My Foolish Heart — Chet Baker
An Interview with Steve Wall
Steve Wall is the singer and songwriter of prominent Irish rock bands The Stunning and The Walls. In the recent decade he has also turned to acting, and performed in various roles including the part of Einar in seasons two, three and four of Vikings.
He remains a musician at heart. Why shouldn’t he? The Stunning debut album Paradise in the Picture House came out in 1990 in Ireland and became one of the biggest Irish albums of all times. It went number one for five weeks and almost every household of the country had a copy of it. Their single “Brewing Up a Storm” is now considered as an alternative national anthem in Ireland, a rousing song that gets played during international rugby and football rallies. After The Stunning broke up in 1994 Steve and his brother Joe almost immediately formed The Walls, who have released three albums so far. Another one is now ready to go and will be released in 2022.
Steve finally got his chance as a leading actor in Rolf van Eijk’s My Foolish Heart, a reconstruction of jazz legend Chet Baker’s final days in Amsterdam before his defenestration on 13 May 1988. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the film itself comes across as stereotyped and predictable. But Steve Wall’s impersonation of Chet Baker is nothing less than charismatic. How did he manage to get under his character’s skin in such a convincing way? How did Steve Wall become Chet Baker and give such an excellent performance?
Steve, was it perhaps because of your face that you got chosen for the part?
No, but let me tell you how it happened. The agent I had at the time needed photographs. They call them headshots. I got some photographs done where I looked as if my cheeks were sunken. I sent them in anyway and said to my agent “if you can find a decent one amongst these, let me know which one. One where I possibly don’t look like a junkie.” Then I joked at the bottom of the message, and I said “Oh by the way, if ever a role for Chet Baker comes up put my name forward ha ha ha”. That was 4 years prior to that film.
It sounds like destiny, as if it was meant to be!
It was pure fluke! When I got the call about auditioning for Chet Baker I thought it was because she remembered my email from four years previously. And it wasn’t because it had actually come from a different agent anyway. So it was just pure fluke. There’s a casting process called spotlight. You put on all these different things, whether you can speak a language or whether you can do martial arts or ride a horse, all that kind of stuff, your height, colour of your eyes, whether you have a full beard or no beard. And basically when agents are casting a movie they use search terms, it’s all got to do with the tags. I had put in “can sing” and “am a musician”, and that’s how they found me. There were two actors they were talking to. One was Willem Dafoe.
Willem Dafoe could have played that role very well.
He wouldn’t have needed the prosthetics they had to put on me. And the other one they had started the dialogue with was Val Kilmer, who had played Jim Morrison in The Doors film. It probably wasn’t enough money for these great actors anyway. I put a lot of work into doing the audition. The way lots of auditions are done these days is through self-tapes. You film them on your phone, preferably you get another actor to read the other lines to you because it’s always better with another actor. My daughter does loads of them with me, and she’s getting really good. You film yourself, sometimes they ask you to stand up and do a full-length one as well. But I didn’t need another actor because the scenes that I had been sent were on the telephone. It was Chet calling.
I remember that scene. From a public phone. Trying to call his girlfriend he had beaten up and seeking forgiveness.
When I was asked to do it I was quite excited by the challenge. I thought for me it’s a dream role. I was a fan, I’m a fan of Chet Baker. I have his music on vinyl and CD. And I knew a bit about him as well. Whenever you get a request for an audition they always say “can I have it in two days time” or something like that. They give you very little time to prepare. So I told a white lie. I said I was on holiday, and that I would do it when I got back. I wasn’t, I was at home. I just got stuck into watching every interview that I could find on YouTube, and reading some stuff, listening to the music, singing along. Trying to get his voice right was a big challenge. I ended up experimenting with different techniques. He has a much higher voice than mine, a high-speaking voice, very gentle, very soft. I discovered from messing around that when I pinched my nose I could get that voice. Because his nose’s so wrecked from sniffing cocaine and God knows what else. So I put a tissue up my nose, just the right amount to obtain that nasal sound of his voice and when I did the audition I actually had the lights off, just a couple of desk lights on, so it gave it that noir kind of look, like he’s in the telephone box and it’s night time and he’s making this call. I sent it in. Then I didn’t hear anything for probably three months. I didn’t believe it was going to happen, so I was really surprised when they called me to say they were giving me the part. And I went for it.
Which scenes did you most enjoy doing?
There was a scene in a small club in Amsterdam.
Is it the one where you faint?
Not that one. It’s the one where he actually sings “My Foolish Heart”. It’s in a small club, and Chet actually played on that stage. It was amazing to actually be sitting there where he had been singing that song. The guy that owns the club owned it back then as well. When I walked in, looking like that, with the costume and the trumpet case, the guy nearly had a heart-attack when he saw me.
