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SPOTLIGHT: LUKE 'SKYSCRAPER' JAMES
- D.G. Torrens
- Aug 13
- 18 min read
THIS
TWISTED
WRECKAGE
BIO:
Luke SkyScraper James: This Twisted Wreckage Band (vocals, lyrics, and guitar) has had a long and impressive career in the world of music spanning four decades. Luke was the original frontman with Birmingham post-punk band Fashion from 1978 to 1980, along with Jon Mullighan and Dik Davies who left a lasting impression on the music scene in the UK. Luke’s musical journey led to the eventual formation of ‘This Twisted Wreckage’ with Rick Humphrey. Their musical chemistry is nothing short of magical.
SUMMARY:
This Twisted Wreckage – were voted Band of the Year, by Wayne M on ’The Beautiful Freak Show’ - Big City Radio. Luke Skyscraper James: Vocals, Lyrics and occasional guitars. Ricky Humphrey: Music Composition, Synths, Guitars, Bass, Fretless Bass. Double Bass, Chapman Stick, Mixing and Production.
Together they make for an artistic, gothic, and often ominous version of modern alt-rock that’s highly memorable.
Q&As
DG Q: Your upcoming album release Floating? promises to be another compelling addition to This Twisted Wreckage’s catalogue. What can you share about the album’s essence and the inspiration that brought it to life?
Our last album, FEEDING FRENZY, was a direct general reaction to and protest against the current US administration and the rise of American oligarchs.
The upcoming album, FLOATING? was much more born out of dealing with daily life under that regime these last nine months.
The songs are less blatant than on FEEDING FRENZY, but nevertheless they address concerns around the shifting sands of what is happening here.
The new album poses questions and posits suggestions as to how to cope.
What do you do when you can’t tell whether you’re falling, rising, or floating in place.
Why are so many people content to live in their Netflix Burger King caves of denial about what’s happening to democracy?
What stories do you tell yourself about freedom? Do you still feel free? Do you still believe in freedom? Are you willing to fight for it? It all sounds very serious, and indeed it is, but you can definitely still dance to it. Head bang to some of it. Even float away on fluffy clouds of psychedelia.
I think that this is a much more ambiguous album born out of ambiguous times. But it also demands choices be made - in one instance very directly with two tracks that share the same basic music remixed – one called DOWN WE GO the other, UP WE COME. We are quite clearly saying the choice is ours!
And the musical composition and production that Ricky Humphrey has created is in my opinion at a whole new level of sophistication for the band. It’s such a joy and an honour to write lyrics and sing to his music.
DG Q: Could you offer a thoughtful reflection on your extensive musical journey that spans four decades?
LUKE: I first realised that I needed to learn to play guitar at the age of 14 when I saw Jimi Hendrix perform Hey Joe on the Lulu Show on our 13 inch black-and-white television.
By the age of 18, I was in an acoustic duo called The Alchemist’s Day Off, playing open mics and folk clubs in and around Birmingham, with occasional forays down to London.
I remember we did an open mic spot at Alex Campbell’s (father of the UB40 guys) folk club night at Digbeth Civic Hall. In the bar, after our three songs Fairport Convention’s bass player Dave Pegg bought us a drink and invited us to record a demo at his house. I think it was the first time I ever saw a reel to reel tape recorder. Dave played bass on the tracks and how many people can say that on their very first demo Dave Swarbrick played tambourine? So we took the tape down to London, going to EMI, Decca, and Apple, but at Pye Records, who at that time had Donovan and The Kinks, they verbally offered us a record deal to make an album. We came back to Birmingham and to put it mildly “celebrated”. At least until the letter came a week later, from Pye Records saying that they had changed their minds.
Now this should’ve been an early warning shot across the bows of my burning music career dreams, and one I would’ve done well to heed. But of course I didn’t.
Whenever my musical ambitions were rejected by everyone from my own father to record companies, my response has always been the same – I’ll bloody well show you.
So as singer songwriter Al James I continued to play in and around Birmingham for quite a few years until one night, in 1977, I went to Barbarella’s to watch this band called The Clash. And that was me done! I went home, shaved off my moustache, hacked my hair into short spikes with blunt scissors, razor slashed a black T-shirt, took a large studded dog collar off a large studded dog that I found wandering around Moseley and reinvented myself as Vince Drizzle.
