Richard Hewson’s RAH band: Journey From Bedroom Demos To Global Streams

My career in the entertainment industry has enabled me to work with a diverse range of talent.
Through my years of experience, I've recognized two essential aspects.
Industry professionals, whether famous stars or behind-the-scenes staff, have fascinating stories to tell.
Secondly, audiences are eager to listen to these stories, which offer a glimpse into their lives and the evolution of their life stories.
This podcast aims to share these narratives, providing information on how they evolved into their chosen career.
We will delve into their journey to stardom, discuss their struggles and successes, and hear from people who help them achieve their goals.
Get ready for intriguing behind-the-scenes stories and insights into the fascinating world of entertainment.
Hi, I'm Tony Mantor.
Welcome to Almost Live Nashville.
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Thanks for being here.
Joining us today is a true pioneer in music, an artist whose influence stretches across decades and genres.
Richard Hewson, the creative force behind the Ra band, has helped shape the sound of modern music in ways many people don't even realize.
From producing and arranging for some of the biggest names in the industry to creating timeless hits like Clouds Across the Moon, Richard's work blends innovation, storytelling, and a signature sound that still resonates today.
The Raw Band isn't just a project, it's a legacy of creativity, vision, and musical excellence that continues to inspire artists around the world.
Today we're diving into his journey, the stories behind the music, and what continues to drive his passion after all these years.
Thanks for joining us today.
Okay.
Amazing.
In the early years of your music career, you were a producer and an arranger.
Then you created the Raw Band.
Can you give us a little bit of a background on how that all came together?
Well, um, I don't know whether you know, but I did about 10 years of arranging for All and Sundry.
And back in those days, as it is even today, arrangers don't get royalties, music royalties.
You just get a fee, which wasn't very big in those days.
And I did so many records, and I thought, oh, look at the millions they're making, and I'm making 25 quid.
So I thought, I've got to write my own tunes because I'm never gonna last unless I turn to writing my own songs.
So the very first one I did, I probably was one of the very first uh bedroom bands, you know, recording everything in his bedroom on a very small uh multi-track machine.
And I could play the guitar, I could play the bass, I could play the keyboard and uh synthesizer.
Well, I didn't have synthesized in those days, actually, but I could play the keyboard.
And so I decided I'll have a go at making a record.
Actually, I was a jazz head, really, not you know, in my previous life, not really a pop musician at all.
So I knew nothing about pop music except the tracks I'd worked on.
So I thought, well, I'll have a go at making a pop record, what I thought was a pop record.
And I just put it all down on the on the multi-track tape, and it sounded pretty good, and then I put some brass on.
I took it then to a big studio and put brass on it.
It sounded pretty good, but I couldn't sell it.
I could not sell it for about two years.
Eventually, somebody in the clubs picked it up and it blew up big tongue, and uh I got a deal for it, and lo and behold, I've got a project.
I was thinking, what am I going to call this band?
The sort of heavy water.
No, no, no, no.
Somebody said, What are your initials?
I said, R A H.
He said, That's it.
You got it, the raw band, and it stuck.
Wow, that's such a great story.
I love you weren't chasing pop trends.
So take us back for a second.
Who or what influenced your sound?
Well, really jazz.
I was a complete jazz head when I did music college and then came out, but jazz was all that was my life.
Bill Evans, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, all the great guys that everybody knew about.
That was me, just jazz.
And I was jazz guitarist.
I was quite good on the jazz guitar at the time.
I met a friend called Peter Asher, who you probably know about Peter Asher, whose sister was going out with Paul McCartney.
And that's how I got to meet Paul McCartney.
And around at Peter's house one day we were playing.
Paul wanted um, he discovered a new Welsh singer, a girl Welsh singer, folk sing, and wanted to make a record with her.
But he said, I don't want to use the usual arranger guys, because you know, you wanted to use somebody a bit less feel.
And Peter said, Well, why don't you try Richard?
Because he's been to college, got some knowledge, and he's a jazz musician, so you're coming in with something different, which is what happened, and lo and behold, my first arranging job, which went to number one, which opened a lot of doors for arranging.
Wow, that's amazing.
