[By Liam Kitchen]

Ask anyone who’s passionate about music in Sunderland about Baz Warne, and chances are you’ll see their face light up in admiration. It seems like everyone has a story to tell about Baz, or has seen him in action at some point in his storied career. Chronicling how he cut his teeth with renowned Sunderland-based punk outfit the Toy Dolls – to his joining of the Stranglers and his twenty-five (twenty-five!) years as a guitarist and vocalist in the band since – Baz’s new autobiography, No Grass Grows on a Busy Street, is a no-holds-barred collection of interviews and tour ramblings, interspersed with Baz’s more… wizened modern-day reflections.
 
Now, with his ‘Convivial’ tour (being completely honest, I had to Google what ‘convivial’ meant), Baz is bringing his tales to audiences across the country, including two evenings (and a matinee!) at PopRecs. I was lucky enough to spend some time with Baz on video call last week, where we covered his vision for these shows; his affection for his hometown; and more as he prepares himself for the rigours of another tour – this one being slightly different perhaps to the tours that he is used to.
 
Before I can even get a word off, Baz is already welcoming me with a broad smile like we’d been friends for years. Immediately, I understand why he chose ‘convivial’ for his tour name: cheerful and friendly.
 
We got started discussing the coincidence of Baz’s childhood home on Ashwood Terrace being directly opposite the home of Barry and Dave Hyde, of Futureheads fame. But the coincidences don’t stop there, as both of Sunderland’s esteemed Barrys got into making music on their brother’s discarded guitars.
 
For young Baz, he quickly got to grips with the guitar after an older friend at school showed him his first chords – “all I needed were those few chords and I was away. I was away.” Suddenly, as Baz tells me: “I couldn’t bear being apart from my guitar, I even took it into the toilet with me!” And it wasn’t long before his brother, not to be outdone, caught up to him. The Warne brothers would then spend hours and hours every day playing music together in their front room, curating their own musical styles and interchange that would later bear fruit in their later band ‘Small Town Heroes.’
 
Back to the present day, we discuss what inspired Baz to write his autobiography and, importantly, why now? As it turns out, a quarter of a century in the Stranglers is a hell of a milestone! That’s twenty-five years of touring; twenty-five years of making tour diaries to pass the time; and perhaps most importantly: twenty-five years of your bandmates saying, ‘you know… you really could turn these into a book?’
 
Even collecting all of these artefacts together was a mammoth task in itself, before trawling through each one “for months in the same basement,” sizing up how they fit on the page. One key consideration for Baz was that he didn’t want the book to appear sanitised, so anything that scanned well, no matter how bothersome, made its way into the book. As such, No Grass Grows on a Busy Street is Baz Warne truly unfiltered, from professional interviews to trains of thought humbly scribbled onto hotel stationery – “A lot of it I don’t even remember writing. I read some of them now and I think ‘what was I thinking writing that!? Then there’s bits I remember really well, and really enjoy reading back.” Completing it proved a mountainous challenge for sure, but ultimately a familiar one, “the process was exactly like writing a song, where it absorbs everything and nothing else matters until it’s done.”
 
One particularly pivotal moment in the book is Baz weighing up whether to join the Stranglers around the turn of the millennium. The stakes around this decision for Baz couldn’t have been higher: “I’d already spent ten years in my previous band [the Smalltown Heroes], and didn’t have anything to show for it. Joining the Stranglers meant a wage, it meant a car, I had two little ones to worry about.” And so he took the train down south with just his trusty Telecaster and a hundred quid lent to him by a close friend.
 
Naturally, the Stranglers had a long list of suitors for the vacant guitarist position, but a key hurdle – as Baz tells it – was arguably their biggest song, Golden Brown. Many had tried and failed to properly replicate the guitar solo from the 1981 hit, leaving the band with the feeling they were yet to find their man. In walks Baz Warne, who played the whole thing perfectly in one go. Almost immediately, the decision was made for his soon-to-be-bandmates; before the dust had time to settle, the job was his.
 
Even just speaking to Baz, it’s evident why he made such a good addition to the Stranglers – a band who always came across a bit more nuanced and sophisticated compared to their punk contemporaries – with his clear passion for music shining through as we discuss some of Sunderland’s other proudest musical exports, namely the Futureheads and “one of my favourite bands of the last fifteen years,” in Field Music. Similarly, Baz’s attention to detail is razor-sharp – as he rattles off name after name of pubs and clubs he’s played in the North East, even the names of the people who ran them. It’s easy to imagine how these qualities made him ideal to front the Stranglers.
 