For a while, I formed and was in a truly awful band called Rudi and The Rationals. We were so bad, that my own band fired me. The only good thing that came out of that band was one of the guys, Andy Downer, who went on to play with The Denizens.
Six months after having been turfed out of my own band I met this bloke with platinum dreadlocks in the dole queue who asked me to teach him to play bass because there was this girl he was trying to impress. And that was how I met Mulligan. A few months later, we played our first sold out gig as Fàshiön at the Golden Eagle on Hill Street.
The rest may or may not be history, but it is all in my book, Stairway To Nowhere - a sort of Brummie punk Spinal Tap, every word of it the truth, honest John! Available from lulu.com
Go on treat yourself – why should me and my mom be the only ons to have read it?!
Since quitting the music business in 1980, I’ve busked on the freezing streets of Cologne in front of a record store window plastered with a display of Duran Duran’s album Rio, I’ve played guitar and sung in a San Francisco dive bar blues band, I fronted a new wave band in Bordeaux, I was in the only punk band in Charlottesville Virginia, I played and sang in a California suburban garage band, I’ve performed flamenco guitar, I was in a late 80s alternative guitar band in London called Orange Car Test, and each and everyone of those projects served nothing other than the love of music. No more being a fortune and fame junkie.
In today’s internet blizzard there is no way that This Twisted Wreckage will achieve the recognition that I genuinely and quite modestly believe that it deserves. And I’m fine with that because the creative process with Ricky Humphrey is sheer magic.
DG Q: Who were the pivotal figures or moments that sparked your musical journey, and what influences have most profoundly shaped your artistic direction?
LUKE: When I was a naive 18-year-old singer songwriter, I would save every penny to go to as many gigs at Birmingham town hall as possible. I saw Thin Lizzy with Phil Lynott at Henry’s Blueshouse at The Crown on Station Street for 5 shillings in about 1970. The very same place that Black Sabbath played their first gig as Earth. God, I wish I’d gone to that! I saw Pink Floyd at Mothers, a club over a furniture store in Erdington. But I was mostly influenced by Roy Harper. Flat Baroque and Berserk as well as Lifemask were albums that I memorised.
Then I listened to this album called Hunky Dory and nothing was ever the same in my life again. It might be a cliche to say that David Bowie inspired and shaped my music but I don’t care because he did. He still does!
And of course, as previously mentioned, seeing The Clash at Barbarellas in 1977 totally sent me off the rails. And I’m happy to say I’ve not been back on them since.
DG Q: How did the name 'This Twisted Wreckage' come to represent your band’s essence, and were there alternative names that came close to capturing your vision?
LUKE: The name of the band came out of a song lyric from one of the early songs that we were working on. The song is called. BACK UP AGAIN and is on our debut album, EI8HT. It’s
a song about never quitting – a very common theme in This Twisted Wreckage material. In fact, the more we are encouraged to give up in the face of current social, economic, and political developments in the world, the more This Twisted Wreckage refuse to either give up, give in, or go away!
The lines in the song were:
“What do I do, lying down here?
In this twisted wreckage where nothing is clear.”
Ricky immediately jumped on the phrase and said how about we call the band This Twisted Wreckage.
It’s also a fairly accurate description of the state that I’m in these days!
DG Q: Can you share the origin of your collaboration with Ricky Humphrey, how you met, and what sparked your mutual journey into This Twisted Wreckage?
LUKE: One day I happened across a great band called Ishkah and I was going through a phase of being into bands like Dreadzone and Thievery Corporation. So I bought their EP on Bandcamp and messaged them saying how much I loved their music. The composer and producer, the driving force behind that band was Ricky Humphrey. So we emailed each other back-and-forth a little and then one day he asked me if I’d consider putting vocals to something that he’d written.
Around that time, I had been working with a guy called Eric S. Anderson. Eric told me that the Fàshiön Product Perfect album had changed his life when he was a 13 year old living in Wisconsin. It took him 25 years to track me down on a MySpace page– remember MySpace? Anyway, Eric asked me if I would be interested in recording some music with him as he was also a bass player. What I didn’t know at the time was that he had been the manager and one of the engineers at Pachyderm Studios where Nirvana recorded their album In Utero, as well as recording such artists as K.D. Lang, Killing Joke, and Sonic Youth.
Needless to say the standard of Eric’s playing and mixing were superb and we began working together.
Together, Eric and I put together a band called The Ghost of Luke James. I was frantically fighting heart failure at the time, which I successfully beat, and we recorded nine songs over a period of about a year. They’re all available on Apple Music and I’m still very proud of those songs.