And then clouds across the moon happens, and it just takes off worldwide.
Was there a moment in the studio or hearing it back where you thought, okay, this one's different.
This is special.
Well, when I wrote it, it was because I'd been coming backwards and forwards to Los Angeles doing arranging for American artists, actually.
And I remember we didn't have cell phones or internet or any of that stuff.
So to call back home, I used to have to go by the old-fashioned telephone.
And when you wanted to make an international call, you'd you'd pick up the phone and the guy would say, Hello, this is the international operator here.
Yeah.
That stuck in my head.
And when I came home, I had a track written, not with that theme, just with a different lyric.
I was thinking about this international operator.
And I thought, what if we said it in the future and call him the intergalactic operator?
So uh that became a space song.
Okay.
And it got picked up because it was a space song.
If I hadn't changed the lyric, I don't know whether it would have been a hit actually.
But because it was a spacy thing, and it was about the time of space was all in the news, new space exposition, it took off and away she went.
It seemed like a lot of your songs had a good story base to them and they were very inspirational.
It was almost like listening to the soundtrack of a movie.
How important was the storytelling to you in writing all your songs?
Well, I suppose because I wasn't really a lyric writer, I was a musician, guitarist, jazz player.
I'd never written pop songs before, as I said.
So it was really an effort for me to write a pop song.
So the first one I did really was not Clouds Across the Moon.
It was one called Perfume Garden.
Okay.
Now that was when I written a jazz type backing, and um I thought, well, I don't know anybody who writes lyrics, strangely enough, even though it's in music.
So I didn't actually know personally a lyric writer.
So one day in the bath, I went with my pencil and paper, and I think, well, I'll try and write one myself.
I thought, well, that sounds like come with me.
And that was the first lyric I ever wrote, come with me.
And I took it on from there, trying to make a story of it, really.
And that's basically the way I've always tried to write lyrics, to try and have a story attached to it, and that's how it goes.
So here we are, 40 or 50 years later, and your music is finding a whole new audience through streaming and all these modern platforms.
What does that mean to you to see a new generation discovering what you created all those years ago?
Yes, indeed.
In fact, um, I don't know whether you're aware of it, but about two or three years ago, an old tune called Messages from the Stars, which was written in '83, 1983, okay in Los Angeles of all places.
Yeah.
And it blew up big time, went viral on on Spotify's, on uh TikTok, all the platforms, and still is, still bowling along there, which is amazing.
It sort of reignited interest in the back catalogue, of which we've got quite a large one.
I think I've been fifty odd years in the business.
With everything you've done and everything coming back around, do you find more people are reaching out to find out how you did all this?
How does that feel?
Yeah, it does feel it feels um it's strange because as I say, starting off as a backroom boy, arrangers are of course a backroom boys, they never get to see the front of the stage.
Yeah.
And and then making records in my bedroom, as I said, I was a bedroom band.
I didn't really get to meet people outside because it wasn't a band, even though it's called the Ra band.
Right.
It was me really playing all the instruments, and then if I needed strings or brass, taking them to a studio.
So still I wasn't really in the public eye.
I was just a name, which was great.
I got a lot of lovely compliments on YouTube and things like that, which was great.
But I never actually met a lot of people.
In fact, and I keep quoting this, but I've never actually been to a music business party in 50 years.
Never.
People say, You're lucky, mate, you didn't go.
But um, so that's how the the you know, the pu me and the public never really met.
You said something earlier that really stood out.
You weren't part of the clique.
And honestly, I think that's what made you special.
You weren't chasing other people's sound.
You were building your own based on what moved you and your influences.
Exactly so, actually.
You're you're dead on because um I was still a jazz head even back in the day, and still am actually, but I'm wild about string orchestras from my college days, that's where that started.
Yeah.
And that was really the influences in my music, probably.
And so I didn't used to uh I didn't listen to a lot of pop music at the time.
In fact, I probably didn't know what was in the chart.
I just sort of went my own course and out came the music the way it did, you know, not influenced by a lot of other contemporaries.
Many different people have said that you were not afraid to try new and different things with your music.
When you went in the studio and when you worked with a gear that was prevalent at that time, what was one of your favorite pieces of gear to work with that helped give you the sound that you became well known for?
