Eighth Day Magazine Issue Twenty-one

EIGHTH DAY Jah Wobble in Lockdown!

The Alarm / Screaming Dead / Grant McPhee / Snowgoose / Mark Corrin / Counterparts / Action Records

ISSUE TWENTY-ONE. JUNE. £4.50

“Oi! Inside Now!”

EDITORIAL

Alice Jones-Rodgers Editor-in-Chief Scott Rodgers Photographer and ‘Lert’ Thank you to all this month’s contributors.

If you would like to contribute to future issues, please Email samples of your work to: eighthdaymagazine@outlook.com

Facebook: eighthdaymagazine / Twitter: @EighthDayMag ... #2020inthebag

CONTENTS 4. The Alarm Interview by Kevin Burke.

50. Jah Wobble Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

10. Screaming Dead Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

78. Counterparts Interview by Peter Dennis.

17. Dean and Chapter Alice Jones-Rodgers reports on the Country Down outfit’s new single.

82. Frenchy’s Rants This month: And then, he took his test ... life choices.

18. Snowgoose Interview by Kevin Burke.

85. Oasis Paul Foden gives his verdict on the recently unearthed ‘new’ old single.

23 / 31 / 35. Wasted World Another installment of Dan Webster’s legendary comic strip.

24. German Shepherd Records Presents: Mark Corrin Interview by Bob Osborne.

32. The Senton Bombs In the second part of an exclusive series, bassist and vocalist Joey Class reveals all about the band’s new single ‘Blue Sunset’.

86. Sparks Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews ‘A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip’.

90. Stardust Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews the David Bowie biopic.

94. Rock for Ray Paul Foden reports from the Nowhere Inn in Plymouth.

36. Grant McPhee Interview by Kevin Burke.

97. Drum & Bass: The Movement Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews the definitive D&B documentary.

49. Introducing: Oggy Why.

98. Action Records Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

Sounding

The Alarm: A Conversation with Mike Peters

Interview by Kevin Burke.

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Welsh troubadour Mike Peters is someone who has remained at the forefront of music for nearly four decades. With his band The Alarm, he has seen the world and captured the spirit of what music means to all of us. He is a survivor of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and co-founded the Love Hope Strength Foundation to raise funds and awareness in order to benefit people with cancer and leukaemia. For this, Mike was awarded a MBE in the 2019 New Year Honours for his services.

However, his musical career is still soaring. After two acclaimed albums released a year apart, ‘Equals’ (2018) and ‘∑ Sigma’ (2019), he is now about to unleash two mammoth and nostalgic recordings.

The first, due for release on June 12th titled ‘Stream [Hurricane of Change]’ is a 39 track concept of new music that exists somewhere between The Who’s ‘Quadrophenia’ and Dylan Thomas’ ‘Under Milk Wood’, a culmination of the acclaimed Alarm albums ‘Eye of the Hurricane’ (1987) and ‘Change’ (1989). The second, a Record Store Day release, is a double live album recorded in 1988, ‘Celtic Folklore Live’, an extension of the original release, ‘Electric Folklore’. Both together celebrate a creative peak for The Alarm in the late eighties.

As the world turns through this

surreal time, Mike Peters is keeping himself busy. With his streaming show on social media, The Big Night In and his home schooling, consisting of teaching his kids classic tracks like The Who’s ‘My Generation’, he is remaining prolific as ever. In between all of this, I got to speak to the gentleman Mike about these upcoming recordings, his nostalgia fired projects and his most recent recordings ‘Equals’ and ‘∑ Sigma’.

Thank you Mike, first off you have two albums coming out in June. The first, ‘Stream [Hurricane of Change]’ is a massive 39 track album. Are you celebrating the pinnacle of The Alarm through this release?

I’m not sure a pinnacle, a turning point. I think we reached a crescendo in the eighties. In 1986, we played our biggest ever shows in Los Angeles, live on MTV with 26,000 people there. We played Wembley Stadium a few weeks later with Queen and then we went away, we had to start cleaning up the band again for what we were going to do for the rest of the decade ... having to face the nineties. It became quite a turbulent time for us. We still found a way out, but it was difficult. I think ‘Eye of the Hurricane’ at that point was relatable to surviving that heavy storm, the winds of change that had come along and that took us into the ‘Change’ album. The two albums came out of an extended period of creativity.

We had a lot of songs for ’Eye of the

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Mk1 (1983)

Hurricane’ that didn’t get to the album sessions that carried into ‘Change’ and there were a lot more songs written.

There was a clear line of an end or beginning to the two albums, they kind of flowed into one another like one big creative period. We were so challenged by what was happening around us at that time, coming to the end of the eighties our relationships with individuals were changing, we were growing, we were boys becoming men, we had relationships. Europe was changing - the borders were coming down, the Berlin Wall fell, in Wales there were campaigns to devolve the government. We became embroiled in all of this. I was distracted a lot while writing them, trying to convey things happening in the outside world through the prism of The Alarm. And they were great records [I agree]. We enjoyed touring them, they took us into the nineties and then we moved on.

Looking at ‘Stream’, what gave you the idea now to do this project?

When it came to the 20th anniversary, I

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dusted the albums down and remastered them both with massive sleevenotes, including all the B-sides.

When it came to the 30th anniversary last year, I just thought, well, everyone’s got the record, they know what it is. I wanted to put a new insight into this record and reveal it in another way, let’s just go back to the songs and see where they might have gone with a different set of thinking if they had been written today.

Am I right in saying it is a very autobiographical album and set of songs?

It is, Kevin, to be honest. That started with our producer George Williams. I sent him all our original demos for the new version in a way of playing them in this modern setting, he said, ‘Mike, you’ve got some great material there but it makes a lot more sense if you’ve got a sequence for it that it can all be played in’. I thought, that’s a big challenge, there’s 39 songs. I went back and thought historically what was the first written of all of these songs and it

was the track ‘[A] New South Wales’ [later featured on ‘Change’]. That was written and debuted by myself and Eddie McDonald in 1986. We played it on BBC Wales on a show called The Orange Box. That was the first step on the road to ‘Eye of the Hurricane’, so I went back and read that lyric and asked well ‘who it is about?, who is the guy walking past the church of the mourning souls at the end of this era?’

And I asked if that’s me where is he going now? There was a lot more autobiographical stories going on across the body of work then I’d realized, there was more of ourselves in it than I had realized at the time.

Looking back on it all with hindsight I thought I could rearrange the pack into a song cycle that makes sense of the record for modern times, see it in a new light and also go back to the original recordings and listen to them with a bit of new information. With The Alarm, what I was priding myself on was the songs could stand up, as if I was stood on O’Connell Street [Dublin] playing them, that people walking buy the shops and pubs would view them as

purely an acoustic song that is it’s own organism. If it could work there it can work on the final stage when the band comes in to play on them. I always seen that as what The Alarm is all about.

I heard the ‘Irish Sea’ snippet from it, with the dialogue leading into the song. It is fantastic. What is the story behind that track?

It’s a song I wrote in 1986, when we had come off this big touring period.

I didn’t want to go on a holiday with hotels and planes and suitcases. I spent my whole life trying to get away from Wales and then I spent that whole summer travelling in Wales. I had a video camera with a sound recorder built in. I went round writing songs about what I saw. It’s an important song, and I never even sang it to the fans.

Your second release due out in June for Record Store Day is ‘Celtic Folklore live’. Does this release tie in with ‘Stream [Hurricane of Change]’?

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It does Kevin, yes. In 1988, we released the album ‘Electric Folklore’, it was our first ever live album and it was only six songs long. We didn’t have room on the album for a lot of the songs and we couldn’t do it as a double album at the time for various reasons. I always wished we had made it a double album as a timestamp as to where The Alarm were at the time. When it came to Record Store Day, and we had been a part of the last few, we said we would do something meaningful for the fans, so we decided to turn ‘Electric Folklore’ into a double album with a companion ‘Celtic Folklore’, which was the name of the tour and we put all the songs we couldn’t fit on the original album.

Is it recorded at one live show or is it a culmination of different shows?

No, it’s right across the tour. The original ‘Electric Folklore’ was recorded at the Boston Wang Theatre, probably the biggest show we ever played on the East coast, it was a great gig. But it was a huge tour, with

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different songs every night. So we’ve taken half from the UK tour, in particular the Hammersmith Odeon show and then from the shows on the West coast in San Jose, so you really hear us from both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of the USA. Turning back to last year’s acclaimed ‘∑ Sigma’ album, I felt it comes across as a very personal album. Was it difficult to make?

It’s always difficult to make music and put it out there, and make it part of your life and reflect the life you’ve lived. It’s always a challenge to put it into words to convey what we went through and don’t trivialize what you did but put it into a framework that other people can relate to. Maybe many people haven’t been to some of the depths to have those experiences in life. It’s always difficult to put out those true experiences. The creative process wasn’t difficult I think. ‘Equals’ and ‘∑ Sigma’ is a double album. We could have put it out as a double, but it would have been too much for the modern

world to assimilate. I thought, well, there’s no rush, once we had ten songs in the bag we put them out as ‘Equals’, then we finished the second set of music, which was ‘∑ Sigma’, so we put them out a year apart. I think there’s a great symmetry in that. I’m really glad we did it, it also allowed people to take it all in, listen to it and make it a part of their lives. We got two opportunities to tour and play in cities twice.

What are your plans and hopes for touring again?

Even now in this lockdown, we are all pushed back into our homes and we can’t wait to free ourselves out again.

We [The Alarm] only need a moment’s notice and we are there. All we need is a guitar, the lyrics, and the melody and we are there. I think when rock and roll comes back it will be in smaller venues. I don’t want to rule anything out, we want to be there at-the-off.

We’ve been doing our lockdown sessions (Big Night In) on the internet and the jukebox, sharing stories and videos ... the audience are still there.

We are still selling tickets for The Alarm for December. I said, ‘We are coming no matter what.’

Is it true you sold out your 40th anniversary show in St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, for next year already?

Yeah, that is amazing. It is like we have a platform already for next year. I’m sure things will be back to ‘normal’. It will be safe to go to gigs again, though things will be a bit different. I’m a great believer that everyone at the minute is in the same boat, everyone has to live in the same circumstances. I think we will come through this stronger, a better human race at the end of the day. Music reflects that and the collective feeling that we are all trying to survive this pandemic. thealarm.com www.facebook.com/ TheOfficialAlarm

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Screaming Dead Ressurecting the Revolution Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

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Chelternham, 1979 and in the dying days of the first wave of the first wave of punk, four young men who had been informed by the ethos and energy of bands from that movement formed a band that are now widely considered to be one of the most important early examples of the gothic rock genre. They called themselves Screaming Dead, dressed in black, took their musical and visual cues from horror films, initially self-released on a label called Skull Records and even coined the term ‘horror punk’ to describe themselves.

Vocalist Sam Bignall, guitarist Tony McCormack, bassist Mal Page and drummer Hugh Fairlie went on to release a number of singles, including ‘Valley of the Dead’, which after selling out within a week as a self-financed 7” was reissued by the Oi! label No Future in 1982, the 12” single ‘Night Creatures’, which saw the band reaching number 22 on the UK Indie Chart the following year and a cover of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint It, Black’ on 7” in 1984. They also put out a cassette-only album, ‘Children of the Boneyard Stones’ in 1982, which came complete with a copy of the band’s own fanzine Warcry, where they further set out their very distinctive manifesto.

The band split in 1985 but were resurrected in 1997 for two tours of Germany before disbanding again

two years later. It would be another seventeen years before they were seen on stage again and 2018 saw the release of the seven-track compilation album ‘Methodonia’.

When the following interview questions were put together for Sam, the band were preparing themselves to take to the stage at this year’s Rebellion Festival, due to take place in Blackpool in August. However, like all other events for the foreseeable future, the coronavirus means that this now been cancelled.

But fear not, as their history proves, it will take more than a pandemic to stop this band and they are one who forty-one years after they first came together, we look forward to seeing much more from in the years to come.

Firstly, hello Screaming Dead and thank you for agreeing to our interview. Could we start by asking where, when and how the band got together, who was in your line-up upon forming and who is in your line-up now?

Hello, Screaming Dead actually formed as a concept in 1979 in the aftermath of the original punk scene. Tony McCormack was the instigator. We all knew each other as we lived in Cheltenham and the punk crowd pretty much all mixed anyway. Tony recruited Hugh Fairlie, drums, then Sam Bignall on vocals and finally, Mal

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Page on bass. The line-up is the same with the exception of Pete Mazslag who replaced Tony on lead when the band reformed in 2016. It’s fair to say Baz Clark on bass and Richard Bulgin on lead step in on a regular basis so should really be considered as members of the band also.

Who or what were the band’s influences upon forming?

The band had mainly been influenced by the original punk movement as we were all original 1977 punk rockers.

Obviously the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Ramones, and The Damned were our biggest influences. However, we didn’t want to become a predictable rank and file punk band. We wanted to be different and as we all had a big interest in horror films it was kind of a natural progression to start playing a more dark themed punk sound.

Although you are seen as a punk band, you have often been refered to as a goth band and have often been credited with coining the term

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‘horror punk’. What are your feelings about such labels and which do you feel is a better description of the Screaming Dead’s sound and ethos?

We formed and dressed in black a long time before the Goth scene truly existed. Punk rockers still follow us as do rocker Goths. We did first coin the phrase ‘horror punk’ as it was an apt description of our look and music style.

We started to call ourselves a horror punk band in 1979. Of course, other bands existed that were on the same way of thinking but no one had ever used the term before. We think we are a punk band but the aesthetics are in line with Goth rock also. We sit comfortably with both.

