Geoff Francis: 55 Years Vegan - Music, Art & Activism

Let's hear a little snippet of your collaboration with Captain Sensible.

It's 1984, and, uh, you co-wrote this single called What No Meat.

Let's hear a bit of it now.

What have we made of this world? Every way, every turn, it's a battle.

There's a war going on between man and the birds, beasts, and cattle.

The front line is there in your eyes.

They do all of the things you despise, but oh, you can change it.

I'm not so meat crazy.

It's just the meat, baby.

What's no meat? I'm not so meat crazy.

It's just the meat, baby.

What's no meat?

So it's Jeff Francis and Captain Sensible there, What No Meat, 1984.

And, um, Captain Sensible had had a couple of ...

Well, he had a very big solo hit.

He had a, a version of Happy Talk from South Pacific, which was number one in the UK and various countries, and one of his follow-up singles was called Wot, W-O-T.

So this is a bit of a, a play on that title, What No Meat, which was shortly after the Captain Sensible single, Wot.

So tell me how this came about, Jeff.

Well, I'd, I'd said to, because we had the label, uh, I said to the Captain, "Would you think about doing something on the vegetarian theme?" And, uh, he booked a studio.

I paid for it, but he booked the studio [laughs] in Croydon.

And, uh, went over there, and he had the chorus, but he didn't have any verse.

And this was my introduction to songwriting, because, uh, I sat down with Rachel, who was Captain's girlfriend at the time, and, uh, we knocked out the tune, the words.

The words were basically mine.

I was running a thing called The Enough Project at that time, which was all about, uh, the waste of human resources, of food resources, uh, that could've been fed to human beings directly.

And we were in a situation where there was the, the Ethiopian starvation going on, and they were shipping grain from Ethiopia to be fed to cattle over here.