That shows you really got into the role.
I went for it big time. I really enjoyed that scene because everything was live, I sang live, no overdubs or anything like that, it was like your normal kind of cheap microphone.
When you were singing, I assume you didn’t put those clothespins on your nose, did you?
I did! It was hard to breathe properly. I even got a sinus infection because I had those things up my nose every day for a month and a half. I had to be very careful. I started to get steroid swabs from a pharmacy and cut them into little squares and I was using these sterile medical swabs.
It’s the price you pay for glory.
I’m really proud of my work in it, to be honest. It’s the first time I’d done an acting role like that. To date I’ve only been supporting characters. I arrive on set, I’m only there for a few days, a couple of weeks, and then I usually get killed, and then I’m gone. I really relished that job because I was able to fully immerse myself in the research, just thinking about it every single day and looking for ways of getting under the skin of Chet Baker and trying to portray it in a way that would be believable.
Miles Davis and Chet Baker were both legendary jazz trumpet players. With Miles Davis it’s easy to find a rock connection considering how deeply he was influenced by Jimi Hendrix at a certain point of his career, when he was doing Bitches Brew and Live at Fillmore East. Whereas I find it difficult to find a connection between Chet Baker and rock music. Can you find one?
No. He didn’t like it. And he also didn’t like the sort of fast jazz that was coming out of New York. He was a real traditionalist. He loved the American songbook, the standards and all of that. When people started going free-form, when it started to get too experimental, he wanted none of it.
Miles Davis even went into hip-hop shortly before he died. That was not Chet Baker’s style at all.
I mean, Miles was Chet’s hero. And when they met, their meeting was very disappointing for Chet. Chet had been voted the best musician in this very famous jazz magazine that ran through the Fifties and Sixties. Chet had topped the polls as the best trumpet player. Miles was furious about this. He saw it basically as “here we go again, the white boy, he’s hardly on the scene, a new kid on the block, and he gets voted to the top.” I think they met in the Blue Note in New York. It didn’t go well. Miles snubbed him.
There is a point in the film when your Chet Baker says “I made a pact with the devil. He allowed me to use as many drugs as I wanted and enjoy them and I would never die” — if I remember correctly — “as long as I played from the heart.” I had never heard about Chet Baker making a pact with the devil. Is it a Robert Johnson sort of thing, or did you make it up?
Rolf, the director who wrote it, had made it up. There was a whole chunk of the film that was cut out. And I’m sorry they cut it out in a way. It was like the Italian portion of the film.
Chet Baker was big in Italy. He had lived in Italy. He spoke Italian very well.
He did speak Italian very well. He was in prison in Rome for ten months or something. There was a scene in the film, with this character who appears in various points through the film and now is gone, he never made the final cut. But you see this guy when they show footage of Chet in that club scene of “My Foolish Heart”. In the audience you see this man and he’s wearing a trilby hat and a big dark overcoat. And you also see him when there is a flashback to 1957, the concert in Paris, and you see the same guy in the audience. But he hasn’t aged, he looks exactly the same.
He must be the devil.
Yes. It’s Lucifer, you know. Then there was another scene in the script we shot with this fantastic actor. Chet has completed his gig where he sings “My Foolish Heart” in the club. He’s at the bar and he’s signing LPs. Next minute this LP cover of Live in Paris is put in front of him. He looks down on it and looks up, and it’s that guy again and he speaks to him in Italian. So I did a whole scene with the devil where Chet speaks Italian. I had to learn this scene in Italian.
Wow. I’m sorry they cut it out.
I’m sorry too, because I actually think I did a really good job. It was funny as well because the devil character is a big actor and has a big coat and a hat and he actually leans in to speak in Italian.
The devil who is Italian…that’s amazing…they shouldn’t have cut it out.
They shouldn’t have…He says to him “You can stay as long as you want as long as you play from the heart”, but while he’s whispering that into Chet’s ear he’s grabbed Chet by the balls, and he squeezes.
That’s the way we do it, you know. It’s the Italian way.
Yeah. He’s squeezing his balls and he basically says “you do what you want, take as many drugs as you like as long as you play from the heart”. But they cut it out, and I was kinda sorry to see that go. I thought that the more Felliniesque they would make it the better. The film could have been more fantastical.
Would you like to speak about the creative relationship between you and your brother Joe?
