Chip Taylor: ‘Playing in maximum security prisons is one of my favourite things to do’

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy “I wonder what it’s like up there?” ponders 83-year-old Chip Taylor on The Cradle of All Living Things, the extraordinary new album he feared would be his last. Taylor sings, “I know that I don’t see much/ Close my eyes and it is you that I touch/ I touch your hair, I touch your nose, I touch your lips/ baby, I suppose…” Fifty years on since he wrote some of rock’s rawest declarations of youthful passion – including “Wild Thing” for the Troggs and “Angel of the Morning” for PP Arnold – and had his songs played by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Cash, Taylor is still: “A romantic?” he laughs. It was a real New York moment…” Taylor reaches creakily out of shot, grabs a guitar and begins slamming vigorously into the song’s riff to show me how “that upstrum, there? “I wasn’t quite sure what to sing next!” Raised in a strict Catholic faith – “with a lot of guilt” – Taylor was rather embarrassed by the song’s raw sexuality.