As part of Felix White’s remarkable series of interviews exploring the new lives of former cricketers, Mark Butcher opens up to Felix White about coping with life both before and after retirement.
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In my formative years of falling in love with the game, Mark Butcher is one of the clearest cricketers in my memory. So much so that I remember being painfully nervous for him facing his first ball as stand-in captain of the England team. A teammate of Jack Russell’s [also interviewed in this mega-feature] and a constant through England’s troubled if colourful Test side, a rare feat in itself, as well as Surrey’s all-conquering late 90s era, he played 71 Tests, averaging 34.58, and scored 17,870 first-class runs. Now a revered and travelled pundit, he is also a guitarist and songwriter, and due to make his next record with Paul Weller’s bass player. We meet in a pub in Croydon one afternoon where we have three pints and stop our two-hour chat occasionally to talk guitars and music. I leave insisting that he really should write a book about all of this.
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I think I probably enjoy cricket more now that I don’t have a vested interest in who wins. It was probably one of the reasons that coaching and staying involved in dressing rooms didn’t appeal to me, I was tired of going home and kicking the cat because we’d not played well or I’d not played well and the team had lost. It became like that in the end, you take this monster home with you to an unsuspecting and undeserving wife, and I thought ‘I don’t really want to be doing that again for another 20 years’. For a start, playing for England in the Nineties, generally speaking we were losing. We went pretty much an entire decade without winning.
We had an album that came out in 2009, the year after I retired. We toured it a little bit but it was nothing concerted. I put it out with a good friend of mine, who produced it, there was a bit of a lack of cohesion with it. It got out but the distribution was average to say the least. I don’t know whether it was absolutely in my heart that I was going to get out and give my life over to it. I think I probably dodged the reality of that, knowing that I had a family and had to make money and the best thing to do was to stay with the cricket stuff, which demanded more of my time than I could have ever imagined. I look back and wouldn’t do it differently.
I recorded another album in January. It was something Acid Jazz records wanted me to do. I sent this guy the demos and he was totally blown away by it, couldn’t believe it was me, played it to everyone in the office. And I get a phone call saying, ‘Go for it, I’m going to put you in touch with this producer’, who happens to be Weller’s bass player up till this time. We recorded 15 tracks, and it has elements of a soul, R’n’B record.
In terms of my playing career, I finished in 2004 when I had my wrist injury and didn’t play for England again. So that was the end of my international career, although I never actually officially retired, so I’m still available.