The Walls last album, Stop the Lights, goes way back to 2012. We spend a long time working on our albums, we’re perfectionists, which is not always a good thing. We have our own studio, and we tend to work better in our own space, because we’re slow. If we went to a studio we wouldn’t be able to afford it. Our first album Hi-Lo was recorded around 1998 and came out in 2000. We were experimenting a lot using samplers, drum-loops actually playing organically with real drums, overloops and sequencers. We had been listening a lot to Beck at the time. With New Dawn Breaking, which came out in 2005, we wanted to do a fairly straightforward rock album where we weren’t using any samplers or loops or any of that kind of things. We basically went for live band in a room. We did it in a studio in France. It was all recorded on analogue tape with old vintage equipment. The first song “Open Road” got a good deal of airplay in America from a great station over there called KCRW. There’s a DJ called Nic Harcourt who had a very influential show and he loved that song. And then we released Stop the Lights and that took us years to finish, because in the meantime we reformed our first band, The Stunning, and we started reissuing The Stunning’s albums on our own label. We ended up getting very busy with our old band because our old band was way bigger than The Walls in terms of success.
Why did you dismantle such a successful project?
The Stunning broke up in 1994 after we formed in 1987. After seven years or so we decided to call it a day. We had released three albums and we just couldn’t get an international record deal. We became so frustrated at having our music only known in Ireland and we spent all our money on tours in the UK. We went to America several times to try to get a label to take us on. We just ended up running out of money and became very disillusioned. We didn’t want to just continuously tour in Ireland or London or places where there was an Irish audience. We’re not known outside Ireland. Sadly, because I think people in Italy would love our music. After The Stunning broke up, Joe and I started demoing music together, experimenting and using the studio more as an instrument. The Stunning got busy again when in 2003 we reissued the first Stunning album and it went back to the top of the charts in Ireland after like ten years. And the band is still hugely popular. We are still gigging with The Stunning and we stopped gigging with The Walls.
You opened up for the U2 and, amazingly, no less than Bob Dylan. How does it feel to be Mr Dylan’s opening act?
The first time we opened for Dylan was as The Stunning. Dylan’s agent in London liked our band and offered us the opening slot in 1992 when Dylan was doing five nights in the Hammersmith Odeon. I remember that when Dylan would arrive they would clear the backstage area, clear the corridors, he didn’t want to see or meet anybody. Then, years later, we ended up opening for him for a gig in Galway as well. The limo brought him to the steps that went right up to the stage. There were loads of kids at the fence. And he went over and he spoke to some of these young kids for ten minutes or so but ignored anyone grown up. I’m a big fan of Dylan, I’ve been since my early teens. I taught myself guitar from the Beatle book and learning Dylan’s songs as well. Dylan is just another level. He’s incredible. I’m totally in awe of him. “Murder Most Foul”, that was released out of the blue about a year and a half ago, is incredible, the way lyrics pour out of him, in a stream of consciousness thing.
A few days ago I said to myself “I’m going to interview Steve, I’ve got to be prepared and see what he’s doing now”, and did my homework, sat down and listened to a song with almost a reggae sound. There was a line about “emoji” or something like that.
Yeah, it was “sometimes I get a little bit lonely / but I can’t find the right emoji”. The song is called “Rise with the Sun”.
It made me smile. Did you have a moment of inspiration there?
What happened was that a musician that’s based in the west of Ireland got in touch with me during the first lockdown and said “hey, do you want to collaborate on something”, and he sent me about three or four pieces of music that he had made. I picked that one. It had a kind of quirky vibe and I thought “I’ll try to make something of this” and I tried to write a positive, uplifting song that did not mention Covid.
Badly needed, right now.
That was a collaboration. I would never have written music like that myself. I wouldn’t even know how to write reggae. I couldn’t get anywhere near something that had a beat like that. I leave that for people who do that well. It was good fun. It got me actually writing. I haven’t been writing a lot. Definitely the acting thing has shifted my focus. I spent the whole summer in Spain. I did a series for Amazon Prime and the BBC in the UK. It will be out next Autumn. It’s a Western, a six-part Western with Emily Blunt. It’s called The English and it’s a very good, really well-written script set in the late 1800s when they’re basically carving up America. They’ve pushed the Indians further north, the buffaloes are all gone. And it’s a big landgrab, there’s a lot of investment from Europe and they are just buying up the country to create these huge cattle farms. It’s set around that period. I play the cowboy. I was there for 2 and a half months, in the hills north of Madrid, in the heat. This area looks like Montana or Wyoming. Since there were times when I was off work, I thought I could do some writing to keep the music going. But I find it really hard to just switch now. I thought it would be easier, it’s not so easy. When your mind is focused on acting it’s like the music part of the brain starts to get dusty. I suppose it’s something that needs to get exercised — the writing process.
At the end of our conversation Steve and I find out we both share a passion for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. That could be the starting point for yet another interview in the future, hopefully.