Where did the name Screaming Dead come from and how did it fit into the band’s manifesto in your early days?

The name Screaming Dead and its origins have been misted in time between an early horror film and a reflection of the youth of that period.

Screaming in frustration and yet dead to the World. The name reflected our complete brand of punk style music and dark imagery.

In the early days of the band, you ran your own fanzine, Warcry and self-released your 1982 debut cassette ‘Children of the Boneyard Stones’ and 1982 debut vinyl release, the single ‘Valley of the Dead’ on the label Recreational Tapes and your own label, Skull Records, respectively. Could you tell us a bit about Warcry and the writing, recording and releases of these early records?

‘Valley of the Dead’ was actually the first release. We took out a loan from Mal’s Mum, Marion. We initially made 1,000 copies and it sold out in a week and that sufficiently prompted No Future / Cherry Red to sign us and repress it. It made the national Indie charts. The cassette, ‘Children of the Boneyard Stones’ came out on a Bristol based label called Recreation records.

It came complete with a badge and the

Warcry booklet that Tony had illustrated. That too sold really well.

The ‘Valley of the Dead’ single sold out within a week and was quickly picked up by the Oi! label No Future, with whom you went on to release the ‘Night Creatures’ 12” single (1983) and the ‘Paint It Black’ 7” single (1984). You later released ‘The Danse Macabre Collection’ and ‘A Dream of Yesterday’ 12” EPs on the Nine Mile Records imprint Angel Records, have since released via Resurrection Records and are currently linked with Secret Sin Records Ltd. What do you feel were the advantages and disadvantages of self-releasing and releasing through a label at this point in time?

No future used an ‘Oi’ prefix catalogue number and as such it was very early days with the label. They were fairly local to us and had had huge success with their early releases. It seemed logical to do, but in essence we were not part of that scene in anyway, same as were many of the other bands on

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the label. We only ever truly released ‘Valley of the Dead’ on our own Skull label. The others were all from signed deals. No Future have stated they wish they had marketed us differently from the outset. Of course, it was a huge advantage being signed up. We were all unemployed and needed backing to get the music out.

The band initially split in 1985. What caused this and what did the members go on to do following the split?

The band split because the scene had changed beyond all recognition. I think the Thatcherite ideology had started to kick in too, with venues going by the wayside. We were all approaching our mid-twenties by this time and we just kind of drifted. At the time it seemed the right thing to do but we split far too early. We’d had a number of major disappointments too. We came so close to being signed to a major label but every time something looked like it was going to happen it kept going inexplicably wrong. Mal moved to

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London, Hugh had gone to Australia much earlier and had been replaced by Mark Ogilvie on drums and they are both on the recordings. Tony carried on playing music with his wife to be. The others played in different bands at various times. Sam never joined another band.

You reformed in 1997 and released the album ‘Death Rides Out’, featuring re-recordings of Screaming Dead demos, in the same year. You split for the second time in 1999 but reconvened again in 2014, releasing the limited edition seven-track compilation ‘Methadonia’ in 2018. What have been the biggest challenges of reforming the band on these occasions and can we expect any new music from you at some point?

We basically reformed in 1997 just to do two German tours. We didn’t have a drummer, so had to use a drum machine. The line-up consisted of Mal, Tony and Sam. It was only for a while and was never going to be a long term

project. We actually officially reformed in 2016 with the line-up stated earlier.

The ‘Methadonia’ release was from a Hong Kong label, aided and abetted by good friends Roland Link and John Sanders. We initially decided to reform as a one off supporting the Sex Pistols Experience. The line-up consisted of the original three band members with Maz replacing Tony. Tony was too busy working with his current band. Maz came very close to joining the band back in the original days so we basically went almost full circle. Along with a very good friend and promoter, Duncan Willox asked us to play. Hugh was the main instigator with the reformation and the gig was so good we decided to carry on and as a result we have played all over the World.

Places include Canada, Italy, America (twice) Mexico, Poland, Austria and most recently Germany. We also play in the UK too mainly London. We released an EP a few years back called ‘The Resurrection’ which has sold out of two runs. We are waiting to go back into the studio to record a new album featuring new recordings of older songs

and new material that we have incorporated into the current live set already.

It goes without saying that you will have seen a lot of changes in the music industry over the years. What are your thoughts on the current state of the music industry in comparison to during the band’s initial run?

The changes are immense, totally unrecognisable. I suppose it’s gone back to the original Punk DIY ethos but if anything there is possibly too much to choose from so things can get lost in the mire of social media. The current music scene in the UK sucks to be honest. Too many youngsters want to be on X-Factor and not many young bands coming through. The audiences here are much older than when we play abroad. An alternative scene is very much alive in the places we mentioned with plenty of people wanting to be in bands.

Later this year, you play Rebellion

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Festival in Blackpool. For those who are just discovering Screaming Dead and have never attended one of your shows, what can they expect and which other bands currently on the punk circuit are you most looking forward to sharing the bill with and why?

want to sound and look as good as we possibly can. We like to try and provide a touch of theatre with sleazy dark rock ‘n’ roll!

Sadly, we are now conducting this interview in the pandemic, so all gigs are cancelled for the foreseeable future.

We had a great year in store for us and Rebellion was going to be fantastic. On top of that, we had another American tour lined up as well as countless shows in both the UK and other exotic places.

When we can all resume and no one knows when that will be its going to be a strange situation. Many venues and promoters may not survive but we pray they do. People who come to see us live know they are in for a show. We

As above, we are all on hold and we all want not just ourselves but everyone to come through this and be ready to kick on when we can. Stay healthy folks and see you all on the other side of sanity.

Finally, what else can we expect from you throughout the remainder of 2020 and beyond?

Thank you for a wonderful interview and we wish you all the best for the future. www.facebook.com/ officialscreamingdead

Here, There and ...

‘Nowhere’ with

Dean and Chapter

By Alice Jones-Rodgers.

You may remember Dean and Chapter from our interview with main man, vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Dean Wright in Issue Sixteen (December 2019). Back then, Wright, a seasoned musician originally from London but based in Newry, County Down for almost twenty years, was rounding off a busy year which had seen him and his band (Jason Varley on bass and Padraic Farrelly on drums) play gigs all across Ireland and release the spectacular debut EP ‘Spiritual Suicide’ in the April. Now, just over a year later, having brought on board mastering giant Barry Grint, who since the 1980s has worked with every music luminary imaginable, including David Bowie, Madonna, Beach Boys and Van Halen, comes the single ‘Nowhere’.

A self-depreciating ode to the little man,‘Nowhere’ is a radio-friendly, earworm-packed three-minute gem of a song. You may detect a bit of The Stranglers in terms of the song’s attitude and structure and a bit of The Police in terms of its reggae-inflected rhythm with Varley’s glorious and pulsating bass groove placed high in the mix, complimented by some inventive drumming from Farrelly.

However, Wright’s delivery, in equal parts aggressive and confrontational and sweet and humble, is at points more akin to that of songwriting masters such as Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. Meanwhile, the eery and disconcerting lead guitar line and wonderfully imaginative production touches, such as the tiny, intentional defect on the line “Life makes no sense, there’s a digital glitch” present an outift whom one gets the impression we are only just starting to see the true sonic imagination and potential of.

‘Nowhere’ even comes complete with a highly effective, charismatic and at times laugh out loud funny video depicting the band against a simple white backdrop, which allows their expressive faces to convey the song’s message perfectly, making it a single that deserves to be both heard and seen everywhere. deanandchapterband.com www.facebook.com/ deanandchapterband

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The Harmony and Hope of

Snowgoose Interview by Kevin Burke.

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In 2012, Glasgow based duo of guitarist Jim McCulloch (BMX Bandits / Soup Dragons) and singer Anna Sheard came together to form Snowgoose. Releasing the critically acclaimed album ​‘Harmony Springs’. ​The album, a blending of neo-folk and melodic indie rock, is a spirited, energetic affair. As their sound recaptured the original musical idealism of Fairport Convention and Fotheringay, placing it within a 21st century framework.

Now on June 26th, Snowgoose unleash their sophomore release ​ ‘The Making of You’. ​It has been a long eight years since their debut and they return to push the same boundaries of genre defying music.

On ​‘The ​​Making of You’, they have crammed a guest list of sublime prowess. Featuring a who’s who of musical wealth, with Raymond McGinley (Teenage Fanclub), Chris Geddes and Dave McGowan (Belle and Sebastian), Stevie Jones (Arab Strap), Stuart Kidd (BMX Bandits), Ken McCluskey (The Bluebells), Tim Davidson (Camera Obscura), and Davie Scott (The Pearlfishers).

This musical muscle of guest collaborators does not weigh down the beauty that is ​‘The Making of You’. ​Instead, they create an extra emotional edge, prevalent in the lead single, the poignantly haunting ‘Hope’. Scottish novelist Ian Rankin declared Snowgoose’s debut

‘Harmony ​​Springs’ one of the best albums of 2012. He states, “I was a huge fan of the first Snowgoose album and I’m equally excited by the follow-up. Such warmth and emotion, with great performances by the musicians and singer Anna Sheard.”

Knee deep amidst the surreal lockdown, I spoke with Jim McCulloch and Anna Sheard. They gave me a collective insight into the upcoming ‘​The Making of You’, their collective creativity and what lies ahead for Snowgoose.

Thank you for taking time out guys.

The anticipation for ‘The Making of You’ is certainly building. How are your own nerves at present towards the release, even in this current climate?

Jim: No nerves as such regarding the songs. Without trying to sound arrogant we’re very aware of how good the songs and the recordings of the songs are. It’s all the other stuff that we can’t control that we try not to stress over. At the end of the day we are giving people something beautiful to listen to that will hopefully transport them to a better place even for a short while.

Have you tested any of the new material on ‘The Making of You’ on a live stage?

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Anna: Collaborating with Jim to co-write songs for ‘The Making of You’ was a conscious decision moving forward from our debut release. The songs which formed our debut, ‘Harmony Springs’ were essentially gifted by Jim McCulloch and as beautiful as they remain, my role within those works was to simply translate them as best as I could using my voice. The natural shift in time and process of working together since to co-write the new material has allowed songs from ‘The Making of You’ to feel much more cohesive, considered and embodied.

Has collaborating brought you closer artistically, tightening your live sound?

Anna: Without a doubt since writing together our artistic connection and friendship has become more profound.

There is a huge amount of trust between each other, and It’s noticeable for me how different it feels to perform live the new co-written songs from ‘The Making of You’. I genuinely can’t

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wait to perform these songs live as a full band once we get past lockdown.

Before the recording, how much of the album was fully formed and was there anything written within the confines of the studio?

Jim: Anna and I had completed the songwriting process prior to going into the studio. We had rehearsed up the band and the basic song arrangements were in place, leaving room for improvisation where it was required.

The time we had in there was extremely limited and so our plan was to record quickly and nail the songs live, including Anna`s vocals. It`s quite an old-fashioned way of working and not without risks, but I think we achieved it.

With such a broad range of influences, how would you describe the sound of Snowgoose?

Jim: I could easily rhyme off a few musical reference points, but I’m way too close to be objective and really

it’s all about beauty. Beauty of melody, voice, harmony and getting them all to blend in such a way as to touch people deep inside. Is it too much of a stretch to call it ‘magical soul music’?!

The opening ‘Everything’ starts with the lone vocals before the band kicks in. It is a dynamite opening but how far into the album were you before you decided on track order?

Anna: The track order for the album was established once myself and Jim listened back to the final mixes however, immediately after laying down the recording of ‘Everything’ at Red Kite Studio in Wales, the band acknowledged how good an opening this track would be. It seemed an honest, intimate and apt fit to introduce the new songs.

The first snippet, ‘Hope’ turned out to be more poignant as the weeks went on, almost a soundtrack to the situation society found itself in, but what was the initial inspiration for the track?

Jim: I had written the basic song on summer holiday in Donegal, Ireland, just strumming the chords on the porch looking at the sea and thinking about the world and how sometimes it just goes to shit and how we can tackle the feeling of helplessness that leaves us with. It’s about the universal human condition, so it’s always going to apply no matter how horrendous things are turning … we just didn’t figure it would become SO poignant …

With so many contributors and guest musicians, would it be fair to say Snowgoose is a celebration of Scottish music of the past three decades?

Jim: In a sense yes, insofar as I`ve been involved in playing music for that length of time! I`ve known Raymond McGinley since the mid 1980s and everyone else we’ve met along the way.

They are some of our favourite people and performers and so we do feel that there is a lot of love in the playing.

They are the best. They “get” where we`re coming from without too much

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explaining and we trusted them to express themselves knowing they would do us proud.

With a gap of eight years between your debut ‘Harmony Springs’ and ‘The Making of You’, were you afraid of losing the initial impact you made in 2012?

Anna: We can’t get away from the fact that there has been a prolonged period of silence from the band since our debut release, many factors have contributed to this break. It feels less about fear and more about trust in terms of how the new album is received, the music will speak for itself and the rest is out of our control.

There is a lot of interest stateside in Snowgoose. After everything gets back to some normality, are there plans to head across the Atlantic?

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Anna: That would be a fine thing and had been discussed with our record label Ba Da Bing in Brooklyn pre to Covid-19. Who knows what the future holds in regard to travel and the music industry as a whole ... we remain hopeful.

Finally, the Scottish novelist Ian Rankin is one of your biggest cheerleaders. Have you met the man?

Jim: We sure have! He has been to a few of our shows and is a great guy.