When Eric had left Pachyderm Studios and the music business he went to film school and became an editor and director – he won two Emmys for his work on the opening credit sequences to Six Feet Under, and Dexter.
Eric became increasingly busy with other film projects, and my health was far from optimal at the time.
So I was kind of looking around for something to do when Ricky sent me his composition.
The piece of music that Ricky sent me was fantastic. The vocal I eventually recorded was born out of tragedy.
A couple of days after I received the track from Ricky, I got a phone call telling me that one of my closest friends back in England had taken his own life. I was shocked and didn’t quite know how to process what had happened. So I fired up Ricky‘s piece of music and just improvised a set of lyrics which I ended up calling The Forgotten Summer. We never released that song but it was the beginning of This Twisted Wreckage.
At the same time that I was dealing with my tragedy, Ricky was going through the wars himself. I’ll let Ricky tell it as it happened...
RICK: I had only ever communicated with Luke via Facebook. My fascination with the band Fáshiön had led me to him. I wanted to know more about the early days and the origins of the band pre Dave (Dee) Harris. As previously mentioned and due to the circumstances that unfolded, destiny if you like, brought us together.
I live in a two story apartment, it’s a converted army barracks and I am in what was one of the lecture rooms, the walls here are extremely thick, nearly a meter. My reason for sharing this information is because, the young lady below me was struggling with her mental health, and one day, two days before Christmas, she loaded the rooms up with gas bottles and ignited them, which in turn exploded and that in turn created a huge fire, which required 30 firemen to extinguish, she sadly but unsurprisingly passed. Although structurally the building was fine my apartment was smoke damaged and therefore left me and my wife homeless. My neighbours very kindly offered us a room, whilst the refurbishment took place. All I had to my name was my MacBook Pro and the clothes on my back, everything else was either condemned or in storage.
I was sitting around feeling lost, confused and dejected. This was also the time of lockdown due to Covid. I was on Facebook during this time and reached out to Luke Skyscraper James to see if he would be interested in collaborating, we were already Facebook friends but had only communicated occasionally. I had a few of what were to be NATURE KILLS demos kicking around and thought that that would be a good basis to start from as I had no access to instruments. Thankfully, Luke agreed to working on a track.
As Luke lives in California, this meant sending files over the internet, so imagine my surprise when I got back Luke’s first vocal. I was truly blown away, he had taken the bones of an idea and breathed life into it, changed the whole dynamic of the song, which in turn meant I then had to rework the backing track to get it to the next level. And that boys and girls is how This Twisted Wreckage was created.
DG Q: The chemistry between you and Rick Humphrey radiates through your music. In your view, what elements have forged and sustained such a powerful musical connection?
LUKE: It’s strange because many people decry the internet as being a dividing force in our lives, and obviously it sometimes can be divisive. I think one of the key factors to why Ricky and I work so well together was because we had both been through the ego machine that is the music business. And we had both become disillusioned with and rejected it. Right from the beginning, we agreed to set our egos aside and do whatever was necessary for the common good of what best suited and served the music.
The result is not only the music of This Twisted Wreckage, it is also that Ricky Humphrey, someone I’ve never met in so-called real life, is now one of my closest and dearest friends.
DG Q: Your new song ‘Daughter,’ a personal favourite, moved both me and my own daughter deeply. What emotional or creative spark led you and Ricky Humphrey to create such a profoundly touching song?
LUKE: My wife and I have a 20-year-old daughter who we adopted from China when she was 13 months old. Adopting a baby from a different culture on the other side of the world comes with it its own set of challenges. When she was a toddler, my daughter suffered night terrors. She understandably has a fear of abandonment and rejection. Witnessing the unconditional love and unbridled patience that my wife has shown to my daughter is one of the most inspiring things that has ever happened to me in my life. When Ricky sent me the music for what was to become DAUGHTER we had just come out of a kind of rough patch in our relationship with our daughter. We were in the space where everything had calmed
down and there’s a period where you truly appreciate the wonderful privilege of family and the bottomless love that exists in a functioning family.
It’s almost spooky how, over and over again, Ricky will send me the perfect soundtrack for whatever is going on in my life – but not really because everything is connected. It’s just a question of recognising it. So the music he sent me was the perfect music at the perfect time for me to write those lyrics and sing that melody– and the song was born.
