SPEAKER IDENTIFICATION

Program Intro / Announcer - Opens and closes the episode.
Catherine Nadal - Host of Bringing the Darkness to the Light.
Sean Manning - Guest; guitarist for The Exiles.
Music Cue - Excerpts from The Exiles' songs played during the episode.

Program Intro / Announcer:
This is Bringing the Darkness to the Light with Catherine Nadal, professional psychic medium. Today's guest is Sean Manning. He is the guitarist for the band The Exiles. The Exiles is an international, 1970s-inspired hard rock band that also features his friend and musical partner, Paul Rafferty.

Catherine Nadal:
It's a pleasure to have you on.

Sean Manning:
Hey, Catherine. Thanks for your time. I appreciate being here.

Catherine Nadal:
Thank you. The band is called The Exiles, and I am very interested in speaking with you. I was reading a lot about the band. I know it has a bit of a Led Zeppelin flavor and a bit of a Bad Company flavor. There is a lot happening right now with your band, but I want to start at the beginning. How did you get involved in the music scene?

Sean Manning:
I was a professional musician in England when I was about 17, and I came to the United States at the end of the 1980s. I actually came over to study jazz, but I ended up playing in various projects here, including heavy metal and hard rock projects. I played with Kevin DuBrow when he was reforming Quiet Riot, and I also played with the band Hurricane and did some session work.

I ended up being introduced to Paul through a chap named John Sutherland, who was very well known in the Hollywood music industry. He had a great talent for putting people together. John was a big fan of Zeppelin and a big fan of Free. He liked the style of my guitar playing, so he put me in touch with Paul Rafferty.

Paul came over with Jason Bonham's original band, Bonham. We got together, jammed on some old Jeff Beck and Faces songs, and we clicked. I knew we had something there, and that was the beginning of it.

Catherine Nadal:
That is incredible, because you look at our timeline and sometimes you meet people by chance, but then you really do not continue along with them. You have been with him a long time.

Sean Manning:
Paul and I go way back. The reality is that this album, Turning Time, is remastered and reproduced from some demos that were initially released in the 1990s. There was no distribution, no record company, just some CDs pressed. The timing was really bad because when Paul and I were writing together, it was right before grunge really hit and overtook everything. The entire music industry changed.

Then I got a phone call last year from a friend, Swiss Chris in Switzerland, who said there was a record company in Europe that wanted to put the album out. So I had an opportunity to go back into the studio, re-record, reproduce, and remaster all of the tracks. Through that process, I found five songs that Paul and I had written twenty years ago that I had completely forgotten about.

That was an incredible opportunity to go back, rearrange those songs from the scratch tracks we had, add different instrumentation, and add other guitar tracks to the originals. I brought in Jeff Jacobs from Foreigner and Billy Joel to put keyboards on everything, and we remastered everything. It has been an incredible journey this last year.

Catherine Nadal:
I find that interesting, because when you go back and revisit something you worked on in the past, as a songwriter you probably write with emotion. Did you need to dramatically change a lot of the sentiment of the songs, or was it more about changing instrument sounds and production?

Sean Manning:
The songs and the vibe were captured at the time. We recorded them at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, the same place where the Stones and Zeppelin recorded. The original tracks and vibes were there, but the production was not. Frankly, my ear back then was not as advanced as it is now, and I could not hear things then that I can hear now.

It was a blessing to have the original songs and make the album I would have loved to make twenty years ago but did not have the opportunity to make. It was a chance to close the chapter and actually produce those songs properly: adding tracks, instrumentation, strings, and the final details needed to make the product sound exactly the way I heard it in my head. That was not there twenty-plus years ago, so I was grateful for the opportunity.

Catherine Nadal:
Earlier you mentioned the time of the 1980s going into the 1990s and how the music scene shifted toward grunge. That affected a lot of fans. What did you find in your life, not just in your music life but personally? Did you have to sort it all out and say, "I have to do different work," or did you somehow remain in the music field?