Being such a huge music fan as he is, it’s a massive compliment to be so enthusiastically and publicly lauded. www.facebook.com/ SnowgooseMusic

German Shepherd Records Presents:

The Worlds of Mark Corrin Interview by Bob Osborne.

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Mark Corrin is a Manchester-based musician currently involved in three seperate projects with German Shepherd Records.

Mark’s early releases as Shirokuma were frequently broadcast on the John Peel Show on BBC Radio 1 and his more recent solo work has featured on BBC Late Junction with Nick Luscombe. He also presents a weekly music radio show on Salford City Radio and has collaborated and performed with several notable artists from all over the world, both live and on record. He has also been a member of other groups including German Shepherd artist Una Baines’ band Poppycock and Rose & the Diamond Hand and is currently working with new groups Elastikbande and La Capsula as well as progressing his solo career.

Mark’s first solo release with German Shepherd, in April 2019, was ‘Pub Bin’, a dark comedy concept album set mostly in the venues, shops, offices, pubs and bins of modern Manchester. With a brand new album just released and new music from Elastikbande, plus a compilation of some of his earlier recordings coming soon, it seemed timely to have a chat with him about his musical life.

Tell us about your early musical experiences. What got you into music?

I was born in Liverpool in 1977, the first songs I really remember were from a couple of years later, which my dad played me. ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials [1981] was a big one that remains a favourite. I loved the eerie video and the moody, otherworldly instrumentation, although at the age of four I just thought it was a great song about ghosts! Aside from that, it was pretty much light hearted fare from dad’s early ‘80s record collection that turned me on to music. Madness, Bonzo Dog Band, Ian Dury, Blondie, T-Rex and Fives Company ‘The Ballad of Fred The Pixie’ [1969] that I managed to dig out of the pile and really enjoyed.

The first stuff I bought for myself was classic ‘80s chart pop music and novelty records. I missed out on punk the first time round, but I caught up on it from about the age of 11.

Woolworth’s bargain bin got me into tapes of the Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks, as did Channel 4’s ‘Banned’ season, where I saw Derek Jarman’s ‘Jubilee’ [1978], ‘The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle’ [1980] and videos of Joy Division and Iggy Pop playing in Manchester. I also started buying the music press and listening to John Peel a lot around then and got a cheap £25 Spanish acoustic guitar for my birthday.

I was a computer nerd too, so I had been making weird little music experiments with a ZX Spectrum, on ‘Wham! The Music Box’ no less, then

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later on a Commodore Amiga. I had no idea what I was doing but it was great fun. I was also very much into the dance music and hip hop of the period, especially Bomb the Bass, De La Soul, The Orb and the Beastie Boys.

Probably the single biggest musical influence of my younger life came once again from Woolworth’s bargain bin, where I snapped up a VHS tape of the best of the early ‘90s music show Snub TV. Within an hour I was introduced to The Fall, The Pixies, Momus and many more for the first time. Those three especially turned my creative world upside down. The Fall were like nothing I had ever seen or heard and I soon set about learning Brix Smith’s guitar riff to what is still my favourite Fall song, ‘Deadbeat Descendent’ [B side of ‘Cab It Up!’, 1989]. After that, it was the grunge era and bands like Pavement and Nirvana were influential when writing early songs with friends.

Then after that Tricky, Beck and early Mo’ Wax like DJ Shadow were acts I loved. They seamlessly blended the electronic and acoustic with fresh and

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interesting ideas.

Your first project to get national attention was Shirokuma. What can you tell us about it?

Shirokuma was inspired by a lot of great music coming from Japan in the later ‘90s, Pizzicato 5, Cornelius and older ‘70s stuff like Yellow Magic Orchestra and Akiko Yano. Lots of collaborations and the sounds of folktronica and chiptune were very influential too. The name Shirokuma just means polar bear, and was chosen mostly for aesthetic reasons really, not many people ever quite got the hang of the pronunciation, which is kind of like “She Rock Ooh Mah”.

The very early material was actually recorded in 1999 when I was still in the Amiga / 4 Track era (and briefly called Valentino Swords) and was very kindly passed to John Peel by an old friend from the band Monkey Steals The Drum who had done a couple of Peel sessions and put us in touch. Peel was fond of my early stuff and played quite

Elastikbande

a lot from it. BBC’s Nick Luscombe and Steve Lamacq were supportive later too. I moved to Manchester in 2002 and have been here ever since. I initially worked with Valentine Records and met a great deal of incredibly creative and unique artists who continue to inspire me.

How did you get involved with Una Baines’ Poppycock?

It was just via mutual friends really, there was a shout out for a guitar player for the project and I turned up for a jam. It was lovely to meet and work with Una Baines and a pleasure to perform some of the beautiful songs from the classic Fates album [‘Furia’, 1985], plus Poppycock originals and meet some brilliant people. Rose Niland was singing with the group and we became mates and I really enjoyed demos I heard of her original songs too.

We first met up when Rose released her first EP with us and you have worked with her live and on record?

Rose has a brilliant voice and is a great songwriter. It was a massive pleasure to be involved with the early incarnation of Rose & the Diamond Hand and to play bass on the ‘Universe is Woman’ EP. We played some really memorable concerts during my time with the band.

One of your latest projects is Elastikbande. What can you tell us about it?

With Elastikbande, we wanted to create something quite stripped down and primal, some exciting rock ‘n’ roll to play live really. Both Luisa Maraffino and I are very fond of The Fall, The Cramps, the Pixies, ‘60s garage rock etc. She’s an amazing guitarist and we quickly developed a set with the great Kate Themen on drums and myself on bass. People seem to enjoy the anarchic energy of the live shows and catchy songs about everyday life like ‘Vacuum Cleaner’. We recorded the debut EP [‘Vacuum Cleaner’, 2019] locally with Paul Morrice, who is a great sound engineer and artist too.

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Your other project other than your solo work is La Capsula?

La Capsula came about after a writing session in Italy about a year back, it’s named after a small bar there, initially as a side project of Elastikbande and us wanting to do a few more simple, stripped down acoustic folk style songs. The tunes are more gentle and melodic and rooted in a love of nature walks, open mic nights, beaches and old memories. It’s a peaceful and laid back project inspired by the psychedelic folk music of the ‘60s and ‘70s, John Martyn especially.

Your first solo album with the label was ‘Pub Bin’. It paints a humourous and sometimes and dark picture of Manchester. What was the inspiration behind it?

Well, firstly I felt like a change from the style of album which I had made before that, ‘Archipelago Quest’ [2016], which was quite lush, optimistic and expansive. With ‘Pub Bin’, I wanted to bring some urban grit

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and reality back and write story songs about where I live. I love Manchester and the underground music scene here and I was inspired by a lot of great local bands, including many acts on German Shepherd Records. The poetry of Emily Oldfield is a big inspiration too. I wanted to make it funny too though, and catchy and immediate to hopefully connect with people. The music is much simpler and more direct than previous albums too. It’s inspired by pubs, the daily grind, shops, fast food, and the everyday. The title track was kind of an attempt to write a Lou Reed-esque song about quite a visceral Manchester Saturday night out. People who have heard it thankfully seem to relate to the record and the songs of charity shops, falafels, commutes, bouncers, etc.

The latest album is ‘Washed Up’.

What can you tell us about it?

‘Washed Up’ was written at the very start of 2020 and was partially concerned with bad weather of all kinds. Could be political, social or

meteorological. Things move very quickly always, it’s interesting writing reactive music to the times because they are indeed always a-changin’. It’s a short and hopefully catchy album anyway, my records usually tend to come in at around the thirty minute mark, it’s a good length for an album, I think. There is a more electronic influence than on the punkier ‘Pub Bin’, it’s a companion piece to that record in some ways though, there are some story songs and tracks that could have fitted on that LP. There is also a German Shepherd Records subscriber special album available called ‘Mission: Inaction’ which is compiled from unreleased tracks from the last few LPs. I’m at the ideas stage for a follow up too!

Humour seems to be a key element of your work? To paraphrase the Frank Zappa album, does humour belong in music?

Well, we could all use a laugh! Humour and music are two pretty basic and universal elements of human

communication too, right? I mean not all music or comedy are to everybody’s taste of course but it seems perfectly natural to me to at least attempt to combine them. If I think one of my songs is getting too bleak, I usually try and throw in some daft curveball somewhere to try and lighten it up.

Tom Waits is a master of doing that.

I love it when he’s doing some really broken hearted bar room ballad and then he distractedly sings “And some guy’s trying to sell me a watch ...” [‘Bad Liver and a Broken Heart’ from ‘Small Change’, 1976]. A lot of the best comedy for me comes from surrealism and combining unexpected elements and I’d say the same is true of music. The Fall were a good example of that. Also, I find songs that make people laugh seem to go down very well live too. Plus I’m quite silly onstage at times anyway, there have been some unintentional slapstick moments there for sure. I always liked Frank Sidebottom!

How and where do you record your music?

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I record mostly at home. I often write lyrics whilst on the go, in a notebook or on my phone and email them to myself. I try to write something every day, often a list of titles or a complete lyric. I’ve got hundreds of unused ones from over the years I dip into or prefer to just write fresh. It’s the same with music ideas, I’ll often bash something out quickly each day, get distracted by another task, save it and forget all about it. Then every so often I’ll go through the lyrics and backings and some things will fit nicely together. If not, then I just write something new. Or, if I’m collaborating I’ll bring a pile of lyrics and try and find one that fits the song best.

In July, Elastikbande release their second EP, ‘Very Busy’ and Mark releases a further solo album, which collects some of his older recordings, called ‘Fable Shore Lost Songs Volume 1’. ‘Pub Bin’ and ‘Washed Up’ are available from the German Shepherd Record Bandcamp page, as are the debut Elastikbade EP ‘Vacuum Cleaner’ and the La Capsula debut ‘Time Capsule’. His previous solo work before German Shepherd is available from his own Bandcamp page.

I like combining a more upbeat backing with a darker lyric or the other way around too. Often an idea for a backing could also be inspired by a combination of trying to meld two elements I like from very different songs by other artists. I tend to demo about twice as many songs as I actually use on an album. Mixing up genres comes probably too easily, then when compiling an album together it is important to get a good flow. I usually open with a “door kicker”, something really attention grabbing, and end with something slower. Then I just try to create an entertaining journey in the middle, it’s like making a good radio show.

germanshepherdrecords. bandcamp.com

Thanks Mark for a very entertaining and informative interview.

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germanshepherdrecords.com/ artists/mark-corrin

markcorrinmusic. bandcamp.com www.facebook.com/ markcorrinmusic

The Senton Bombs Breaking the Record: ‘Blue Sunset’

In the second part of this exclusive series, vocalist and bassist Joey Class gives us an exclusive insight into the new songs from the band’s upcoming sixth album.

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‘Blue Sunset’ was released 1st June and is the second single from our new album, coming down the line. If there was such a thing as a traditional Bombs song, this would be it. Fast paced, hard hitting, hook-filled, punk infected rock n roll. The theme is taking chances and making the most before we exit left from the mortal stage; subjects I’ve covered before but from a different angle. There’s an edge of recklessness to this one, albeit controlled. The “Blue Sunset” is death. Before we sail into it, we need to seize our days and throttle them.

The song kicks in with the most unfortunate and inappropriate line you could have during a viral pandemic which affects the respiratory system: “Some think living is impossible, even breathing is a task”. This is an allusion to how difficult some of us manage to make life, not a battle with COVID-19.

The current connotations can’t be helped, hopefully my poor diction masks it. The verses bounce around a lot of imagery, “wrapping trees around convertibles”, “ripping pages from the catalogue”, “nobody spinning on the carousel”. There’s a raft of references here from carelessness, selfdestruction, and materialism to loneliness, depression and detachment.

It’s the fine line between fun and failure, going too far or not going anywhere at all.

positive method to taking chances, hedging our bets to mitigate loss but still taking the risk. Clearing our debts so we don’t burden others, owning a clean slate. Having no regrets and forgetting mistakes of the past to allow feeling in the present. The sub-text is maximising enjoyment whilst being a good person, before we ride off into that final sunset, which sinks into the night over the horizon and disappears for good.

I’m very lucky to be surrounded by so many talented friends. Two of my best have really brought this one to life. Our producer and former drummer, Ronnie Bomb has made this sound so big and ferocious, he’s a true master of his craft. Artist extraordinaire, Dean Reilly, has smashed it again with possibly my favourite ever Senton Bombs cover. I was after something eighties, retro-wave, a car driving off into the blue sunset. What Dean produced is perfect; such a cool, striking image which works so well.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first two singles. The next release is where we take a sharp left turn onto our, now familiar, dark southern rock highway.

It’s a big one. Stay alert people – there is an abundance of creativity swelling across the globe. It’s a bug that bites and when it does, you just can’t help yourself. Get infected. Keep the faith and stay classy.

The bridge becomes a mantra for a

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Eighth Day Recommmends: Essential Senton Bombs

Above, from top left to bottom right: ‘Sweet Chin Music’ (2009); ‘Gambit’ (2012); ‘Chapter Zero’ (2013); ‘Phantom High’ (EP, 2014); ‘Mass Vendetta’ (2016), ‘Outsiders’ (2018). www.sentonbombs.com www.facebook.com/thesentonbombs ‘Blue Sunset’ is available now.

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Grant McPhee Indie-Visual: Moviemaking and Music Interview by Kevin Burke.