DG Q: At the heart of your sound and storytelling, what core message defines your band’s identity and creative mission?
LUKE: THIS TWISTED WRECKAGE is a cocktail, one part blunt truth, one part refreshing originality and honesty, garnished with a twist of optimism.
THIS TWISTED WRECKAGE's music is the panacea for what ails us all.
Get TWISTED today, and emerge phoenix-like from the WRECKAGE, dancing and singing into the better future we all crave!
DG Q: Two decades ago, you studied guitar with someone who had trained under the legendary Flamenco maestro Diego del Gastor. Could you share more about that experience and its impact on your musical journey?
LUKE: I’ve always been attracted to the music of struggle, of the poor and disenfranchised- the blues, punk, and gypsy flamenco. I had played blues and punk but during a particularly painful time in my personal life, I took refuge in the music of Paco de Lucia. Riding the bus to a job that I hated, a 2-hour commute, the hills and countryside outside the bus window became Andalusia as Paco injected my heart and soul with the fire and passion of Flamenco.
A couple of years later, I went to Andalusia. In Granada, I bought a Flamenco guitar, played it for the first time outside the luthier’s store, crouched in the rain in doorway of the house of Lorca. Lorca was a Spanish poet, civil war martyr, and champion of Flamenco culture.
Back in California I discovered a guy called Evan Harrah, a flamenco guitar teacher who had studied with guitar maestro Diego Del Gastor in the early 1970s. Diego was unique in that he never made any commercial recordings, never toured, and only played local fiestas with friends and family. But his reputation spread to flamenco guitar guitarists around the world and soon players from USA, Canada, Germany, and even Japan started showing up seeking him out on the dusty streets of Morón de la Frontera.
Diego lived in one small room above a bar - the bar owner was too embarrassed to ever charge him rent and fed him for free. “Lessons” with Diego apparent took the form of drinking in the bar then going upstairs where Diego would play without explaining or repeating anything. My teacher, Evan, smuggled a Nagra mini reel to reel tape recorder into the room- Nagras were the tape recorders the Apollo astronauts took to the moon. So now I have a copy of those unique recordings and the accompanying tablature that Evan compiled.
I’m still studying them 20 years later, in conjunction with my online Spanish flamenco teacher Mario Moraga (Familia Flamenco). On my evening 2 mile walk to the community park I am in Northern California but in my headphones I’m in a dusty room in Southern Spain listening to one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
It has been my experience that all of my other guitar playing styles benefit hugely from me playing Flamenco. There’s just something about the flow and passion that translates into any other musical form.
DG Q: Your book Stairway to Nowhere carries an evocative title. What themes or stories does it explore, and where can interested readers get their hands on it?
LUKE: I originally started to write Stairway to Nowhere after meeting a singer songwriter called Matthew Moon on a flight from San Francisco to the Midwest. We spent the flight exchanging music biz and gig anecdotes and it was Matthew who suggested that I should write them down.
After many drafts the book came out in 2009 and is available from Lulu.com
This is from the fly leaf:
“Stairway To Nowhere is the true story of late 1970's, Birmingham, UK band Fàshiön. In the brief spotlight of their fifteen minutes of fame, Fàshiön toured both the USA and UK as opening band for The Police, did a UK club tour with a then unknown band from Ireland called U2, opened for The B52'S on their first ever UK tour, and had a new band called Duran Duran open shows for them.The book tells the story of how four young, unemployed working class gits from the gutters of Brum donned make-up, attitude, weird clothes and swaggered forth to escape the dreaded clutches Birmingham's car factory mentality by conquering the music business. On their voyage of escape and discovery, Fàshiön encounter a plethora of the music industry's sickest practitioners. Join them on their headlong flight up the stairway to nowhere, as they cobble together some of the most innovative and original post punk music of the time.”
If you are considering buying my book, please buy it from lulu.com, and not from Amazon because I don’t really wanna give practically every damn penny of my royalties to Jeff Bezos!
DG Q: In the dynamic of your band, each individual carries their own strengths and vulnerabilities. How would you describe yours, both musically and personally?
LUKE: The main dynamic of This Twisted Wreckage is mutual inspiration. From the spooky twin tragedies that spawned the band, to the constant creative process of each of us providing exactly the necessary component for each song to be brought to magnificent fruition – he said modestly – the dynamic is that having set aside our egos for the sake of the music, Ricky and I have over the last five years developed an almost supernatural ability to provide each with what the other needs to create the next stage if a song up to completion.