Perhaps most important of all, however, is that he’s rooted in the same DIY ethos that gave rise to the Stranglers early on. He has his experience with the Toy Dolls to thank for that, “back when I had a full head of hair… and a waistline!”
 
“You’ve got to remember that the Stranglers came through in the early punk days, and they had to be tough. J.J. Burnel told me that there used to be a ‘ruck,’ as he called it, every night. At every single show they played. But the guys were a bit older than all the other bands at the time, so they didn’t ever get involved in it. And they were incredible musicians too, which meant they kept the crowd onside.”
 
“The original singer [Hugh Cornwell] was really good at handling those situations.” Baz plays his abilities down a little, but he gained his own expertise from doing the hard yards around the North East’s club circuit, setting him up perfectly to slot right into the Stranglers’ frontman position left by Paul Roberts in 2006.
 
“The ‘hard yards’ is exactly what they were.” Baz recounts, “With the Stranglers, the audience are coming specifically to see you play – whereas in the gentlemen’s clubs, these guys have been working all week. They’re coming to the club to have about nine pints, a bit of craic with their mates… and if they’re lucky, a fight! If the music’s good, all the better. If not, you could hurl some abuse at the band. If the band can’t handle that stick, if you’re going to get upset – you’re not going to make it.”
 
Like I touched on before, everyone I had asked about Baz had seen him play somewhere across the North East. He even hosted his own open mic nights in Sunderland for about a decade, helping foster the next generation of Mackem music makers. From its relatively humble beginnings, where the same small handful of people would show up every week with acoustic guitars – to  getting full bands up at Greens Tavern and drawing a huge crowd every week – Baz’s open mic nights became something of a fixture in Sunderland.
 
Nowadays, Baz lives in Yorkshire. He still has his first ever guitar, and a wealth of memories about being a musician in Sunderland. But Sunderland is a different city now – a Music City. The old fire station has been revamped into a state-of-the-art music venue, Culture House is set to open its doors in the spring, and the whole city seems to be growing into a bastion of the arts. If anything, Baz’s time away from Sunderland has given him an even sharper perspective on the city’s transformation compared to those of us who walk right past it every day: “Every time I come back, there’s a new building up that wasn’t before. It changes its face every time I’m here.”
 
As for the music, “I’m not up to date on the scene as I don’t get a lot of time in Sunderland these days. But even before, there were loads of places to go and play; the Old 29, for example, used to have bands on all the time, and it was always packed. Sunderland has always had a massive passion for music, no matter how the city looks; the people have always, always cared about the music.”
 
The 7th and 8th of February will be Baz’s first time visiting PopRecs, a venue that seems almost tailor-made for personalities like him, a vital thread in the fabric of Sunderland’s musical history. A couple of nights on home turf with the lights dimmed low, some craic between pals, and plenty of tunes – on an acoustic guitar, no less. “I was always a rocker,” he explains, “I never even owned an acoustic guitar for so long. I think I’ve only been playing an acoustic for about thirty years…” How’s that for evolution?
 
If anything, the acoustic guitar signifies that the Baz Warne returning to Sunderland is not the same as the one that left a quarter of a century ago. No longer running at the breakneck pace of grassroots gigging, Baz is keen for his audiences to feel relaxed and invested, enough to ask him anything – “if they want to kiss my backside, fine! If they want to get things off their chest, that’s fine too.” Both dates at PopRecs will feature Baz on stage with longtime friend Jeff Brown, who has presented BBC Look North for longer than I’ve been alive. The audience is essentially another friend joining in the conversation between old pals.
 
Baz clearly seems to relish the unpredictable jeopardy of presenting his tales to unique audiences across the country, the unique perspectives they’ll take, and the unique directions they’ll whisk him in. The first date on the tour takes place in Glasgow, one day before his hometown triple-header.
 
“There’s about two hundred tickets sold for that one,” Baz muses with an air of anticipation – but if I had to guess, he’ll handle the crowd with the same warmth, wisdom, and conviviality that he has shown me.