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The relationship between cinema and the ethereal sounds of indie music runs parallel. Scottish director Grant McPhee appreciates the coloration between the art forms and how they compliment each other. With no formal training, the ambitious Grant started his career as a camera assistant, learning from some of the most prominent directors of our age. His list of mentors include Ken Loach, Danny Boyle, Jonathan Glazer and Stephen Soderbergh.

a haunting soundtrack to match by Rose McDowall and Shawn Pinchbeck, it is the perfect example of matching the score to the visual beauty on display.

His first full length feature, 2013’s ‘Sarah’s Room’ is an ambient horror drama. Following this however, Grant’s next project, the documentary ‘Teenage Superstars’, combined his love of music with his love of film. Narrated by The Breeders and Pixies legend Kim Deal, it tells the story of the Scottish indie music, over the course of a decade, including input and footage from The Vaselines, BMX Bandits, The Pastels, The Soup Dragons, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream and Teenage Fanclub.

I got into music relatively late, maybe fifteen / sixteen but quickly devoured it.

My dad was a big film fan – not a fan of particularly good films – but we did watch a lot of films at home. Despite not having much money growing up my dad bought a video player in the very early ‘80s so we watched a lot of videos. Unfortunately, it was a V2000 player, an obscure European version of the Betamax that he thought was better somehow. Regardless, due to its obscurity it didn’t have a great choice of films available for it so I ended up watching an un-curated mixture of obscure 1960s dubbed Czech children’s films one night to be followed by things like ‘Nightmares in a Damaged Brain’ [1981] the next. Sometimes there would be something interesting that later sunk into my sub-consciousness but I could never join in on the school chats about having seen ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ [1981] on VHS.

Last year, Grant returned to the horror framework with his third and latest full length feature, ‘Far From The Apple Tree’, a fantasy horror fairytale which won Best Performance at the Toronto International Spring of Horror and Fantasy Film Festival. A gripping, psychological outing starting Sorcha Groundsell and Scarlett Mack with

I spoke with Grant about his love of movies, his methods and of course his adulation for Scottish music.

Growing up, were you one of those kids who listened to music all day and got lost in films at night?

When I was a little older – I was

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Sarah’s Room

around six when I watched these – and started developing my own taste he did have the cheek to ask why I watched such strange films. When I moved from home my film knowledge did start to develop. I stayed next to a great video shop so my flatmate and I would rent up to seven film’s a day. The video shop was organised into categories like ‘important directors’ and actors from the history of world cinema, so I got a pretty good film education quickly.

Your musical tastes and influences seem rooted in your surroundings of Scotland, but who would you say has had the most impact on you as a director?

I listen to a lot of Scottish music primarily because of my involvement with the films and I like to know what everyone is up to and to hear new local music. I think it’s important for anyone to listen to their own local music scene.

Really though, I just tend to listen to something because it’s interesting or good regardless of where the musicians are from. Sometimes its nice to know a

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band is far away. I love the idea of punk, DIY and breaking down the barriers but I still love the magic you get from bands and music seeming otherworldly and mysterious. A lot has to be said for rock stardom still. I don’t mean selling lots of records but being a star.

My thoughts on film stardom are the exact opposite and that’s probably from having direct experience with the whims of seeing how stars behave.

Film is more inaccessible to those from low income or working class backgrounds due to the higher costs involved and as a result there are whole parts of society not being properly represented. I’m very much in favour of having less barriers, taking away the magic and opening up the process of filmmaking to more people. There’s unfortunately a lot of folk who benefit from inaccessibility and maintaining a status quo. Probably the people who’ve had most impact on me as a director are people like Ken Loach for his socialist outlook on filmmaking and others like Christopher Doyle who work in slightly

more unconventional ways that often circumnavigate conventional rules but still create a fantastic product. Music probably has more impact on my views of producing a film – ‘Spiral Scratch’ [Buzzcocks, 1977], Factory, Creation.

Doing things for yourself, being self sufficient or working with like minded individuals who can create something good and successful but independently.

I also started out working for a community video company in a very deprived area of Edinburgh where you would deal with direct social issues.

They would pretty much just give you a camera and make you go out and film something that would have a direct impact on someone’s life. Being given that responsibility was very important to my confidence and ability to think quickly. I think it’s important to sometimes just jump in at the deep end.

You have no formal training as such and worked your way up, learning from experience and how others do it. Did that make it more difficult in the early days to get a project off the ground?

The Film Industry, in the UK anyway, is almost 100% vocational. Unless you go to the NFTS, and with no disrespect to the other fine teaching institutions, a film qualification is virtually worthless to getting you a job in the Film Industry. Large film sets have their own unique language, systems and protocols which are generally not taught at film schools. The technical aspects are very simple and quick to pick up but it really is based on experience and slowly moving up a department ladder. Except for directors.

Ironically, the least experienced person on a film set (unless you are working on one of the new high end TV series or it is someone like Scorsese) is the director. A crew member can go from job to job and work on four or five features per year whereas a director may only work on one feature every five years.

The industry is pretty regimented and in many ways very conservative for a so called creative industry. Really, most of the difficulties I’ve had are

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with people believing directors have to be auteurs suffering for their art and can’t have a technical background.

There’s a view in the film industry that you shouldn’t get above your station, ha. Unless you ignore this and just go out and do your project then it can be a tough barrier. Ion the plus side, there are many great folk who can help you.

I know I would not have been able to have made anything without the help, support and advice from many great people I’ve met on the way. A lot of film people are very, very generous with their time and knowledge and its something I always try and remember.

The DIY mindset is pretty much essential to me. All the projects I’ve made have started out from just deciding to go and make a film myself or with friends. Usually I have to take the initiative and take a finished film to a distributor, broadcaster or financier and hope they can do something with it. If not you just have to think of ways of releasing yourself. I suppose the difficulty with this approach is really fighting morale.

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I suppose it comes down to what you’d define success as. If it’s a steady income then that can be something almost anyone can be successful with it just takes a bit of a reality check and a lot of tenacity and hard work. You can have a very good career working as a film technician providing you understand it won’t happen overnight and will require dealing with A LOT of knock backs, disappointments and very long hours. It really comes down to not giving up. It might not be what most peoples fantasy world idea of what success is like but there’s good solid work available in a very competitive market if you’re willing to put the dedication into it.

On the other hand, if people have expectations of being an A-list Hollywood director or having a top ten album, that’s a level of success only open to the very few and requires – extreme luck, knowing the right people, playing the game, being able to talk the talk and having a large amount of talent. It’s something I know I’ll never achieve but I’m happy doing what I

Teenage Superstars

do. I define success as being happy doing what you do, which I very much am. I have to work like everyone else and I might not like my job everyday.

It might not be someone else’s idea of a success, but I think anyone who lasts a few years in the film industry is successful. I know my limitations and I’m comfortable with that.

weeks during a break to make ‘Far From the Apple Tree’. ‘Teenage Superstars’ was being cut at the same time so I had to review cuts and make notes in the very late evenings, ‘Big Gold Dream’ was being released at the same time, so I had to work on the press for it during what breaks I could manage.

When you begin a project, are you within a creative bubble for the length of the production and it becomes hard to switch off?

It was a pretty intense period without enough time to rest afterwards as I had to go back to the brutal hours of my camera work. I’m a very clean living person and at some points on ‘Far From the Apple Tree’, I started to develop these crazy nosebleeds whenever I bent down. I think it was the stress, but I’m sure I looked like I was an extra in ‘Scarface’ [1983]. I don’t think you even get a chance to switch off during the intense filming period. Everything is just grabbed moments here and there.

But I suppose it does become hard to switch off when you finish. I do a lot of exercise and try spend quality time with my family. Holidays are important as you can overwork yourself without realising it when caught in that bubble.

No, the exact opposite. For practical reasons I need to support what I do by working on other peoples films. I’m quite lucky as I have quite a long background in cinematography and being a camera technician which allows me to work on some very good projects.

To keep my own films going, I generally have to work eighty hours a week on these other projects, which doesn’t allow me too much time for my own. I take what I can get. I took two

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I remember at the end of one film my internal dialogue seemed to switch itself off for a few hours. It was pretty nice actually but knew it probably meant it was time to stop. You do have to really look after yourself – physical and mental health, so I always make sure that I have a good holiday with my family and try to eat well.

Your debut feature was the noirhorror style ‘Sarah’s Room’. Is it true you managed to make this eighty-five minute film that won awards (Fife Film Expo, Bootleg Film Festival New York) for only four thousand pounds?

It was really an experiment. About three quarters of that budget went towards crew fees so it was probably closer to £1,000 to make the film. We worked out what was needed to pay the crew and then what we could do with the rest . I try to stay away from revealing budgets and time-frames as usually it is seen as an excuse. The only reason we mentioned it for ‘Sarah’s Room’ was the hope that it might

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inspire others to try something similar – and hopefully something better. We did it in five days after constructing a tight schedule.

It probably wasn’t the wisest choice for a first mission statement to be fair. It just frustrated people as it was incredibly ambiguous and more damning, didn’t fit into a set genre.

People who expected to see a horror, got bored and annoyed, and people who expected an arthouse drama got bored and annoyed as it had too many genre elements to it.

I just don’t see the point of making something that has been done before.

I’d rather fail terribly. We could have made some sort of tightly scripted horror but it would just be like all those other micro-budget indie films. I’d rather use the budget limitations to do something you’re not allowed to with funding rather than try and make something that’s an attempt to appeal to funders. It might not be good but it’s different. It’s almost it’s own genre – though admittedly one that won’t catch

on.

It got some OK reviews among the general un-interest– someone said it was the sort of film that you can take magic mushrooms too and it will reveal the mysteries of the universe. Someone else said it was ‘just a boring man with a beard who just walks around all day’.

The camera and lighting style worked really well and a lot of indie films made in Edinburgh after, looked very similar to it for a little while after. Nobody employed me as a director after it but I did get a lot of calls to work as a cinematographer. They just asked me to make their film look like mine and I didn’t really see the point in that.

Overall it was a film that gained very little interest and I can see why.

I probably should have learned from this but made another film shortly after that went a little more extreme in annoying an audience. It got some pretty extreme reviews. Someone said that even though it was only January they knew they’d seen the worst film of the year. But it did get some really

good reviews. Annoyingly, some of the best I’ve had as I think it’s my worst film. It’s going to be included in the Far From the Apple Tree BluRay. ‘Teenage Superstars’ is both a passionate and enlightening work.

Did you feel that it was a story that needed to be told, as the impact of Scottish music on the global scene is often forgotten?

It always grows. And grows and grows. ‘Teenage Superstars’ and ‘Big Gold Dream’ were two films called ‘The Sound of Young Scotland’.

Initially, it was one film about Postcard Records, which then became about Postcard and Fast, which then started to include the Glasgow bands from the ‘80s and ‘90s. The characters and stories were so good that we decided it should be two films.

Unlike the drama features I do, these films are unfortunately very expensive to make with very little chance of recovering the budget so it does have to be a passion project.

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There’s just so many stories from such a small part of the world that I hope someone mines all the great ones not yet told.

How did Kim Deal become involved in the project?

Much like everything else to do with the films, we just asked her! ‘Hey pal, do you want to be in our fillum?’ Our Executive Producer, Mark let us do whatever we wanted, which was fantastic, but he did ask, ‘Do you think you could squeeze the Pixies in somehow?’.

Like Robert Forster [formerly of The Go-Betweens] narrating ‘Big Gold Dream’, we wanted somebody who had a connection with our story as well as being part of another story. There’s a strong connection as The Pixies covered ‘Head On’ [‘Automatic’, 1989]

by Jesus and Mary Chain [on ‘Trompe Le Monde’, 1991] and The Breeders supported Nirvana with Teenage Fanclub ... One of The Breeders albums was recorded in Edinburgh

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[‘Pod’, 1990], so she really knew the culture, the story, the people and was the perfect choice. It was also great to have a female voice. Many things happened like this during the production, a seemingly off-the-cuff suggestion from someone often led to ‘actually, that’s a really great idea’.

She was brilliant and incredibly kind to us.

‘Far From the Apple Tree’ is a modern, horror masterpiece. Was it the darkness and possibilities that attracted you to the screenplay by Ben Soper?

Haha, it’s a little far off that. I asked Ben if he could write a script for it.

Ben is a great writer, something I struggle with. Me, being a writer not me struggling with Ben being a great writer. I needed a script and Ben and I have a shared love of similar films so I knew he’d be great. It was written very quickly and went into production very quickly afterwards. Just a few weeks.

I like to have something solid as a

guide and always allow some shooting time to improvise as I think that’s where the magic really happens.

You might loose something in the structure but you gain something that you’d never get if it was pre-planned. It should have been released and in shops by now but HMV going bust pushed it back and obviously now, with Covid it has been pushed back further. We purposely only had a small preview release and it’s had a mixed reception.

I can understand why some people find it frustrating and jarring but it’s what I wanted. We did have some great reviews with some amazing (and surprising) plaudits. It’s fantastic when people really get what we wanted to do and it feels very rewarding … but I know it will annoy some people.

A lot of my inspirations are ‘60s and ‘70s European horror films, those pop psyche films where there are arty elements to it but a lot of exploitation elements too and that whole period of British folk/occult/rural weirdness. If you’re going into it expecting a deep character exploration, that’s just not

going to happen. It’s lots of ideas and questions thrown in and you choose what you want to make from it. I call it a pop art fairytale as that’s what I think it is. While it feels like there’s a lot of darkness there it’s actually quite a gentle film that’s quite melancholy.

There’s not even that much horror to be honest either. Two elements that a distributor hates but we’ve got a couple of really good ones who get it and are very much behind it.