Well, um, I don't know whether you know or many people know that the crunch, which was the first record I I mentioned when I started took it into my bedroom and made it all myself.
It sounds, everybody says, which synthesizers did you use?
I said, I haven't got a synthesizer at that time.
I didn't have a synthesizer.
It was just about the time they were coming in.
Yes.
When that was a hit, I got a call from Roland, the company Roland, Synthesizer Company, and they said, We'd like to give you a synthesizer, an SH5 synthesizer, which I still have today and still sounds great.
And that was my very first synth.
So I hadn't actually got into electronic music until after I had the first hit, which wasn't a synth record, although it sounds it.
So people are starting to find you again, and of course, along with that, they're listening to your music.
What do you hope that they get out of your music and which songs would you like to have them listen to first?
Oh, that's a difficult one.
I've heard the quote many, many times.
It's like your babies, aren't they?
Very hard to choose which one you would put first.
Yes, very true.
But um, I've got my favorite orchestral type ones, I've got my favorite dance ones.
If you want to pin me down to the best song I wrote, probably, in my opinion, not in anybody else's my opinion, is one I called Across the Bay.
I like the lyric, I like the performance.
That was my ex-wife that did the singing in the early days, and I love the string arrangement of it.
So I could say that probably is my favorite piece of work.
Not necessarily my favorite baby, as it were.
So are you still working in the studio?
And if you are, what are you working on?
We've got a new album out right now as we speak, yeah.
It it's released, uh it was released a couple of weeks ago, and doing very well.
I'm really pleased to say what it is is a compilation of some of the old tracks that are from across the years, remixed, remade.
We're all with the same the original vocals.
I've kept all the vocalists and um rebuilt the tracks, and we've got two or three new tracks, brand new, and it's doing very well, and I have to say it's called Life After Love Songs.
Yeah, that's great.
Now, let's get into your remixing.
I know back then you were doing things your own way to get that exact sound you wanted, and it clearly worked because people connected with it.
Are you using different studio gear to remix?
What's your approach to this?
I'm still back in the dark ages with my equipment.
It's still a lot of it eighties, seventies, nineties equipment.
Nice.
Still sounds great today.
So a lot of it's broken down.
So the ones that are broken are not used anymore, so it reduces my choice of instrument considerably.
But that's good because when I come down in the morning, I think, which drum machine shall I use today?
Oh, there's only one that's working, that's the one we'll use today.
And so my sound has sort of shrunk a bit.
No way, it makes more demands on you.
You've got to be more creative to use those sounds and get something more out of them than you perhaps did before.
I love it.
I it's just lovely to go on.
But I technically, my son, who is a brilliant musician, and incidentally now takes the Ra band out on the road doing gigs, um, the Ra Band Live.
It's they've got brilliant musicians in it.
Anyway, he comes around to my studio and says, Dad, that old gear there you've got, you should get some new stuff.
I said, No, I don't want to.
I like the sound I make with this, and I'll stick with it till I'm gone.
Yeah, I'm a big analog guy myself.
I remember working with two-inch tape and doing it the old school way.
It seems like a lot of people are trying to recreate digitally what we created back then with analog.
There's just something about the old gear, the warm sound, the depth of it.
It's just hard to replicate.
It's just a great quality sound that we can get with that gear.
I think so.
And also, I think um listen listening to uh occasionally as I do, I said I don't normally listen to pop music, but when I do listen to the radio in the car or whenever, yeah, I find they all sound very, very similar.
All the tracks are very similar to each other because they're probably using the same gear.
But it does sound whereas that back in our day, I mean back in the day, sure and in the Scubia that I used to take my um stuff sometimes to be mixed to, the engineers were so creative.
You know, we thought, how can we make this sound better?
And we didn't have the electronic sampling stuff that we've got now.
Yeah.
So we'd have to, you know, we'd have to put two tape machines together with a big long loop of tape around it or something like that to get a long wrapper.
Things like that.
We I think we were more creative, fly by the seat of your pants type uh work, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
I remember those days.
There's just something about the tone you get from the two-inch tape versus digital, that slight hiss in the background.
