Jim McCarty is the original drummer for The Yardbirds, afterwards going on to many musical projects including but not limited to: Together, Renaissance, Box of Frogs and his own solo work.
Here Jim tells about his early-'70s jazz-rock-fusion band Shoot ('The Neon Life' is phenomenal), mystical New Age projects: Stairway & Pilgrim, and the unreleased obscurity that is the film "Schizom".
Can you tell me in-depth about the recording process and completion of the soundtrack for the film "Schizom"? I read it was a very limited release for the 2012 distribution of the soundtrack on Easy Action, apparently there are only 300 copies? You recorded with Kay Garner I believe?
Yes. It was just an idea, we had a management company in London and they were approached by these guys that were doing a small budget documentary, it was sort of a semi-documentary, and they wanted some music for it. I don’t know why they chose us, I don’t know whether they wanted some Renaissance music or Yardbirds, but we put a few songs together for them and we recorded in a London studio and we used various session musicians. Kay Garner sang on one song. [‘High Mountain Sequence’]. We did see the film but I don’t know if it ever came out properly.
↳ The cover features a person ski-ing, was it about that?
Yes, it was ski-ing and sort of mountain climbing, mountaineering, up in the wilds. In Switzerland I think it was.
We liked doing it [the project] ‘cause we could watch the movie and do the music at the same time. It was like quite good fun, we’d never done that before. I think it was the sort of film that didn’t fit anywhere, didn’t really go on to the cinemas. It was like a very small budget thing, and didn’t go on TV either. It's a shame in a way.
Front CD cover for Schizom.
After the dissolution of the Yardbirds, you formed Together, an acoustic duo with Keith Relf. What was that endeavour like?
Well it was sort of very similar, I think. We were under contract to EMI still after we split, Keith and I were writing songs and were happy to record some things, we went into Abbey Road and played with some nice session musicians - people like Nicky Hopkins and John Mark, who played guitar and Tony Meehan the old Shadows drummer was involved ‘cause he was doing string arrangements for us. That was quite good fun but it never really made much of an impact on people and after that it was suggested that we got a band together and we called it Renaissance.
Promotional media of Together. © George Walker.
Jim’s note of the picture: ‘Oh yes I’ve seen this one before, it’s quite good isn’t it?’
How was your time in Shoot? The album cover is very interesting. I love the experimental sound on this record.
Funny enough, that’s all coming into the show I’m doing, [“History of Renaissance” with Annie Haslam]. That was after we left Renaissance and I just wanted to do some songs that I’ve written and sing them and form a little band. I met Dave Green, who was the guitar player and we got on well together, we were writing stuff, doing stuff together. He seemed very good and we were interested in a lot of American groups: Crosby, Stills & Nash and Seals & Crofts - those sort of vocal harmony groups so we did a lot of the songs in that sort of nature. It was good fun, we only did the one album [laughs], it didn’t do too well.
Shoot. L-R: Craig Collinge, Bill Russell, Dave Green and Jim McCarty. © Gered Mankowitz.
↳ People are missing out!
Yeah, well it’s just been re-released in the States on a label called T.L.A.K [Think Like A Key Music] and it's on CD.
Is there a chance you'll do an England tour sometime?
Yeah, we’d love to actually. It’s just getting the right sort of dates or the right tour together. Yeah I think it'd be really good fun. We’d been doing for the last Yardbirds tour, I was talking through the history with back projection and playing the music as it came up, which was quite good fun. One of the other guys was playing drums a bit, so that was very helpful, I didn’t have to keep going back to the drums all the time.
How did you compose the drumming for tracks on the Yardbirds' albums? Did you come up with a sequence and then apply it to a song? Or did you listen to the song and then figure out what you wanted to add?
Jim is shown in ‘Beat Instrumental’ magazine’s Portrait Gallery, October 1965 edition, with his Ludwig drum kit on ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ at Wembley Studios, London. 1965. © Beat Instrumental.