Do you feel the whole horror genre has shifted from gore-based outings into the psychological, with the rise of Ari Aster and Jordan Peele, as horror now has to be intelligent and authentic?

I reckon a lot has to do with age and background. Probably less obvious from those two examples as they are American but definitely the current popularity of things like Hauntology, Folk-Horror and Wyrdness I think is to do with growing up at a certain time in Britain. Scarfolk really struck a chord with people due to its humour. ‘70s /

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Far From the Apple Tree

early ‘80s Britain was full of fallout from the 1960s underground culture that seeped into everyday modern day life – creepy and inappropriate kids TV shows, dark public information films, adverts, occult themed paperbacks etc People who are of an age who grew up with that are now making music, films and writing books so it’s not surprising that they seem to be popular now. I genuinely thought I was working in a vacuum so it’s really interesting to hear about all this other business going on.

Definitely Ari Aster’s work falls into this. It would be interesting to know what his inspirations are as he’s younger and from a different country.

There’s a really great music scene which ties in with a lot of this too.

‘Ghost Box’ [2019] being a good example.

How long in terms of time does it take to plan out a film such as ‘Far From The Apple Tree’ with regard to shooting and ideas to execute a vision?

Normally, it takes a long time but we

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just worked very quickly due to other commitments. I was very lucky to have two great producers to help me – Olivia and Steven who are able to work quickly. I’m a firm believer in Tony Wilson’s interpretation of Praxis, that you do something to only later work out why you did it. We had an extremely tight and complicated schedule but it did have opportunities to improvise. I think it’s so important to have these. You might loose out on structure or clever plot twists but you always get fantastic moments that you’d never get if they were scripted.

The magic moments.

Again, like with the other dramas I didn’t want to just do the easy option of having a tightly scripted three-hander as it would be like everything else. We shot on film and had lots of moments where the characters are watching recordings of themselves within the film. This obviously caused some logistical nightmares due to out incredibly short turnaround times but I think it all helped in creating the correct atmosphere. I think every film

should be treated as an art project within itself – the actual filming – and out of that comes the film. Getting the right people on board is essential as you have to rely on other peoples experience so much. Due to our limited resources we can’t work like a normal shoot which is something some people find difficult to adjust to. Having all these elements together and a vision is as important as having a great script I think.

The soundtrack is an incredible piece of work by Shawn Pinchbeck and Rose McDowall. Did you have an idea of what you wanted sound wise before you started filming?

I did and this was it. I knew Rose from interviewing her and we got on really well and met up a lot after to chat. She’s such a talented artist and incredibly generous. I was telling her about the project and she said she’d love to collaborate on a soundtrack for it. She’d worked on an album with Shawn and suggested I use the tracks they had for cutting to. It

complemented the film so well that Shawn mastered these, which became the soundtrack.

How did Shawn and Rose happen to come together to create the music?

That’s a good question. I think Shawn was involved with Sorrow, Rose’s previous band.

As a view of other directors’ work, what did you think of Robert Eggers’ ‘The Lighthouse’ in terms of filmmaking?

I still haven’t seen it but I very much want to. I read a lot about it when it was first announced, especially the cinematography techniques. You’re always told that story is the most important aspect of a film and it doesn’t matter what you shoot it on. I just don’t buy that. Yeah, ‘Pet Sounds’ [The Beach Boys, 1966] songs can all be played beautifully on an acoustic guitar but ‘Pet Sounds’ is ‘Pet Sounds’ because of the songs and the precisely chosen instruments, arrangements and

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recording techniques. A film is the same to me. Lenses, lighting, camera choice are all essential to creating a mood and the correct texture to frame your story. Don’t believe anyone when they tell you it’s script, script, script.

It’s all about choosing the correct paintbrush for the job and it all complements the script. From only seeing the trailer it certainly feels that he has a great understanding of aesthetics and feel.

In this obscure world of isolation, has it given you time to come up with ideas that make you eager to get back to work?

I’d taken three months off work in January to bring up my daughter. I had a year’s worth of work on other people’s projects lined up after this and had decided to attempt to finish off some overdue projects just before. I’ve got a theory about folk music being more important to ‘indie’ music than rock and roll, which will now have to be written rather than filmed. I’ve got another feature I filmed and I’m now

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editing. It won’t be a popular one!

Finally, what are you listening to these days?

I started listening to albums I owned but had never listed to , or have not listened to properly. It’s really nice actually. Other than this, I’ve just been listening to minimalist American classical music. It’s one of my favourite things. That and jazz / blues.

I see a lot of the structures in this music that can be adapted to filmmaking.

Editing is the greatest tool a filmmaker has. It just feels like notes and rhythm to me.

Thank you for a wonderful interview and we wish you all the best for tbe future. grantmcpheedirector.com twitter.com/GrantMcPheeFilm

Introducing:

Oggy Why

By Alice Jones-Rodgers.

Sometimes we hear a piece of music so unbelievably heart-renderingly and soul-stirringly beautiful that even we aren’t sure how we can possibly put the feeling derived from it into words. One such piece of music that we heard recently was the latest release by London-based singer/songwriter Oggy Why, entitled ‘Missing’. However, we were soon to discover that this delicate and mournful yet utterly uplifting three-minute, piano and voice led peaen to a departed lover was just the tip of the iceberg with this musician, who’s incredible talent has already seen him perform at legendary venues such as Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club and the 02 Empire.

Oggy recently told us, “I’m influenced

by Nina Simone, David Bowie, Kate

Bush” and we are certain that with his soulful vocals with their seemingly unlimited vocal range and soaring, operatic tendancies attached to often sparse backings imbued with all manner of interesting production curiosities, he will garner these sort of comparisons. However, upon hearing the other three tracks currently available on the classically trained musician’s Soundcloud page, it is obvious that there is so still much more to his ambitons. With Oggy having learnt from the very best in the classical oeuvre, he attaches it to his own unique vision with aplomb, with every track almost being a minature symphony. There is the majestic ‘Thought’ with its swirling, rolling and crashing musical arrangement suggesting the narrator being lost at sea as he attempts to navigate his turbulent mind; the icy and chilling backing of ‘Street Behind’, which compliments lyrics such as “Glaciers in our bodies, it cuts through as we breathe” and the echoing, ethereal quality of ‘Voice’, which evokes the transcendental experience in order to find answers from the spirit world that he sings of.

“I like to write about my internal, introspective world”, Oggy told us. It is a wonderful world that we look forward to hearing much more from. soundcloud.com/ogg www.facebook.com/oggywhy

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“Oi! Inside Now!”

Jah Wobble in Lockdown!

Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers Cover shoot by Alex Hurst.

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Like everybody else over the last few months, former Public Image Ltd (PiL) bass player turned Invaders of the Heart leader Jah Wobble has been forced into self-isolation by the coronavirus. However, having just released a brand new sublimely hypnotic seven track opus entitled ‘Ocean Blue Waves’ on 27th March, which comes off the back of a hugely successful UK tour back in January and now having to promote it with interviews conducted from home, there is little time to rest.

apart, I’ve got nothing on under it, I’ve got to manoeuvre to put the water down and do it up so no-one bloody, you know ... it’s just mental!

I couldn’t even have a coffee. Yeah, I got up a bit late today, you know, I thought I’d have a lay in, you know, but right from when I got up and that’s typical. I suppose I said to the PR company, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, I’ll do all these interviews’, but they’ve all happened at once, everyone was calling at once! That’s what was weird, you know.”

There are a lot of interviews to do and it doesn’t sound like he was particularly impressed with those he had taken part in before we rang him. “This one guy, he was nice but he was really slow, like going ‘So, what year was this exactly? and I’m like, ‘I can’t fucking remember, mate!’, he tells us. No pressure then!

I ask Jah if he has time to do the interview now or if he wants to reschedule for another day, to which he replies, “No, no, love, I’m fine because what else am I going to do?

I mean, what else am I going to do?

All I’m going to do is exercise, take my regulation one exercise period, you know what I mean. I’m not worried at all, don’t worry about that, you know what I mean. Well, one of the things, this is what I’ve been saying to everybody, obviously this is terrible grief what we’re going through now, you wouldn’t wish it on anybody, any of us could get ill with it, so I’m not complacent, but one of the things I said was it’s kind of nice having a merry-go-round stop and just being forced not to do anything is not unpleasant in a way. But then you have a day like today when its like going back to the merry-goround unexpectedly, but there you go! Doing the interviews is fine, but

“I thought that there was going to be nothing to do from the start to the end of the day, but right from the moment I got up, it’s been mental!”, continues the Stepney-born father of four, who is locking down in Stockport, where he has lived for the last few decades with his Chineseborn wife, guzheng player and harpist Zi Lan Liao. “We had some water delivered this morning. I’m stood there in my dressing gown, so I’ve gone out to get the water thinking I’m carrying the water and my dressing gown’s about to come

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PiL, 1978.

L/R: Jah, Keith Levene, Jim Walker, John Lydon.

the phone was going like mad. I’m a terrible multi-tasker as well! So, there’s a guy banging on the door, the door’s locked, I can’t find the key ... I thought, what’s he delivering anyway? I was looking at him thinking, there’s loads of pink boxes, what could it be? And I thought, is it toilet paper or something? But it was Evian, it was water, but anyway Alice, lovely, let’s go!”

Firstly, hello Jah and thank you for agreeing to our interview. Could we start by asking how you first became interested in music as a listener and how you came to start playing music yourself?

Well, with the music, I just used to hear music on the radio as a kid. The first music I really remember was Johnny Morris’ ‘Animal Magic’ programme on telly. I would have been three or four or something like that, I suppose. It was duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh ... you know, so I’d sing that I’d sing that and drive my mum and dad wild in the morning going up and down

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stairs. You know, singing that song would drive anyone fucking mad. My mum used to buy me a single every Friday, which was basically what she wanted, so the first one was Jim Reeve, ‘Welcome to My World’ [‘A Touch of Velvet’, 1964]. I got that from Paul’s record stall [Paul for Music] at Whitechapel Station. So, yeah, that was my introduction to music. It was Whitechapel Waste Market. It was right next door to the fish market, so, you know ... I would buy music there and my mum probably pushed me into buying stuff she liked, you know. Burl Ives ‘Froggie Went A-Courtin’’ was the second one after Jim Reeves and I got into all the blue-beat stuff, you know, ska music, which started to become really popular around that time, like Desmond Dekker and I loved all that.

And then as a player, I started playing music because of punk, because at that time, it wasn’t a working class thing, generally, to kind of learn ... working class people played music but by the mid-’70s, with a lot of music, the middle classes had taken it over generally and it was a lot of this

virtuoso stuff, you locked yourself away and it was this faux-virtuosity, kind of fast runs and all that. And so punk kind of opened it up for us to play. Up until then, you just listened to recorded music and you know, you listened to records and that kind of gave permission to learn an instrument somehow, you know.

What attracted you to playing bass and having played bass for so many years, what still fascinates you about the instrument?

Oh, I still absolutely love it and if anything, I happened to have gone back to playing Fender Precision bass, which is the bass I started out on with PiL and it reminds me ... the tone of it really reminds you of when you first played and I’m totally in love with it again and making up simple little basslines and making up bass runs. It’s simple; I like simplicity because I like to think I’m a really complex person, you know, and I’m very evolved and all that bollocks and I actually need things to be really simple for them to be

effective and for me to ... I’m a bit OCD-ish, you know, so it’s really good for me to keep things really simple.

But I’m a getting a bass made that’s going to have one string and then that’s zen-like, you know and it’ll make you play a certain kind of way. I’m in the early stages of talking about it.

So, what is the string tuned to?

Well, that’s the moot point. Do I have it at E? I’ll probably keep it at E, but I like a lot of Moroccan music and a lot of that stuff’s in D and actually D, I think once you go past D or certainly a C-sharp on the low string, it starts to kind of have a flappy bottom end. It’s not good, you’re better off on a synth bass. I’m thinking of having one done that’s tuned to D, you know. D I’m thinking would be quite good, you know, and use it very specifically for making real simple trance stuff, you know.

You will have to start selling them!

Maybe the Jah Wobble bass?

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With John Lydon in London

Well, I don’t know about that but I think that’s how this idea started was doing a classic bass, so my thinking was to do something that was a bit more kind of fun really for everybody.

This is probably a story you have told a thousand times but could you tell us how you got the nickname ‘Jah Wobble’?

How did I know you were going to ask me that? Me and Sid Vicious, we were both trying to get through a door, open a door. We had a key to the door, or maybe we didn’t but we thought we had the keys to the door, but we had a bunch of keys and we were trying to get into someone’s gaff. It was a squat, I suppose and it was like an impossible obstacle course and we were both lagging drunk and half way through it, when we were both pissed, he said, ‘I’m going to call you Jah Wobble because you like reggae’. My real name’s John Wardle. And I said, ‘Sid, you know what, I’m going to remember that because, you know why?’ And he said, ‘Why?’ ‘Because

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no one will forget it!’ Exactly! So that was it. It was one of them. And I remember we gave up and climbing through a window was easier than trying to open a door because of the thing of trying to get the key in the lock, you know. Looking back, it was a bit like a Laurel and Hardy sketch, you know, yeah.

In May 1978, following the break-up of the Sex Pistols, you were approached by John Lydon to become a member of a new outfit that would soon become known as Public Image Ltd (PiL). What are your memories of the formation and early days of PiL? Oh, it was very informal, you know.