Almost every time I listen to one of Ricky’s compositions for the first time melodies and lyrics just flow into his music. Entire songs have sometimes arrived that way on the first listen. But at the very least, some thread will appear that I can share back to Ricky.
Sometimes, I send him sets of lyrics and the perfect music arrives. It’s almost as if we are weaving together strands of alchemical sonic smoke.
I also have one of those voices apparently that you either love or hate but that I’m told doesn’t sound quite like anyone else. Although, I have absolutely no problem with the occasional comparison to David Bowie. Thank you very much!
Ricky and I also share decades of musical discovery and whereas some of these are similar some of them are not. For example I’d never heard of the band Porcupine Tree until Ricky introduced me to their music. But individual instances aside we both have rich veins of musical styles that we can draw on for inspiration.
When I was in the band Fàshiön one of the things we did was stitch together different styles within the same song – sometimes starting out straight ahead punk before segueing into reggae, or electronica into rock. With This Twisted Wreckage it seems that stitching together of styles now extends over entire albums as opposed to within single songs. An album as an entity might have a theme, an identity, but Ricky and I have a vast catalogue of musical composition styles to draw upon in order to express that album's identity.
DG Q: What’s next for This Twisted Wreckage: musically and beyond? Are there any upcoming projects or creative ventures on the horizon?
LUKE: We always have at least two of the projects underway as we refine and finish a particular album. At the moment we have a double ambient album almost complete – one CD will be instrumental, and the other will have vocals.
We also have a themed album partially written called KILLER about a serial killer, a homicide detective’s search for him, and a priest, with parts of the album being told from the points of view of the victims. We’re hoping to eventually develop it into a Netflix series.
DG Q: Is there a lesser-known facet of your life or personality that you’d be willing to reveal, something fans might be surprised to learn?"
LUKE: I remember at the age of about seven, watching an American cop show called 77 Sunset Strip on our tiny black-and-white TV. Outside, rain was hammering against the window. I looked at the cars with huge fins, I looked at the palm trees, I looked at the cool character called Cookie calming his Elvis Presley hair style into place, I watched the car chases, and the good guys always winning. And I remember quite clearly thinking, I want to live there!
My journey has always been away from Birmingham - and of course in all that time the place changed tremendously, and to a large extent it seems for the better. Just as Ozzy grew up poor on the streets of Aston in the 50s and 60s, I grew up poor around the same time on the streets of a council housing estate - we both had only music as our only avenue of escape. In terms of fame, commercial success, and I’ll be honest and modest, in terms of musical creativity, Ozzy far out distanced me. But there is something that we definitely shared in equal measure, and that is that we proved that you can take the Brummie out of Brum, but you can’t take Brum out of the Brummie.
DG Q: If you could offer one brutally, raw and unfiltered, honest piece of advice to emerging artists walking the same path, what would it be?
LUKE: Don’t believe anyone who tells you you’re gonna be the next big thing. Believe in yourself but don’t believe your own hype. Be prepared to work your arse off with no guarantee of anything. If you got into playing music because of the love of music and you can hold onto that, then regardless of how rich or famous you do or don’t become, you will eventually realise that you are successful.
Most importantly, never ever quit. It’s true that in the past I have given up the music business, it’s like giving up smoking, it’s easy, I’ve done it loads of times. I may have given up the music business but I have never and will never give up music. At least not until I give up breathing. And even then we’ll have to see…
DG Q: What’s one ‘no-BS’ truth you wish someone had told you when you were just starting out as an artist?
LUKE: To paraphrase and quite possibly misquote Hunter S Thompson - the music business is a shallow plastic trench full of thieves and whores where good men go to die. It also has its downside.
DG Q: As technology continues to blur the lines between human and machine creativity, what do you think the future holds for music in an AI-driven world?
LUKE: To be honest, I have an abhorrence for artificial intelligence. This is not because I am an old man, although I am! It’s simply because when I look at the world, especially at the moment, I see a complete failure by the human race as a species to develop natural intelligence. So let’s do that first before we go handing our fate over to a bunch of heartless circuits… Oh, wait.
DG Q: Let’s finish strong: what’s one quote that hits you right in the soul and says, “This is me”?
LUKE: There are actually two quotes and they are both from Chief Joseph:
“ Always look twice at a two-faced man.”
And
“The Earth and myself are of one mind.”
Wot a hippie! Goodnight!
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