Sean Manning:
I knew before it came what was going to happen. The writing was on the wall when Lars Ulrich was making a lot of noise about Napster. When we were kids, if one friend bought an album, you copied it onto a cassette. But it could only go as far as you could travel on your bicycle and how far your legs could carry you. Maybe five or six kids would each buy different albums and share them.

Then I remember seeing Steve Jobs on the front page of Rolling Stone with an iPod, and I knew at that point that this was over. One click, and it was global. All the revenue from record sales was going to disappear. I saw where it was headed and thought, "This is not going to work for me. I am out of here."

Catherine Nadal:
So what did you do with your life?

Sean Manning:
I reinvented myself. I got into the financial markets and real estate. I ended up owning and working with a company here in Texas that helps individuals educate themselves in the financial markets. Before that, I raised money for movies in Hollywood through Reg D 504 stock offerings, raised money for Carnival Cruises, and did a lot of different things that took me down the path to where I am now.

I am a real estate investor and I do a number of different things. This music project happened completely out of the blue. Being able to re-record these songs and add the production I could hear was really a gift. The best analogy I can think of is that it felt like the end of Christmas Day, when there is one gift still under the tree that everyone has missed. It has your name on it. That is exactly what this was for me.

I was not looking for it. I had not been actively playing for a number of years. It came out of the blue and gave me the opportunity to get back into a proper studio here in Dallas, Empire Studios, with Alex Gerst, who engineered the material with me. He is also a great drummer, so he put drums on some scratch tracks and helped turn them into songs.

Some of the five songs that I had completely forgotten Paul and I had written together were actual singles. I cannot believe they were not on the original pressing. It has been a really cool experience, especially from the production side: going back into a studio, being able to play again, and working with talented people who sonically brought the songs to where they are now.

If you like Zeppelin, Bad Company, the Black Crowes, the Stones, the Faces, Humble Pie, or anything like that, you will understand where we were coming from. But it also has a more modern production. It has been a great journey, and I am very appreciative of the opportunity.

Catherine Nadal:
This is such a cool interview because I like to see how you can recreate yourself, and then out of the blue be given a gift to go back to how you started. It is almost full circle. That is beautiful. It is like a spiritual experience for you. When you were really young, did you come from a musical family, or were you the odd man out who just loved music?

Sean Manning:
No, I did not come from a musical family. I came from a little village in England of about two thousand people, where everybody was a farmer, a plumber, a carpenter, or a bricklayer. But I was always very drawn to music when I was young. There were three or four of us at very young ages who were completely obsessed by it.

I was teaching when I was sixteen. I was touring and completely self-sufficient when I was seventeen. Looking back on it now, it is crazy. I moved to California when I was eighteen, and by the time I was twenty or twenty-one, I was playing in the reformation of Quiet Riot.

Had I been six or seven years older, I would have caught that style and genre differently. I think some of my favorite music - Zeppelin, early Rainbow with Ronnie James Dio, Deep Purple - happened in the late 1970s. Then things changed with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in the early 1980s: Iron Maiden, Motorhead, and that kind of thing. At that time I was only twelve or thirteen.

I was a huge jazz-fusion fan. That was the direction I was going when I came out to music college. Then one of my really good friends, Rowan Robertson, got the gig with Ronnie James Dio, and that changed everything for me. My whole circle changed, and I have some incredible memories from back then.

Catherine Nadal:
What are a few early memories of being starstruck? You were seventeen or eighteen, brought over to play music in the United States. You were running into people. Did you have moments where you had to pinch yourself and think, "Is this really happening?"

Sean Manning:
Probably the first thing was that I did not really know who Quiet Riot were because they were not big in England. They were obviously big over here, but the one song they were known for was a cover of an English band, Slade: "Cum On Feel the Noize." When I worked with Kevin, I was really quite hard on him because I was not impressed with the rock-and-roll stuff. I was a musician. I did not care about any of that.

When I first met Ronnie Dio, he was so gracious, so thoughtful. He basically said, "I will help you." I was thinking, "This is the guy who sang on the first single I ever bought, Black Sabbath's 'Neon Knights.' The first album I ever got was Rainbow Rising." That was incredible. But he was such a great human being that there was no starstruck feeling around him.