I’d been down to Wally’s newsagent and got The Daily Mirror and seen the Sex Pistols had split up. That’s how you got you got your news in those days, the newspaper, you know. You had phones, but I will still at home then. I’d been in a squat but I’d gone back home under sufferance for the Christmas and I was still there come

the March or the April or whatever it was, you know, and anyway ... actually, it must have been February, come to think of it when they split up and then

by March, I’d got a call from John [Lydon]. Yet again, I’m a bit OCD-ish, so I used to walk from my house on Clichy Estate, Stepney Green Station probably felt nearer but that didn’t feel right so I had to walk to Whitechapel Station. It’s all too much information but I would always walk exactly the same way, not walk on certain cracks, you know, always walking clockwise around the library on what we called the Jewish estate. Well, when I came back from Whitechapel that day, for some reason I went anti-clockwise and I remember thinking, anti-clockwise around the library? Something’s going to happen. I don’t know if it’s bad but something’s going to happen. I got in, saw my old man and the phone rang and he went, ‘Oh, it’s for you’ and it was Lydon and he said, ‘Do you want to be in a band with me and Keith [Levene, guitarist]?’ I was like, ‘What the fuck?’, you know and I was like, ‘Okay, yeah’. You know, yeah.

Things happened very quickly for PiL and by the end of 1979, you had released two albums ‘Public Image: First Issue’ (1978) and ‘Metal Box’ (1979), not to mention the singles ‘Public Image’ (1978), ‘Death Disco (Swan Lake)’ (1979) and ‘Memories’ (1979). Could you tell us a bit about the general writing and recording process of the PiL material that you were involved in?

Well, I was so lucky because I was a novice player and I was able just to write basslines and everyone seemed to like the basslines and so everything stemmed from the bass. I couldn’t even count; I couldn’t even count like one, two, three four. I didn’t know anything about counting or anything, it was all very instinctual and that was it really, you know. It was a gut-level, visceral, physical, you know, intuitive, you know, kind of approach and I was incredibly fortunate and I was very thinking ... basically, I was in a squat in ‘77 and okay, I got hold of a bass and an amp and a lead and very quickly let the amp and the lead go to get money

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for drink and for pills, so I was left with the bass and it was a Music Man copy and I had to balance it against the headboard. All the furniture had gone, I had set fire to the furniture and one thing or the other, driven everyone out, a bit like The Young Ones [BBC Television] thing. So, I had to balance the bass against the headboard to get a kind of vibration and it was a high action, but it was great. And I had a book, ‘So You Want to Play the Bass?’ and it told you the notation and it had songs like ‘American Patrol’ [F.W. Meacham, published 1891, popularised

by Glenn Miller in 1942] in there and I thought I don’t want to do this, this is too slow, you know, I want to do something that’s, you know ... I knew what I wanted to do, I wanted to make patterns, I just knew that. And I looked at the bass and I just made patterns based around the dots on the fret, you know, so I’d imagine triangles, triangular shapes on it and stuff, you know and you end up playing octaves and everything, so my music was very sort of fixed, quite modal really, you know, looking back and that was it.

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And, you know, I added some of my aesthetic tastes, so with something like ‘Poptones’ [‘Metal Box’], I’d make it like this quite geometrical shape, like octaves, like very open of sound and then put this chromatic kind of tight little run in the middle of it. So, I really did think about things, you know, and I had a sound; I wasn’t doing faux-dub reggae imitations on a heavy bass. I had a heavy bass but I really had an approach and a sound. And, of course, Keith was quite open to doing interesting harmonics. He didn’t want to just do polite rock ‘n’ roll, he wanted to do something different, so it worked really well and I wasn’t under pressure to conform or do this or that, so I was able to play just to my rules, which was fantastic, you know.

Differences in artistic vision and disputes over the use of rhythm tracks on your 1980 debut solo album ‘The Legend Lives On ... Jah Wobble in “Betrayal”’ led to your departure from PiL in mid-1980.

What prompted you to step out on your own and record a solo album,

how different did you find the experience of working as a solo artist in comparison to working with PiL and how did you come to leave PiL? Oh, you don’t hear that so much! That thing with PiL! Yeah, it was put in the press that I had taken their tapes [containing material for ‘Metal Box’], but in fact it was the other way round.

I was working in the Manor Studio in Oxfordshire and I would go up the west end and I would record, so something like ‘The Suit’ [‘Metal Box’] actually started life as my version of ‘Blueberry Hill’ [‘The Legend Lives On ... Jay Wobble in “Betrayal”’], made with a guy called Mark Lusardi [sound engineer], who’s the brother of Linda Lusardi [model and actress], who’s had coronavirus and who’s been in the newspapers recently, so ... I think she’s recovered now. I think she might be in hospital with it. I don’t know, she said something about NHS staff. She was praising all the NHS staff. She said she cries when she thinks of what they’ve been doing for her, which is lovely, because I feel like that when I come in

contact with the NHS, you know; I was ill a few years ago and they were fantastic. But anyway, she had coronavirus recently and her husband, she’s married to another actor, because she’s in Emmerdale Farm now ... I don’t watch it but I’ve met her. But anyway, I digress ... Her brother, Mark ... I worked with Mark and I’d go down there, I’d get bored at the Manor because nothing was happening, so I’d drive down to the west end, we used a place called Gooseberry Studios in Chinatown. So, we used to have to go down trap doors to get into the studios. You wouldn’t be allowed to do it these days, I don’t think, with health and safety or whatever. You wouldn’t have an entrance to a premises like that, where you opened traps doors and went down these narrow stairs, you know. And, anyway, I would go down there and I would do my bits and pieces and I would take them back to PiL, you know, and I didn’t mind doing that.

And the money was terrible, you didn’t get paid properly, so the one thing I had going for me was ... I was so spoiled, this was great ... I could book studio

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time whenever I wanted, so what it did, it taught me a lot about making music, you know, which was just so fortunate.

What does it say? If you give a man ... or you should say a woman now, not to be sexist ... if you give a man or a woman a fish, you feed them for a day, you know, but if you give them a fishing rod ... not that I like fishing because I don’t like the thought of it getting caught in the fish’s mouth, but whatever. It’s a bit wimpy, but they’re sentient beings and all that. But anyway, if you teach someone to fish then you feed them for life and so, I actually did really well and I would then take stuff back there, so it’s real nonsense to sort of say what they did at the time. But I think I was very straightforward and very honest. If something’s wrong, I’ll point it and say this is wrong and that was wrong but it doesn’t matter now, it’s all years ago now, but I said I don’t like the way I’m not being paid properly, I don’t like the way the business isn’t being taken care of properly, I’m leaving, you know, and that’s it. And what I did do, I kind of knew it was fucked up in that last year

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or so, I just went in the studio whenever I could. I was really busy and beavering away and that was the one thing I had going for myself, that I could go and make all kinds of like mad, off the wall solo records, but it taught me something, I learnt something, you know. So, I wouldn’t go back and change anything now.

Being able to go in the studio alone was fantastic, yeah.

The period directly after leaving PiL was evidently a very creative time for you. You first formed Human Condition with guitarist Dave ‘Animal’ Matley and original PiL drummer, Jim Walker and collaborated with Can members before forming Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart in 1982. What are your memories of this period of your life and the formation of Invaders of the Heart?

It was a real relief to be out of PiL, which is a shame really but it was, it was a relief, because it was so great but that’s the pain of change, you know.

With Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit of Can

What do they say, you’ve got the pain you can see, like obvious pain in life, like people getting sick and dying and then the pain of change because everything that’s wonderful now comes apart. We come into the world alone, we die alone, you know, and all that caper. The new car that I’ve got today, not that I have got a new car but if I did have, I would love it, you know, it smells of new car, it’s great and then, eventually, you dent it and doesn’t feel as good because someone’s dented it and it doesn’t smell like it used to, you know, and this, that and the other. You know, and PiL was the classic thing of the pain of change where you, you know, something that was really great in a year was turning sour and wasn’t a great vibe or whatever at all. So, in the end, it was a relief to get away from it, it was toxic, you know. But when I came out, I actually thought, well, that’s it, I’m probably out of the game because I’ll tell you something, I tend to be pessimistic but I thought that’s it. So, it’s conflict, you know, although I’m hungry and recording lots of music and there must be an ambition there,

the other side is, oh, that’s never going to happen for you, you’re never going to have any luck or whatever. So, I kind of thought, oh, it’s fucked but then a good mate of mine said, ‘You’ve got to meet Holger [Czukay] and Jaki [Liebezeit] from Can’, so I went to meet them, clicked, yet again with Mark Lusardi. The best PiL bass sound was done with Mark at Gooseberry because at Gooseberry Studios, you had Mark and you had Dennis Bovell, you know, so you had fantastic reggae engineers and producers. So, anyway, I got Holger there, he loved it, we did great recordings because, you know, I was starting trying to get my head round making simple triad chords and we had a string synth and I’d put a bass part down and put some simple string parts down over the top and it was quite catchy. Holger took the quarter inch away and edited it, you know, quite radically, and then I went over to Cologne and met Jaki, who was the greatest person I’ve ever met in music ... Jaki Liebezeit, what a drummer, he was incredible! So, it was just amazing and Youth [producer], who I’ve just got

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Invaders of the Heart MK1

an album out with and was over there working with Conny Plank with Killing Joke, said to me, ‘I can’t believe how you’d left PiL and there you were playing with Can like weeks later!’

And I said, ‘Yeah, I know, it’s amazing really’, you know. So, I worked with them and obviously like with the Human Condition, once again, I had the idea for a powerful kind of three-piece avantgarde kind of heavy metal band.

I was into [Jimi] Hendrix at the time, which probably kind of set that off. I was getting into Hendrix and Electric Miles and all that stuff and I was also into world music, you know. So, I was into all these things and I started Invaders of the Heart. I wanted like a fusion band. It was 1982, Manchester was our first gig and that was it, we were away, so, you know, it was a very exciting time and we did ‘Snake Charmer’ [1983 collaborative EP with U2’s The Edge and Czukay] and all that as well. I did a lot of stuff in that first few years, with PiL, went and worked with Holger and Jaki, did ‘Snake Charmer’; it was a turbocharged few years, you know.

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I find the 1987 album ‘Psalms’ a fascinating record. You stopped drinking and taking drugs during the making of the album and have stated that half of the album was created whilst you were still drinking and half was created sober. What are your memories of the writing and recording of ‘Psalms’ and how different did you find making the half of the music on which you were sober in comparison to the half of the music on which you were under the influence?

I’ve got to say, I’m glad you say that, it’s a good album, you know, yeah. It fore-echoed what was going to come.

I was half in alcohol, I was half sober, I got sober half way through it. Well, everything started to ... you know, you look back and you think, God, what a pathetic wretch I was, you know, because you’re full of self-pity and very confused about things and you really end up in a kind of a hole, you know, that you can’t seem to dig yourself out of and it’s funny, a guy had come round and I got it off a movie,

Jah revisiting the London Underground recently

that slogan, ‘One drink too many and a hundred not enough’, it was Jimmy [James] Cagney, ‘Come Fill the Cup’ [1951] and not a massive movie either, really, but the slogan of course was a slogan you’d hear around AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] eventually, so that’s how I got sober, I bounced into AA. I’d heard a couple of the slogans before that but that was me that was, I was one of those guys where one drink was too many, a thousand weren’t enough and you’d end up drinking yourself into oblivion, you know. And so, all that was in the build up to it and finally, you know, it just got to a point around about the time of the making of that album ... actually, the last night for drinking was at the studio where I was making it and I was really badly behaved and, you know, really went off on this crazy sort of trip across causing mayhem, you know, and that was the last drink. And I came in and I think my attitude was, right, let’s get this finished as best as possible, I’m going to put a really good effort in and then I’ve got to get into life and I wanted to get a job because I’d had a daughter at

the time, I had one daughter, I was separated at that time in the relationship, you know, and I wanted to kind of turn my life around. So, I wanted to finish the album and work, so I finished the album and I got a job as a courier. So, I’m going to AA meetings, I’m doing my ninety meetings in ninety days and all that, I didn’t muck about and I got a job as a courier working for two ex-public-school boys, I didn’t like them, in Clerkenwell. I didn’t like them at all, they were not nice people, you know, but anyway, it doesn’t matter ... I worked there, applied for the Post Office and the [London] Underground and I got them both. I chose the Underground and so I started working. Actually, I was working on the Underground as ‘Psalms’ came out and I don’t think we got a review, no one was interested in it ... It sold a few, you know. For the time, it wasn’t a great seller but for nowadays, you’d be happy. I think it sold I think 3,000 or 4,000 on vinyl to start with. It wasn’t terrible but I was very much I’m going to take care of business, so I was enjoying working

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and listening to a lot of music very quickly. I was listening to a lot of different stuff like Salif Kaita, I was listening to a lot of Anita Baker, so when I got up for early turn, I’d have a wash ... those were the days when you still had a wash! I’d be in my little flat and you’d have a wash in the morning, you know. Shower culture wasn’t so much in. You didn’t have ordinary showers, you had rubber things that you stuck on the end of your taps, you know what I mean? So, it was quite a common thing in the morning that you’d have a wash; you’d wash those parts of your body that you needed to wash. And there’s something very dignified about a wash, I like a wash, you know. So, I’d get up, I’d have a wash, I’d listen to Anita Baker, I’d get off on early turn, you know and all that and I loved it. I was very happy actually because I felt ... I was really not in a good way with the booze, it was getting really serious. I was turning yellow, you know, it wasn’t good and you become a raging arsehole. It’s not good. And I was involved in life, you’re out in life, so

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it was wonderful for me, you know.

But, Neville [Murray, original Invaders of the Heart percussionist] came round.