It has that ambience that gives it that timeless sound.
Yeah, well, it's amazing, isn't it?
You'll find that you could now get a sample of hiss put on your tape to make it because it's so digital, there's no background noise at all.
But now put your hiss back on, which is kind of crazy.
Yeah, with analog machines and tape, that was just the way we did it.
That sound came naturally.
Now a lot of people didn't grow up with that, so they're using these plugins to try and recreate what we were getting in real time.
Yes, yes.
I mean, the AI stuff now that's on Facebook that you can get to do your multi-strings, your multi-quirs, all that stuff.
Yeah.
A little bit worrying, but that I don't think they'll ever compete with the actual real sound of strings and choirs and guitars and what.
Yes, I 100% agree.
Now, what was your favorite decade for music?
Oh, well, again, uh going back to the jazz days, I started life very late in music because I didn't I ran away to sea when I was uh left school and went to the merchant navy.
But that in fact produced my musical career because one of the trips when I was a cadet, the guy before me, I'd have been about 16 or 17 years old going on these old tramp ships.
He left his guitar behind.
And I hadn't played a note of music until then.
So I went ashore and bought a copy of how to play the guitar.
And on that long trip, I got quite good listening to Voice of America on short wave.
Yes.
I used to listen to Willis Conner's Jazz Hour, and that was a great show, and I could get all the jazz and try and emulate it on the guitar on those long nights at sea, and that's how I actually started in the business.
So, really, I've got various favorites of that.
Merchant Navy learning the guitar time was an amazing time for me as a teenager.
And then going to college was great, and I did that in my early twenties and uh learnt all about orchestration, classical music, etc.
Still playing jazz, and I think I still kept my love for jazz all these years, and playing in Ronald Scott's occasionally and things like that was a great thrill.
Yeah.
Uh still see, go to Ronnie Scott's now.
Uh uh, you've probably heard of it, Ronnie Scott's jazz club.
Yeah.
Anyway, so I I wouldn't say I've got one favorite era.
I think you each era has its own flavor and delights.
Yeah, absolutely.
Now you mentioned you went into your own bedroom and created the band.
So what's your favorite instrument to play?
Well, funnily enough, just before I came in to do this interview, I was in the studio and I picked up my guitar.
I've just finished a track which is on this album, and I thought, oh, I didn't play the guitar on this track.
I must play it because I don't play so much jazz now, and you soon lose your chops.
The old fingers get stiff, and I suddenly thought, oh my gosh, I must practice it more.
Because I've got a bit lazy in the old age and don't practice as much as I should.
But I love the guitar.
That is my first thing.
It was the first instrument and probably will be my last.
But I still have to play the keyboard, obviously, and the synthesizers and such.
But so I think the guitar probably is it.
I'm a naughty boy, I'm not practicing hard at all.
You mentioned before you started the Ra band that you was a producer and arranger.
What's one of the more interesting pieces of work you produced or arranged?
Uh well, there are two, as I said before, I love string arranging, probably above any other kind of arranging.
It's my favorite.
Sure.
And I've done two arrangements that I'm really proud of, I have to say.
And one is a guy called Tiffany T.
Ward was a brilliant young songwriter.
He died very young, unfortunately.
But I did his early arrangements, and I wrote an arrangement for him and a guy called Cliff Richards also with the same arrangement called Up in the World.
And it was purely them with the voice and strings, and that was just that was wonderful for me, because no other instruments, just the string orchestra.
And that was one, and then another one I did with a girl called Toya Wilcox called Sympathy, the tracks called Sympathy.
And that again was just me and her.
A big string orchestra, lovely, and Toya.
Those are my two favorite arrangements, I think.
So I've got a lot of other ones I'm happy with, but those are the those are the strings that one for me.
You've worked with so many iconic artists, the Beatles, the Bee Gees, James Taylor, so many.
When you look back at those collaborations, what do you think they connected with when you brought your ideas to the table?
Well, sometimes you'd go to the studio and it'd be wonderful.
But I remember we're going in with Art Garfunkel once to do some arrangements for breakaway albums.
An album called Breakaway Made.
Yeah.
And I did string arrangements on that.
And Art was great.