I never really bought into all that. I was lucky that I never lacked confidence. I do remember being taken to meet Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley when Kiss were recording the "Forever" video. Eric Carr was playing drums, and Bruce Kulick was there. A seamstress who was making clothes for us and for them took me down to meet them. Paul Stanley was so kind and gracious. I was this kid from nowhere, and he asked if I had a guitar endorsement. He offered to put me in touch with his guy at B.C. Rich. That interaction showed me his character.

Honestly, the guys who were already there and had already made it - the Ronnie James Dios and Paul Stanleys of the world - were always really cool. The ones who were not quite there could be a real pain in the butt.

All the English guys used to hang out. We would go to the Cat and Fiddle, have Sunday lunch, and play soccer together. We were friendly with guys from other bands and played soccer with guys from Def Leppard a number of times.

One vivid memory was around the original formation of The Exiles. Kelly Hansen from Hurricane, James LoMenzo, Greg D'Angelo from White Lion, and I were playing together. Around that time, I was invited up to Zak Starkey's house. Zak is Ringo Starr's son and the drummer with The Who. We had just come back from a Joe Walsh birthday party, and I remember sitting on the couch learning about red wine from John Entwistle of The Who at two o'clock in the morning. He was explaining why I was getting headaches and talking about tannins. The next day, when the sun was coming up, I called my parents and said, "I was at Ringo Starr's house last night talking to John Entwistle about red wine." That was surreal.

Catherine Nadal:
I love that. Even as you are talking, you are rattling off all these well-known names as if it was just part of your everyday life. That makes you realize that every move you made early on mattered. Playing with Hurricane, meeting these people, and taking those risks all mattered.

When you moved away from music and recreated your life, you moved into a career full of strategic moves: learning risk and how to take risk. You had already done that by stepping away from the U.K. as a young man. Sometimes the traits we discover later were already living inside of us.

Sean Manning:
That is very true. Change and being able to recreate yourself into a better version of yourself is really important. Paul Rafferty used to say, "Sometimes, Manning, we have to shake things up. It is good to shake things up."

Throwing yourself into situations where you know you are going to fail is the only time you grow as a musician. I remember going to auditions in London with jazz guys who were forty or fifty years old. To me, they were ancient at the time because I was seventeen. There was no way I was going to hang with them and play those complicated changes. I knew I would fail going into it, but I also knew that if I did not fail, I would not grow. If I did not grow, I would stay the same, and staying the same was never something I was comfortable with.

It was always about pushing and growing through music and different styles. When it became apparent that music was not necessarily going to be the only thing for me, I looked for other outlets. I have been incredibly lucky and blessed. I have lived the lives of three adults already in different careers. I am grateful for the people I have met, and I still have great relationships with many of the musicians I worked with professionally.

Catherine Nadal:
Tell me about Paul Rafferty, not just as a musical collaborator, but as a person. He was involved with a lot of the songwriting too.

Sean Manning:
Paul and I wrote everything together. He is incredibly talented. He lives in the South of France, and he is also an artist. His paintings sell for thirty or forty thousand dollars apiece. He was commissioned to do a bronze statue of Winston Churchill in the U.K. He is an incredibly talented man.

We had a great deal of fun together. We were like brothers. We were very similar, even though we came from two different parts of England. I am from the Cambridge area and he is from Oxford, which are rival cities. We spent a lot of time together writing.

We had great chemistry because we had similar musical tastes. When I met Paul, I thought, "He can really sing." He could sing blues, and he came up with good hooks and melodies. We could write entire songs from beginning to end in thirty minutes. It was really easy to work with him, and we had an awful lot of fun.

One of the joys of doing this project was receiving the master tapes. When I opened them, all of Paul's original lyrics fell out, along with his little drawings and doodles from the studio. I included those when I designed the CD. There is a 24-page booklet with original things nobody has seen. It was cool to see all of that again, including the original song titles that were later changed.