So, I got sober in the October of ‘86, finished that album off, probably by the December and then I started working for the courier, I’ve done the interviews, the courier job had ended by the January and I’m at the Underground by March, you know.

That’s how it was, it was bob, bob, bob, bob, bob. It was a temporary job, the job with the courier, you know and it was a really snowy winter; I remember some of the worst driving conditions I’ve ever encountered in this country actually, you know, where your windscreen is freezing over and all that.

Yeah, it was bad! But anyway! So, worked on the Underground, Neville came round in April and said ‘What’s up?’ That’s when you knocked on for people still, and he said, ‘What’s happening?’ So, I said, ‘What? Do you still want to work with me?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, it was great!’ Because I thought that everyone was just really fed up with me, you know, because it’s so childish what you go through.

Anyway, so, I put Invaders of the Heart mark two together and Neville would always find me musicians ... the drummer who I’m working with at the moment [Marc Layton-Benet], Neville found him. So, anyway, I was surprised he wanted to do it and I said that I wanted to use middle-eastern scales a bit more because we’d put a single out in ‘83 called ‘Invaders of the Heart’, which was ahead of its time really, I think, that sold nothing compared to the records I had on majors at that time, like ‘Snake Charmer’, but over the years, it has done very well. So, it just goes to show that if you stick to your guns ... because twenty-five years later, that was used for a film soundtrack. So, anyway, that was all good and we went and we did a few half-arsed recordings and rehearsals and I started doing shows again part-time, you know, and then a tour came up in the next year and I hadn’t had any holidays on the Underground, so they suddenly said, ‘Well, right, you’ve got to take five weeks off because you haven’t had any holidays’, because I wasn’t even

worried about holidays, I just didn’t care, you know. So, I toured, came back, left the Underground because I’d been put on a depot I didn’t really like.

I found it was a little bit right-handed actually, there. Yeah, didn’t really like the vibe but whatever, it was a great job and it was the best job I ever had and I remember it fondly, you know. In another existence, I could have stayed on the Underground to be quite frank.

Yeah, yeah, I didn’t mind it, I really liked that job and if I’d gone to a different depot, I may well have stayed on it. I would say to myself then, ‘Don’t leave, this is a good job!’ It’s as good as making music to be quite honest! But no regrets. So, anyway, I left there and I started working other jobs and driving part time and by the time that happened, that was like 1988, ‘89 or something, so it took a few years, that marriage ended that I was in and I was sacked, I had a fight with the owner’s son of the company who I was working for and it was one of those watershed moments: I really want to be in music, I really want to be making music. You know, I don’t like these

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jobs I’ve been doing, I’ve got a talent that I’m not using and I remember talking to a guy, he was an ex-submariner, so he would be great in a lockdown! And I used to go to him for a bit of advice. He was a really sensible guy. I’ve never really had a mentor in life or a father figure as such active and this guy was a little bit like that and I went to him and said, ‘Look, I don’t know much but I know this’. He said, ‘You believe in God, you believe in something’ and I went, ‘Yeah, yeah, I believe in something’, you know, so he said, ‘Well, don’t you think God would want you to utilise your talents? And even take God out of the frame, shouldn’t one use one’s talents anyway, if you’ve got a talent?’

And I thought, yeah, he’s right, why am I hiding this talent and not one hundred per cent using the talent? And the funny thing is, you make this decision and you start moving forward and you’re looking and suddenly, within a couple of months, we had a major deal. Because we had Invaders of the Heart going but it was part-time and we’d released a little part-time

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record and at the time, Andrew Weatherall [producer, remixer, DJ] had taken an interest in it, with ‘Bomba’ [1990 single, remixed by Weatherall and released on his Boys Own Productions label]. So, you know, that was 1990, whatever it was and boom!

It all started to happen and we got a major deal. It’s never easy, you have lots of to-ings and fro-ings with getting the contract together, but eventually, yeah, we started moving forward and, you know, I haven’t looked back since really. And what happened, we got a deal; we were on Warner’s East West with an album called ‘Rising Above Bedlam’ [1991] and then we ended up on Island [Records] and that lovely point came which is beautiful where it suddenly hits you that all the years you lost with the drinking and whatever you’ve made up and you’re back to where you should be. It was a lovely feeling and I also, I actually felt like I could call myself an artist. I’d always taken the piss. I tend to be a bit of a Tony Hancock and take the piss out of it. So many people in the music game are a bit up themselves, you know, and

all that, obviously and I’m working class and we always cut people like that down; ‘Who does he fucking think he is?!’ You know, there’s a bit of that going on. ‘Who does she fucking think she is?’ There’s a bit of that with working class people, you know. But anyway, I cracked on and, yeah, it was a nice feeling, and since then I’ve, within reason, been able to do what I want to do. One thing with me, you’ve always got one thing you’ve got the hump about or you want to change, but fundamentally, I’m quite happy with my lot and do not feel in any way artistically frustrated and I think that’s wonderful. I don’t feel blocked creatively at all. I think that’s good because I think a lot of people do end up feeling like that.

That really leads me on to my next question because following the release of your 1994 album ‘Take Me to God’ on Island Records, you took a more hands on approach regarding the business side of making music and set up your own label, 30 Hertz Records. Why did you decide to

set up your own label at this point in your career and what have been the advantages and disadvantages of releasing music yourself as opposed to through the labels you were previously involved with?

Well, the thing is with me, I’ve always ... like when I left PiL, because what happened with PiL really made me learn to keep my guard up and so when I left PiL, I did records like the ‘Bedroom Album’ [1983] and what I learned was, oh, fucking hell, I can make these records for this much money and then I can release them.

You’d go to a place called Making Records, I think it was called, at the bottom of Portobello Road, you’d give them your money and your lacquer [acetate disc], that would go off to France and five days later or whatever it was, a van would come back in from France with all your records, off-load them, you’d wait there, a van would then come from Lightning Distribution, you’d sell half of them to them or three-quarters and then you’d take the rest to Caroline Exports up the road,

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which was an exporter .... you don’t have companies like that these days ... and I would then take the rest to the shops round London. So, that would be on a Friday, I think and by six o’clock in the evening, I would have sold all the records and I’d doubled my money and I started really doing well with that.

So, I’ve never really had management and I learned to keep my guard up, basically. I got a manager in who was a rookie manager, very much at that time, he was a guy who’d been in bands but he wasn’t experienced and I got him in simply as a shield between me and the ... you know. My life might have been different if I’d ever met a manager that was really good. Things might have been really different for me, but no regrets. So, when I started 30 Hertz, it wasn’t, oh, well, this is a leap off into the dark as me looking after myself or anything, it wasn’t at all because I had been like that since PiL. I’m very rare.

I’m sixty-one and I’ve only ever had one guy who you could call a manager of any sort and he was a guy I train into that job to start with. You know, so, I deal with managers here and there, but

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I’ve never really had one. I’m very much an independent manager and to be honest, I’ve never really had that many big-time managers beating a path to my door because you are what you are, an independent operator. You know, it is what it is. I know a few good managers and if I wanted to, I could go and get good management, I think, but you give up twenty per cent, you know, of everything, which a good manager will earn. I don’t know, I like being where I am, you know, and you’ve got a mobile phone now and having a mobile phone itself takes care of a lot of the reasons why you needed a manager.

Nowadays of course, due to the state of the music industry, more and more artists are releasing music themselves. What are your thoughts on the music industry of today in comparison to when you took that step towards releasing your own music?

Well, there’s a lot more music now, you know. When I formed 30 Hertz, what

it was a refuge away from corporatism because corporatism was coming in from the eighties and corporatism is a dead-eyed sort of thing, you know. It’s not healthy, you know, we all know it’s not good in any way. It’s one of the things that maybe might change after this coronavirus. I think they’re like big dinosaurs and maybe there will be more local ways of doing things, you know. When I first went to Island, they had just been bought by Polygram and so you had the old Island team of independent people there backed up with budgets, so that was a lovely combination but it never lasts with corporatism. Corporatism tends not to be very compassionate, not very intelligent, to my mind, you know, so I left Island when they start to do all that thing that corporatism does which is just demand more money out of people. They want returns for shareholders, so your next album has to sell 250,000 and my attitude is, ‘Well, I’ll see you later!’ Because, in any case, I was doing requiem masses, I’m doing a record on William Blake, you know, so music was pouring out of me

at the time, so I thought I need to find a vehicle to get the music out, because I’m a great believer in just getting the music out. And that would be my advice to other people, just believe in it, do your best and get it out. Make sure you get it out. Don’t make the mistake of just sitting there. So many people make the mistake of just sitting on their stuff for too long being too precious. You’ve just got to move sometimes while the iron’s hot, you know. You move and you get things done, you know, you need to show some urgency and if you take too long, it won’t work well for you, you know, But, you know, there’s a lot more music and there’s a lot more competition. It must be incredibly hard to get noticed now. I find that and I’ve got a little bit of a name. But, hey, I’ve got this new record out, ‘Ocean Blue Waves’ and this coronavirus has come along and it’s probably not the most ideal time to release a record. We’ve managed to flog a few on the road anyway. It’s great having a touring band. It’s hard work, but, you know, it’s a great band and we’ve sold a few CDs and got the

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Promo for a Japanese dub album, 2009

ball rolling, but in terms of the internet, Bandcamp’s great, you can hustle it, but, you know, I think it’s very hard to make a living out of this business now.

I think if you enjoy it and make a few quid, then great but if it moves on beyond that then hey, you’re doing really, really well. But it’s kind of very, very difficult. It’s never been easy, there’s been times when I couldn’t make a proper living from it.

I found that I had everything coming for me when I came in the business and by the time it got to ‘84, I’m drinking too much to be fair, I’m getting quite self-destructive, but in any case, my style of music wasn’t in vogue at that time. It was all about synth-basses and this, that and the other, so I was out of vogue, so it’s dealing with that and I had to learn a lesson from that. And the lesson I learnt was that you just have to keep going and plough your own furrow and developing yourself as an artist and believing in yourself as an artist. So, the good side is that the means of production is so easy now.

I’ve got an iPad in front of me that I can work on. You can do a lot of stuff

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on iPad. I directly still, very much like the kid I was early on, put stuff up on Bandcamp that I don’t even bother putting out anywhere else, just my own solo stuff, just for fun. You’re not ever going to make huge amounts of money but it’s just for fun and I enjoy it, you know. It’s the proper albums you do that sell the best, whereas if you’re just doing the odd track, people don’t really catch on to it and that’s fine, it doesn’t really bother me. So, I would just say have a good heart, enjoy it. I think I just felt for the last couple of years that events were going to overtake us all anyway and that’s why people have said, ‘You were right, you know!’ I just felt like it was getting to the point where events were going to overtake us all and I think we haven’t seen anything yet. I’ve got a feeling that something else is going to come within the next few weeks or months and it’s just typical, you know, the ship gets torpedoed and people get the life rafts and then sharks come! Karma comes to fruition, you know. So, events have overtaken us all. So, I think, in a way, it’s quite exciting, it’s quite a

Cadiz Music, L/R: Youth, Keith Levene, Richard Dudanski, Jah, Mark Stewart, 2019

With the Philharmonic Orchestra, 2019

leveller. I just think it’s going to level everything, so we’re all in the same boat really, you know. It’s interesting, you know, that we’re seeing all these big pop stars coming out and doing these podcasts and you can see what they’re about, they’re just naturally competitive people who even in a crisis, you can see that they’ve got the drive and the ambition to take advantage and rise to the occasion. Do you know what I mean? And I get that, you know. I don’t have a problem with it, but do you know what I’m saying?

You just think, oh God, these people are showing that they’re survivors, they’re very competitive people really and all that. But anyway, it’s a great leveller because it’s not going to be that easy even for the established people to make money because Bandcamp is good but Spotify doesn’t generate much money. So, it’s a great leveller and my message to people fundamentally is, you know, be happy! And that’s always been the philosophy, be happy! But that’s the million-dollar question: what does happiness mean? And that’s what the whole journey is about for me,

with boozing too much and craving for something that’s not giving you fun anymore, you know, and then turning back to music because music is the real fun. I saw a lovely little tweet from that girl, the character Dobby from Peep Show [Channel 4], that actress [Isy Suttie]. I think she’s from the West Midlands and what a lovely a lovely tweet she did, not in character, you know, about how we all tweet and we’re conditioned to feel that that’s our downtime, you know, but it’s not.

It’s not relaxing tweeting and being on social media, it’s not. It’s stimulating you really in not a great way and she said it’s not like cooking or knitting or whatever and it’s so true! And she says she leaves her phone downstairs and I thought, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s the way to go. I’ve been doing that a bit recently. It takes a lot of time out of your day and you don’t have that thing that when you go for a walk, you walk and you lose yourself in the walk. You never go into that deeper self, you can’t ever go into that broader self, you’ve always got something that irks you, that pisses you off on there and a lot of it is

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banal. It’s interesting, it’s like a J.G. Ballard novel at the moment and a lot of the stuff, I have to say with the old working class people I know, they’re fantastic and their reaction to all this, my old mates, is to get bingo nights going like they were down the pub. It’s quite sweet but you just think, oh for God’s sake, do you know what I mean?

And the whole thing for me is about is finding some deeper piece of silence.

It always has been, it’s a basic spiritual thing and in a way ... I wouldn’t have wished this on this on anyone, obviously, this coronavirus, but in a way, but a way of dealing with this, I think, well, at least the merry-go-round stops now, you know, I don’t have to go on tour or go anywhere. You’re completely open to the situation, do you know what I mean? You aren’t going anywhere and you can sink into that meditative state a bit easier now.