I mean, he said, Hey, Richard, I love all this string arranging, right?
But why do you have to move the strings around a lot?
He said, Why don't you just hold one note?
That's it.
Well, there wouldn't be much point, it'd be big here if I just put it on one note.
That was a funny comment I got.
Another famous story, actually, is I did the big orchestra for Long and Winding Robes.
And Paul McCartney didn't know.
Though he and I had worked together a lot back in those days.
It was 1970, I think.
Uh-huh.
And he and I'd already done stuff together, you know, so he knew me.
Right.
But he didn't know that I'd been asked by Phil Spector to do a big arrangement on Long and Winding Road because the tape that I got was just him and a piano.
Yeah.
That's how he wanted it to be.
Nobody told him that we were going to put a big arrangement on it.
Oh, I loved it because, you know, when I met Phil, he said, I want you to do a big orchestra, big orchestra on this one.
I said, Oh, what do you mean?
Sort of eight violins, four cellos.
That's my sort of standard big orchestra for recording.
No, no, no, I want 22 violins and I want about three harps.
And anyway, so I did put this up.
I had a ball actually, but it was a massive orchestra in EMI's Abbey Road studios, and we took it.
And it great to me, sounded great to everybody in the studio.
Yeah.
But Paul hadn't heard it.
He didn't even know we were doing it.
And when he did, he went bananas.
He wrote a letter to Alan Klein.
Never ever touch my music again.
He forgave me in the end because we went on and worked together after that later.
But that was one big arrangement that I really loved.
Yeah.
He really didn't.
Now, in any situation when you're working in the studio, you've got everything worked out.
Have you got any interesting stories of places you've produced, arranged, or worked with session players where things were a little bit more different than normal?
Well, I did a lot in EMI Abbey Road, um number two, the one that goes downstairs.
A lot of my big arrangements were done down there.
There's one little studio, funny little place, in a place called Clapham, which is in a suburb of London.
It was actually the studio was over a bingo hall where they have a bingo caller.
Sometimes you had to stop a tape because your sound came up through the floor, and uh they had a plastic palm tree in there.
Oh, it was really classy.
So I did an arrangement there for a band called Jigsaw, which wasn't a huge band, but there was a really great brass section, and they really played so well, and the sound engineer really captured it.
Brilliant.
A funny little studio, nothing like Abbey Road, just a little hole in the wall, more or less.
But that one it had the greatest brass section I think I've ever had.
Now you've influenced so many.
So many people, so many artists, you created your own style.
When people look back at your career, what would you like them to take away from it?
From the whole career.
Oh gosh, well, it's just just the whole career, Richard.
It's been so varied.
I think that's probably the one thing that I am amazed, even to this day.
You know, here we are in 2026.
And I've been going on uh well, I counted it up 54 years in this business.
Yeah.
So I've seen no, you know, acoustic recording, early electronics, more sophisticated electronics, now AI.
I've seen all the changes over the years.
Yeah.
So each one has a flavor of its own.
But I do hanker for the old days when uh particularly when I was doing a string orchestra session, I would go into a studio and knowing there's nothing but strings in there, and these guys came in, and most of them, most of the string players, the professional string boys and girls, then older people, because they'd been in the major orchestras probably, they'd come into the studio, I'd have got all my music set up on the music stands and waiting for them to come.
And they'd come in and they'd say, Hi Richard, how you doing?
How you doing?
And then they'd sit down and start talking to each other.
Hey guy, how is the family?
How's it John?
Lovely to see you.
And I'd be waiting to to conduct, to bring the orchestra in, and I'd go one, two, three, four, and the they'd immediately just play.
And the sound would make you cry.
It made you cry.
And and it was that that exciting realization of what you spent the last couple of weeks writing a piece.
Because in those days, we didn't have Sibelius or any Protools or anywhere notation.
We had to do pencil on paper.
And it literally was writing notes on paper, little dots on paper.
They used to say, those guys will play anything you write on that pater.
And they would.
And if there was any mistakes, it would have been my mistake, not theirs, because they never made mistakes.
They just played like heaven.
It was like heaven.
Have you ever been in a situation where everything was just going really fine?
