarily put into this white-boys-with-guitars-Oasis-Blur-thing. And so when people say mid-nineties and they say Britpop…I mean, would you call the Prodigy Britpop?
I wouldn’t, no.
You know, ‘Fire Starters.’ Probably one of the greatest tracks from the nineties. And does that get sidelined?
I put that in sort of dance music. There's a whole genre of dance nineties as well. But Britpop is more guitar.
Yeah, exactly. And it's a weird one. You get lumped in with things and, yeah, because we had guitars - but we never felt part of it at the time.
Did you see Oasis or are you not a massive fan?
I saw them at the Hundred Club.
Wow. What, when they were quite small, right at the beginning?
They were doing a co headline tour with a band called Whiteout from Scotland, who we knew and we knew different people connected with Oasis. So I saw them at the Hundred Club and yeah, you just looked at it and went, of course they're gonna make it.
And talking of seeing bands in their early days, we just had a chat before this that I think I may have seen you when I was at university. My memory of university days is a bit hazy but you played there in the early nineties when I was still at Warwick University. So who were you playing alongside then?
Manic Street Preachers. I remember Warwick University. And it's the first time we played with them and they'd just come onto the scene with ‘Motown Junk.’ And they were really mouthy in the press and really gobby and we thought they'd be really gobby and quite confrontational in the dressing room, 'cause we had to share a dressing room, and they were quiet as mice and really nice and gentle. And whenever we see Nicky, even now, he’s always very nice and says hello and stuff.
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