I think something like ‘Shapes Of Things’, we all came up with different bits of it [laughs]. We started off with a bass riff that we found on a jazz record and then we built up this sort of chord progression. I think my idea was doing the middle-eight section, the “come tomorrow” section. Then Keith and Paul did the lyrics. I think Keith did the main tune, but it came out well. I sort of put ideas into the pot from the beginning on a lot of songs. I think I wrote a lot of the lyrics on ‘Over, Under, Sideways, Down’ and the tune, that was sort of down to me.
Regarding your book, ‘Nobody Told Me’, what was it like writing a book and such an in-depth one about your life and musical career?
Well it was very enjoyable really because I was working with a great writer, Dave [Thompson], who wrote the book and he’s a real rock writer, and it was very easy. We used to have lots of sessions together and talking about it. He was good fun and we got on very well.
Front cover of ‘Nobody Told Me!’. © Trevor Heath. 1965.
How did the mystical music project ‘Stairway’, with fellow Renaissance/Illusion member Louis Cennamo come about?
Oh yeah [laughs], we lost touch for a long time and we met up and we were both interested in healing and meditation, all that stuff; the alternative world. We used to go to meetings in a big church in London and they always had alternative events on. Just in the West End, quite near Piccadilly. St. James’ church it was called. They had regular alternative talks on there. People were talking about all sorts of alternative subjects, I think we met up there. Louis and I were just chatting, we were saying it’d be nice to do some of that sort of music. We were introduced to these people who were local to where I lived in Twickenham and they were called ‘New World Cassettes’, at the time and they just did cassettes [laughs]. It was quite funny and then they upgraded to CDs. They did really well and seem to have a really good market selling the music in all these alternative little shops that sold candles and incense and all that sort of thing [laughs]. Well, as you know we did a few albums, but it was fun because we weren’t on our usual instruments. Louis was playing acoustic guitar instead of bass, and I was messing around on the keyboards, rather than drumming, singing a bit as well. It was fun to do it and people seemed to like it.
Stairway in Kew Gardens, London. Late 1980s. © Louis Cennamo.
Stairway in Kew Gardens, London. Late 1980s. © Louis Cennamo.
Could you talk a little about Pilgrim with Carmen Wilcox?
Carmen was one of the directors of ‘New World Music’ [label on which the Pilgrim albums were released] it became. She was a bit of a poet and I was quite friendly with her, we used to talk a lot. One day she said: ‘I’d like to do a record of my poetry. Is it possible you could put music to it?’. So I said: ‘Well I’ll have a go.’, and read some of her poems and put some songs together and we went from there. It was good fun to do and it came out quite nicely. John Richardson was another drummer and a lovely singer and he was a friend of Carmen’s as well, and he was involved in Pilgrim. We got a nice female singer as well, it became a sort of slightly Gothic idea as well and we did that ‘Gothic Dream’ [album] which was all based on the Gothic poets: Lord Byron and all those Victorian poets; Tennyson. I enjoyed that more ‘cause it was quite stylised.
Inside cover of Pilgrim’s CD album, “Search For The Dreamchild”. © Jim McCarty.
"Dream Within a Dream" by Pilgrim [video]
Lastly, I'm doing my dissertation on music from 1963 to 1969. What was it like being around London during the R&B boom?
It was very exciting. There were a lot of really good bands and there were a lot of great places to play, it's not quite the same anymore. We heard that [rhythm and blues] music coming over from America, all about the same time. We called it ‘R ‘n’ B’ but it was actually blues coming from mainly Chicago. People like Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Slim Harpo, Howlin’ Wolf, all these people. Suddenly we heard them all at once. We also used to go and see The Stones, of course they played all that stuff. At the time I’d never heard anything quite like it, it was like ‘What is this incredible music?’. It had sort of passion and excitement, and we really wanted to play it. Most of the bands were doing that, most of the bands we knew: The Pretty Things, The Kinks, The Animals. It was great.
Thank you very much Jim for your time.
(Interview conducted 23rd October 2025)
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