It was all planned, it was all worked out, and then all of a sudden, someone makes a mistake.
Yeah.
It wasn't written this way, but the rest of the group follows them and keeps playing.
And it turned out so good you couldn't change it.
Did that ever happen to you?
Yeah, quite often.
Quite often you make a mistake and you think, oh, that's better than I wrote myself.
Yeah, you do.
You do get funny moments like that occasionally.
But uh no, I was just always amazed.
I think my heroes of the of the music business are the session musicians.
They are so great.
And they will play anything perfectly first time.
I wish I could do it.
I'm a terrible player, really.
My son's like that.
He's a trombonist.
He takes out the live raw band.
But he can play anything.
He can sit in a symphony orchestra and play the trombone part.
I couldn't be there.
No way.
Now your son is out there carrying the Ra band forward, bringing it to new audiences, and people are discovering it all over again.
That has to be a special feeling for you.
What's it like seeing something you created live through him?
Oh, I love it.
It's a the the first two or three um gigs he did in the jazz cafe and places in London.
I sat in, and I don't know whether you know, but most of the um music tracks I write for the Rao band usually start with an electronic intro.
Electronic in my terms means synthesizer, not necessarily anything incredibly technical.
But it's usually a synthesized thing.
So I sat in for a few of the gigs and just did the samples at the beginning, and then sat back and watched these guys play.
They had three girl singers and they were brilliant.
The only thing was it's quite big for a touring band.
It was a nine-piece band.
But the sound is amazing.
They really do sound like the Ra band, and it's such a thrill to hear this music.
And you think they're the girls singing those words that I wrote.
My goodness me.
It's a thrill.
It really is.
In closing, you've had such a lifetime of working with so many incredible artists.
You've built a legacy with the Ra band.
In the future, when people discover your music again, what do you hope they feel and take away when they hear it?
Well, that's a difficult one.
I just hope that I can bring some pleasure to them if they like the tunes.
You know, if they don't like the tunes, well, fair enough.
The music that I did spend all those years on still am going to keep going, even though it might be 1999 or whatever it might be.
It's just a thrill to make music, and people actually, some of them say, I really like that.
That is the thrill of it.
People like it.
Yes, music is powerful.
It can take you back to good times, hard times.
It's universal language that connects all of us.
When you sit back and think about all you've created and how people are still enjoying it these years later, that should give you a sense of pride and fulfillment.
Yes, exactly so.
And very much so, and it's quite often the way I find the last record you made is your favorite.
But this album that we've got out now, the Life Without Love After Love, is um my favorite, obviously now because but I did play it through it.
Actually, I played it before we sat down to do this interview, and I thought, actually, I hope people like this because my heart and soul's in there.
It really is.
Yeah, and I just think that's so good.
Now, how do people find you?
Do you have a website so they can follow what you're doing?
Yeah, we've got the Royal Band website, but it's not all the platforms, Spotify, YouTube, the major digital platforms.
Um I'm hoping uh because it's not so fashionable now, but it's getting better, isn't it?
The vinyl situation.
Now we've got three or four albums out at the moment, you know, old albums, they've been re-putting out on vinyl.
And we've got a lovely potwork for this um album.
And I'm hoping to persuade them to do a run of vinyl, because I'd like one myself.
Yeah, I'm hoping it'll come out on vinyl soon.
Yes, vinyl is definitely making a comeback.
It is.
Yes, and it's nice because we get to see that people are rediscovering that vinyl has that warm sound when that needle is placed on that vinyl record.
Yes, that crackle and hiss, it's got it.
But you could get a sample of that now and put it on your tracks.
I know, but it's not the same as when we made it, though.
It's not the same, no, of course not.
Yeah.
It's the thrill of the feel of the record and the little clunk when it the stylus goes onto the track and the music comes out.
Magic.
Absolutely, it sure is.
Well, this has been a pleasure.
I've really enjoyed this and very happy you could join us today.
Hi, thank you very much for having me.
It's been interesting to meet you.
Yes, same here.
It's been really, really nice.
Thanks again.
Thanks for joining us today.
We hope you enjoyed the show.
This has been a Tony Mantor Production.
For more information, contact media at plateau music.com.