Mickey Thomas has given a lengthy interview to Rolling Stone that covers the whole of his six-decade long career.
Who is Mickey Thomas, some of you may be asking? Well, he was – and indeed still is – the vocalist with Starship, the mid-’80s rockers who evolved out of Jefferson Starship, which had in turn evolved out of Jefferson Airplane. We Built This City and Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now? Yup, that’s him.
The former was a Billboard US Number One in 1985 and has led several lives. In the 1990s and ’00s it was critiqued by many critics as being the epitome of mid-’80s ‘corporate’ rock, from a group whose members were also in one of the leading groups of ’60s counterculture. ‘Sell outs’, etc. Latterly, it’s been embraced (somewhat inevitably) by hipsters and, in 2018, ended up being appropriated for a Christmas novelty song about sausage rolls (by LadBaby).
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None of this might have happened, Thomas reveals, if the band hadn’t intervened when they received the song from its writers, Bernie Taupin and Martin Page.
“When I first heard it, I thought, this is real interesting little song,” remembers Thomas. “It’s kind of quirky. I love the lyric. I thought that was one of his [Taupin’s] better lyrics ever.
“The thing was, it didn’t have a chorus. The demo that I received, it went from the part where it goes ‘Don’t you remember we built this city. We built this city on rock and roll,’ and then immediately back to the second verse. So there was none of that, ‘We built this city!’ That didn’t exist.”
So, Thomas brought it in and discussed it with the group’s producers, Peter and Dennis Lambert. “So they went out into the studio. We sat at the piano and came up with the anthemic chorus, which became the double-edged sword of the song. That’s what made it a gigantic hit, but it’s also the part that alienates people a lot, polarises people, purists and so.”
And what of that puzzling line, ‘Marconi plays the mamba’? Marconi is obviously Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio. A mamba is a big snake. But even the group were mystified, it seems…
“The night that the song went Number One, we were touring, we were in Kalamazoo, Michigan,” remembers Thomas. “And so we’re calling everybody we know because we just got the Number One song in Billboard and we’re pretty thrilled. And so I said, ‘Let’s call Bernie.’
“I get on the phone with Bernie and say, ‘Now, Bernie, now more than ever, everybody’s going to be asking me, what does ‘Marconi plays the mamba’ mean?’ And he didn’t miss a beat. He goes, ‘I have no fucking idea. It sounds good to me.’ It reminded me of something that John Lennon said once, ‘Sound over sensibility.’”
