Things have rarely been a smooth ride for Ginger Wildheart: drugs, arguments, music industry problems, mental ill-health. But, as he readies The Wildhearts’ 11th album, he reflects on how, even in his fourth decade as the leader of the band, the music never quit on him…
The Wildhearts’ dazzling new album, Satanic Rites Of The Wildhearts, features a song called Troubadour Moon. A cautionary tale about a singer whose once promising future turned into a forgotten past at the drop of a needle, amid a sheath of impressive and evocative lyrics are included the lines, ‘He never played to 20,000 faces, [he’ll] never get to rub shoulders with the greatest, never to reach legendary status now.’ Take that, the future of rock’n’roll, whomever you may be.
“The person in the story has taken a lot of advice and has changed what he wanted to do, and how he wanted to be portrayed, in favour of something that was guaranteed to succeed,” Ginger Wildheart – band leader with The Wildhearts and the song’s author – reveals. “And when it didn’t succeed, he was left with nothing. Not even the respect of having made his own art. [You should] follow your own path. Go with your own instincts because your own instincts are absolutely correct for you.”
For better and worse, the fate of the protagonist in Troubadour Moon – who learns to his cost that ‘It’s a bitch when you find out you’re just an ordinary man’ – is not one that will be shared by Ginger Wildheart. Even in times when the 60-year-old songwriter has been burdened by mental ill-health, or enmeshed in the chaos of very hard drugs – spoiler warning: plenty of times – the music has flowed like wine at the Last Supper. All of it interesting, much of it inspired, a good chunk of it brilliant. As he himself said, in song of course, ‘Some of the shit has sprouted in roses, and some of the roses have died.’
“I’ve always written,” he says. “Even when I was a crack-head I was writing. I was never a junkie as much as I was a writer.”
Along with talent both raw and cultivated, it is this one priority, held tight in the teeth of madness, that makes it worth the candle. It’s the reason the band, and its kingpin, have held the gaze of an attentive and occasionally indulgent audience for more than three decades now.
Absent as early-day members who re-united for the band’s previous two albums may be – lead guitarist C.J. Wildheart, bassist Danny McCormack and drummer Rich Battersby declined the invitation to feature on the new record – Satanic Rites Of The Wildhearts is a collection seething with invention. Never mind that listeners of a certain age hold tight to the classic debut Earth vs The Wildhearts (an assessment based as much on sentiment as music), the group in its current form is the better iteration. Not for the first time, in 2025, Ginger has exploded the truism that bands do their best work in the first seven or eight years of their lifespan.
“I put it down to a lack of money and commercial success,” he says, in what doesn’t sound like a joke. “Because I’ve seen how that usually derails a band. The concept of an artist getting better, or at least maintaining a standard, is something you expected from writers, and painters, but for some reason we expect musicians to get worse.
“I’ve never understood that. I think if you’ve got your mind open or if you’re still being inspired, how can that not work for you? If anything you’ve got more of a world view. You’ve got more nuance, so it should be better.”
Appearing on a computer screen from his home, hard by the Yorkshire Dales, for the first time in a while, Ginger doesn’t look like a man overburdened by life’s tribulations. His slimmed-down form, he explains, can be attributed to exercise and the daily routine of taking Maggie, his Border Collie, on rambling walks on the hills of God’s Own County.
In a stroke of geographical good fortune, his dwelling in the boondocks, miles from an off-license, mitigates against the temptation to pop out for a bottle or two of hooch. For a man whose photograph once appeared in Kerrang! above the caption ‘hands up if you’ve taken every drug in the world’, today, his sole concession to grape and grain is a glass of wine with a nice steak.
In the last version of The Wildhearts, though, things did get sketchy. “My life had spun out of control and I was definitely going to end up in a box or behind bars, and it looked as if it was imminent,” he says.
Out on the road, bad habits had muscled their way back into the realm. His behaviour became worryingly unpredictable. Crack rocks deposited into pipes were set aflame. Once again, as the chorus in the mesmerising The Jackson Whites warned us, the apocalypse was in his sights. To put it quietly, for a man hurtling towards his seventh decade, the view was unedifying.
“I was the most frightening person in my life,” he says. “When you’re in a band like The Wildhearts have been, where it’s the black water of chaos, then you’re just basically batting things away from you instead of looking inside of life and asking, ‘What the fuck is this all about?’ It’s the sort of band where in the past I haven’t tried not to court chaos. I found a comfort in chaos. And that was something I really had to look into: Why am I” – pause for comic effect – “such a prick?”
The process of attaining mental wellbeing involved learning, autonomously, to understand, and to some degree to control, the things that went bump in his mind. The process was severe to the extent of separating him from music – he couldn’t write it, didn’t want to listen to it, didn’t, even, care to read about it in books or magazines. Fine. But then, on a frequency somewhere between Helmet and ABBA, this most fluent of diviners discovered that a song had dropped into his head, and onto his fingers. Then there came another one. With this, Ginger Wildheart realised he was “pregnant” with a new album.
Today, he describes life as being akin to the point in a rollercoaster at which the carriage is clanking its way up the first ascent. But for all its screaming peaks and thundering valleys, the ride can be endured, and perhaps even enjoyed, in a state of equilibrium.
As The Wildhearts sing on Failure Is The Mother Of Success, Satanic Rites Of The Wildhearts’ closing track and Ginger’s most recent masterpiece, ‘You took a lot of knocks to get where you are today.’ Okay, sure. But with the forces of gravity no longer distorting his face, in this state of peace, the songs keep coming. Unlike the terrible habits of life itself, they can’t be stopped.
With time running short on our interview, Ginger Wildheart is asked if he considers himself to be a survivor?
“Of course,” he answers. “Look at me. Death can’t kill me. For some reason, something’s keeping me here and I’m not allowed to die.
“Am I a survivor? Yeah. I’m the poster boy for survival.”
Satanic Rites Of The Wildhearts is out now via Snakefarm
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