Hearing those songs in a proper studio again was also wonderful. There were tracks on the tapes that had not been used in the original release. If I had put down four guitar tracks, maybe only two were used in the original demo. Then I would hear one and think, "Oh, that is me. What did I play there?" It was cool to hear that and be involved in the production side.

If there were ever an opportunity to go back into the studio again in some capacity, I would enjoy that. It is all right-brain creative work. That is when the magic happens. You either receive something and put it down, or you do not.

I love Paul. He is a wonderful fellow. We shared incredible times writing songs together. Now, with the album being released, the music can finally be heard. There is not a lot of new material in this style around now. I made the album for me, and if anybody likes it, that is great. I also made it with the thought of honoring everybody's contributions: Paul's voice, Terry's drums, and everyone who played on it. We have Pat Benatar's band on there as well, Myron and Frank. Incredible musicians. The music needs to be heard, and then people can judge for themselves.

Catherine Nadal:
When you stepped back into the studio now, in current day, a lot of musicians are editing old things, mixing their own material, and using Pro Tools. How was it to go back now and realize how much help there is from all these tools? A lot of musicians have told me that thirty or forty years ago, things did not move as fast.

Sean Manning:
If it were not for the technology, this album could not have been made. The original two-inch masters had degraded over time. We had to bake them, literally in an oven, to transfer them into Pro Tools. Now everything is digital, so there is no loss or degeneration.

It makes things easier in terms of efficiency and time. You can move things around. But I think it is a double-edged sword, especially for younger musicians. The technology is so incredible that you can rely on it too much. I was talking with someone yesterday and said, "The guitarists now are technically incredible, but I am not feeling anything."

I think every guitar player should have to play one solo using only three notes and see what they can do with those three notes. I miss that feeling. When you hear David Gilmour play a note, you know it is him. When you hear Paul Kossoff, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, or Jeff Beck, you know it is them immediately. Now it can sound homogenized, and so much has been done because of the technology.

I was old school when I was a kid, and now I am really old school.

Catherine Nadal:
There is also a very big conversation happening about AI and the taboo of AI. People are putting out music who are not even musicians, and that is the part that gets me crazy. You spend your whole life studying music, and then somebody just whips up a song even though they are not a musician.

Sean Manning:
It is not the same. I experienced something like that years ago at a different level. I was in an airport while I was traveling, and a guy came up to me and said, "Hey man, you play?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Me too." I asked, "What do you play?" He said, "I scratch. I am a DJ."

I thought, "You do not play. You are a DJ." I believe that to call yourself a musician, you should actually be able to play an instrument. Call me old school, but I believe if you are a pilot, you should be able to fly a plane.

Catherine Nadal:
I agree. I want to move on and talk about the first single, "Rainmaker." Tell the audience about that song.

Sean Manning:
Greg D'Angelo from White Lion played drums on that. Greg was in the original formation of the band, and it was recorded originally in his garage on an eight-track Tascam cassette. It was not quarter-inch tape or two-inch tape. It was actually on a cassette, so we did quite a bit of work on it.

Greg did a phenomenal job. He was the original drummer and a big John Bonham fan. There is something about English players - maybe it is the rain, maybe it is being raised in the countryside - but that song has a certain feel.

The music for "Rainmaker" was written before I met Paul. Rowan Robertson and I were roommates at the time, and we were really into The Cult's Sonic Temple album that Bob Rock had produced. They were stepping into a heavier production with big Les Pauls, twelve-strings, and things like that. The "Rainmaker" riff came out of listening to that album over and over on headphones. I recorded it on a twelve-string and borrowed Rowan's Les Paul to record the heavy guitar underneath.

Before I found Paul, we looked at a couple of other singers. Glenn Hughes came down and listened to the track, which was great because I wanted an English blues singer. The idea really came from a charity gig that Greg, James, Kelly, and I did in Hollywood, where Ray Gillen from Badlands sang some Deep Purple numbers with us. After playing with Ray, I knew that was the kind of singer I needed.

When Paul heard the track, he put the melody and lyrics down really quickly. I knew then that we would be able to produce good music together. There was chemistry. That was the first song Paul and I did together, even though the music had already been written. All the other songs were written together from the ground up.

Music Cue:
The Exiles - "Rainmaker" is played. Extended lyrics are omitted and represented as a music cue.

Catherine Nadal:
Just so the audience knows, this album is called Turning Time. How many songs are being released on it?

Sean Manning:
There are fifteen songs on the entire album. I think I will probably release a minimum of five or six because there is such a different palette. Like some early Zeppelin, there are heavy songs and acoustic songs. "Richmond Castle Walk" starts with acoustic guitar and mandolin and then gets really heavy. "Lights Out" is different again, and "To Friend" is more like an early Rod Stewart and the Faces up-tempo type of song.

There are so many different styles. I do not know. I am just going to keep releasing it until it is all done, and we will see what happens.

Catherine Nadal:
Before we talk about your next song, tell us how we can follow you. Facebook, Instagram - what are the handles?

Sean Manning:
The Exiles UK on Facebook and Instagram. I was trying TikTok, but they flagged "Rainmaker" for copyright and you cannot hear it, even though it is my song. I am going back and forth with them trying to explain that I am the author.

Mainly Facebook, Instagram, and also X. If you search The Exiles, Sean Manning, Paul Rafferty, or The Exiles UK, you will find it. Quite a few people are being introduced to it now, especially people who like that style of music, and they are saying nice things about it. That has been good.

Catherine Nadal:
I have to thank Michael Brandvold for introducing me to you. Now we are going to move into the last song that was recently released, "Soul Woman."

Sean Manning:
"Soul Woman" is one of the forgotten, lost songs. I had completely forgotten about it. When I received the master tape, I saw the title and remembered the title, but when we played it, I could not remember the song at all. It sounded like "Black Dog" at the beginning, and it was really catchy. I thought, "Why did this not go on the original release?" It would not have made any difference because nobody would have heard it, but it was one of the five songs where I thought, "This is really good."

As a musician, I never used to listen to my own work after recording it. But with this album, I had to listen to everything because I was adding instrumentation and production. This may sound cheesy, but I am actually a fan of this album myself. I can listen to it, which I could never do before.

When we pulled "Soul Woman" up in the studio, it sounded massive. I heard the need for doubling two or three tracks, adding vocals, adding backing vocals, and adding guitar parts. The original tracks were raw and not fully produced. I would hear something and think, "We need to double this. We need backing vocals here. We need a Les Paul here against the Telecaster to bring the riff out."

Working with Jeff Jacobs was incredible. He played with Billy Joel and Foreigner. As a guitarist, I do not think like a piano player, and we sometimes speak different musical languages. I would say, "Remember that early Rod Stewart stuff? Can you do something like that?" and he would nail it immediately. He could take the ideas I had in my head and put them down on the tracks.

"Soul Woman" is very up-tempo and very heavy. It starts with a guitar riff and vocal, and then the whole band comes in. It is very big. I also just finished a video for it. I used AI for the video, not for the music. I will not use AI for the music, but it is a wonderful tool for the video side. I took old pictures that nobody had seen, created a scrapbook feel, and included landmarks where we played in L.A., like the Troubadour and the Whisky, along with Beverly Hills, where Paul and I lived. I wanted to bring some of that history into the video.

The next one I have to work on is "I'm the One," which is another lost track. I have an idea for the video that includes a vintage Shelby Mustang. Then I have to go to Europe and Switzerland and do some work, and after that I will get back to it.

Catherine Nadal:
That is very exciting. I look forward to checking out Turning Time and the songs as you release them. I cannot thank you enough for spending time with me today. I want everyone to go and check out The Exiles. Thank you again, Sean Manning.

Sean Manning:
Thank you, Catherine. Thank you.

Music Cue:
The Exiles - "Soul Woman" is played. Extended lyrics are omitted and represented as a music cue.

Program Outro / Announcer:
You have been listening to Bringing the Darkness to the Light with Catherine Nadal, professional psychic medium, Dream Central Station, LLC. Audio editing is credited in the source to Al Hemberger at a recording studio in Bronxville, New York. Closing station identification follows.