So, maybe some good things will come out of all this, creatively?

Yeah. I think, for me, I always expect the worst. I expect we’re probably at

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the tail end of western civilisation, simply because these civilisations are historically last 250, 300 years and I guess you could kind of look at that from the age of enlightenment really. I guess you could say the age of enlightenment, that classical age, the 1700s, we’re kind of at the tail end of it now really, like it or not and probably what will happen, the barbarians are at the gate, a plague has come, the flood has come and we’ll probably go into a new dark age of sorts, you know. And for the Buddhists and the Hindus, it’s the end of a kelpa for them, so it’s actually the end of thousands of years, you know, so as far as they’re concerned, Buddha was part of this time. So, even for them, this is coming towards the end of a kelpa, so I think everyone is coming towards the end of one thing and going into another kind of thing and think that’s how it is, you know. So, I’m easy with it, just for today, as long as I’ve got some food in my belly and I haven’t got fucking ghastly coronavirus, you know what I mean? You know, all good! I’ll go for my little walk later, I’ll take the dog out

With Brian Eno

and then come back and go for a run, if it’s not an arrestable offence taking two bits of exercise.

You have worked with a plethora of other artists over the years, including, as previously mentioned, members of Can, Julianne Reagan of All About Eve on ‘Psalms’, U2’s The Edge on the 1983 collaborative EP ‘Snake Charmer’, Sinead O’Connor on 1991’s ‘Rising Above Bedlam’, Baaba Maal, Dolores O’Riordan, Primal Scream and Chaka Demus, but possibly most impressively, you produced Brian Eno for the 1995 collaborative album ‘Spinner’. How did working with Eno and the ‘Spinner’ project come about and did you find producing Eno a daunting task?

Well, he approached me, he came to a show and he wanted to talk to me about working with me and it was like, ‘Okay, great!’, you know and when it came down to that album ... who was the director? ‘Jubilee’ [1979]? Derek Jarman! And he [Eno] had done some

stuff with Derek Jarman, just kind of squiggles of music, a little bit like Shostakovich’s six little piano pieces [for Jarman’s 1994 film ‘Glitterbug’] and what it was like was that chef programme where you’ve got a carrot, you’ve got a chicken breast, you’ve got a lemon and some salt and you have to make something [‘Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook’, BBC Television], you know and it was a bit like, oh, fucking hell, why can’t we just make an album together?!

Why does it have to be like this?! Or whatever. He’s a bright guy, he’s not a toff. A lot of the people around the music business are toffs, you know, they’re from very rich families.

Increasingly, actually. A middle-class thing came up in the ‘80s, postThatcher, where the middle classes were on the rise and they all ended up in music, whereas it had all been working class boys and girls up until then. So, suddenly, it became all the middle-class boys and girls who were like DJs and all that, from the suburbs.

You always had toffs in there anyway, they were great at camouflaging themselves and now it really is an

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upper class thing, so when you ask me how do people crack on in music, it’s like, well, you see a lot of these upper class boys and girls crack on in music but they are so well connected and I met a few very early on and they start out leagues ahead of us, you know, they’re just way ahead of us. So, I sometimes see my working class mates who have cracked on comparing themselves to these upper class boys and girls and go, ‘Oh, I never did as good as them’ and I always go, ‘Pppfff, you’ve done so well just to be in the fucking game!’ I mean, but that’s another thing. So, anyway, right, so, he’s not one of them, to be fair. Some of them remind me of Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen! You know, that guy with the long hair on telly, the interior designer thing! I’m enjoying this interview with you! But anyway, Eno, not a bad geezer and whatever, it was okay, give it here and I’ll do my best.

So, we did it and there was not much budget, you know, and it coincided where I had the means of productions at a studio in Bethnal Green, East London. So, we made the record at

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my little spare room studio in Bethnal Green, you know, that’s where we did it because we didn’t have a huge budget and actually, what I realise now, it’s lasted very well, the record and we used a lot of techniques, a lot of overall effects on the stereo mix and stuff that dance producers went on to use. Brian, he sent me a fax, which I didn’t know he also put in a book, it was the year in the life of Brian Eno [‘A Year with Swollen Appendices: The Diary of Brian Eno’, 1996] and he said in this fax, ‘I would like you to treat me more like a moreish maiden’! And at the time I thought, fuck off mate! You know, don’t be fey! You know, if you want me to treat you like anything, be in the studio and I’ll treat you like something, we’ll make something together, but you’re sending me this and I know you’re playing a bit of a game with me, but don’t fuck about!

So, I just sent a thing back because I didn’t have time for it, I was touring at the time, so let’s just do it. And then, ‘Okay, I’ve done it’. And he went, ‘Oh, are you happy with it?’ ‘I’m very happy with it or I wouldn’t have

fucking sent it to you, would I?’ You know, and it was all good. Basically, some people obviously think I’m having a pop at the geezer, but I’m not.

I think the geezer’s a good geezer, he’s produced some great music over the years and hey, everyone works their own way, so they’ve got to present themselves a certain way and if you’re a producer ... it’s like politicians. If you’re in a certain world, you’ve got to act a certain way. But actually, when it comes down to it, he’s a geezer where you can actually look him straight in the eye and be straight and he’ll deal with that. His heart is in the right place as well, to be fair, you know. His brother [Roger Eno, ambient music composer] is a nice guy and I think his brother has had a good influence on him. His brother is into all like [Henryk] Gorecki and all the holy minimalists. They’ve had an album out together [‘Mixing Colours’, 2020] and his brother is a really lovely guy, just a nice fucking guy, very easy to talk to, because we’ve worked together for The Orb album [‘No Sounds are Out of Bounds’, 2018] and he was just a very

nice bloke. But anyway, so that’s all good. And so, we did it [‘Spinner’] and at the time, I was testing the music, doing a test pilot, taking it out, walking up the Lea Valley in East London ... up the Lea Valley into Hertfordshire and you go through Hackney Marshes at the time and some of it was quite urban, semi-industrial settings, you know and I loved those walks up there, it was fantastic and it really worked for me, it was really trippy, you know. And so, I think it’s lasted well and I think people have come to see this is a really good album, it’s a great album, you know. And it has sold. Some records last better than others and that record has really lasted well. Well, the funny thing is, at the time, I would describe the sound quality of computer-based music as a bit 16-bitty, it could be a bit brittle and I was worried about how it would last in the same way that, sonically, a lot of the stuff from the ‘80s has only lasted in a kitsch way. Some of the machines sound very boxy and undynamic. But actually, that album has lasted well. Because I didn’t hear it for ages, then people put stuff up on

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With Bill Laswell

Twitter or whatever and say ‘listen to this’ and you go on and hear it go and go fucking hell, it sounds great, wow!

You know, it’s a really trippy record.

Someone made a great video for one of the tracks [‘Spinner’], it’s in New Mexico, all these weird arches or something and whoever did the video, really got the record, it’s very classy. I think Brian likes it because every few months, he always tweets the record, which is nice. He’s a good guy, his heart’s in the right place.

Has Brian Eno been your favourite person to work with over the years?

No, Bill Laswell has been a really good guy to work with over the years, the New York producer. Very down to Earth, treats the players okay, you know. Bill can be a bit awkward with journalists on occasion and promoters, he takes no prisoners but with the music, he’s always treated me really well and flew me to New York to play on the Ginger Baker album [‘Middle Passage’, 1990] and all that. I was very blessed and I had an absolute buzz.

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Moving on to present day and after completing a sell-out tour of the UK in January, you released the new Jah Wobble and the Invaders of the Heart album ‘Ocean Blue Waves’ on 27th March. Could you introduce us to the current line-up of the band and give us an insight into the writing and recording process of the album?

Yeah, all northerners, ‘Gorgeous’ George King on keys; Marc Layton-Benet out of Huddersfield on drums, Martin ‘Chungy’ Chung on guitar, out of Huddersfield as well.

George is out of Oldham originally.

All northerners, great lads, I’ve been playing with Marc for about eleven years now. This is a tough, tough time for them. They’ve finished the tour with me, it all sold out, our last three dates were cancelled and now all their bookings have gone. So, all their work has gone, they’re just like wiped out.

They’re freelancers and they just lost all their work. It was a great start to the year and then ... We were supposed to play the Albert Hall in May. They’re

good lads anyway. But anyway, most of the albums I’ve done over the last few years have had a back story and there is no back story to this. I wanted to go in with the boys and start recording something, so we recorded some backing tracks. Well, we did an album with Bill Laswell last year [‘Realm of Spells’, 2019] and I took time out in his studio just to do some stuff with the band with a view to this next album and then we finished it off in Manchester. And all it is, it’s where the band’s at the moment, where I’ll come up with some basslines ... it’s still like PiL, where it’s like, you know, here you go lads, here’s the bassline, here’s some changes, but without as much direction, a little bit of direction, do your thing. So, this is where we’re at as a band, playing our stuff. This is us making our music, doing our thing and that’s it, you know. One of the tracks, I had done, I’d kind of written it before the sessions and it’s a very simple kind of A minor descending thing, ‘Take My Hand’, which is a little bit rock anthemic, but I think it sits on there okay. I just wanted that done, it was

driving me mad in my head but everything else is just the band playing very naturally with these fractured, weird time signatures and all that, very typical of what we do and the combination of Chungy and George on ‘Ocean Blue Waves’, the title track with the chordal stuff, I don’t know, it’s pretty kind of jazz-funk and with a tougher kind of edge to it. It’s got that modal kind of time signature as well.

And it’s got me, for my personal thing, playing Fender Precision bass again and it’s making me do those chromatic runs. Yeah, so it’s a bit like this millennium’s ‘Poptones’, you know.

It’s got an open quality to it but there’s a lot of octaves in it and it’s got that chromatic thing in there as well, you know. You can be quite busy and play chromatically on the Fender in a way that you couldn’t do so well on the big [Ovation] Magnum bass that I was using. It’s very much a snapshot of where we’re at. Left to our own devices and that’s what we’ll do, you know. It feels weird because we’ve been flogging it live since January or something, you know what I mean

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and it’s like, oh yeah, it’s not out yet because I feel like it’s been out for ages! So, we’ve been selling it at shows for the last couple of months and discussing it with people, so then you think oh my God, it’s not even out yet!

Have you been pleased with the reaction to the album so far?

Yeah, really and it’s always that thing where you don’t expect a lot, you get a lot back, whereas when you’re hoping for a lot back, you don’t get a lot back.

It was like with the Eno album. Back then, you think, this is fucking brilliant, you know and it did fuck all! Now, it’s funny, you see people talk about it. It takes years for people to catch up. So, the ones you think are brilliant, people are going to love it, there’s not much feedback, whereas when you release stuff sometimes without a care in the world like this one, you get great feedback. It was very much was, ‘Tell you what lads, shall we do another album? We’ll do some recordings ready for the next one to go and then we’ll go and do another one in

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Manchester, just for fun, yeah?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, great, lovely!’

So, everyone was really happy doing that and it was just nice, you know, no stress and that was it really.

Finally, we know this is a bit of a difficult one at the moment but what else can we expect from you in the future?

No, not at all! I’m going to be doing the Chinese record. Yeah, I’m doing a Chinese record with the family. It’s already done, it’s getting mastered next week. It was going to be an attended cut and now I suppose it can’t be an attended cut and I don’t even know if the mastering studio is open. I suppose the mastering studio is open but I’ve got to talk to the bloke. But that’s coming out. It’s lovely, a real labour of love and yeah, we’re just bringing it out, so that’ll come out in the next two or three months or something, yeah. It’s me and my missus, she plays guzheng, so it’s got a really sort of dreamy, meditational, tai-chi sort of vibe and my younger son,

Charlie, he was a professional footballer when he left school, but he chose music ... but anyway, he plays erhu, which is a Chinese violin, so it’s a real family affair. And I’ll get cracking on painting pictures; I’ve sold a few pictures. I have a studio space which has closed down, but I had an email this morning and they were talking and they said, well, actually, people need to go in. Because you think to yourself, a lockdown is a lockdown I guess but if people are going into the studio on their own and socially distancing and cleaning all their surfaces and all that, then maybe it is okay, I don’t know.

It’s in an old mill and you think, well, surely that’s alright. You know, I wouldn’t push for it, but I thought, oh right! I thought they might leave it open, but fair enough. Anyway, I’ll have to get hold of some canvasses and I’ll do a bit of painting. They only trouble is, I make such a fucking mess! Oh, fucking hell, the paint goes everywhere and I think, oh Jesus, you know! Oh, you know, it goes all on the floor and everything! I’m not exactly Jackson Pollock but there’s paint

splattering everywhere, you know! But anyway, I’ve been doing painting. I sold one to Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers. Yeah, he’s a bit of a fan of mine, I’m a bit of a fan of mine, he’s a nice guy, you know and a good player.

So, I started doing painting and it’s the same as doing the music, it makes everything open up. I’m going to be doing that over the next few weeks and I’m going to be on the iPad recording and all that. So yeah, all good!

Thank you for a wonderful interview and we wish you all the best for the future.

jahwobble.com jahwobble.bandcamp.com www.facebook.com/ Jah.Wobble.Music

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Everything to Love About

Counterparts Interview by Peter Dennis.

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Bursting out of Hamilton, Ontario in 2007, Counterparts led the charge of the nascent hardcore revival. Since then they’ve released six LPs, the latest of which, 2019’s ‘Nothing Left To Love’, gatecrashed the Billboard 100.

Carrying on through all sorts of trauma, the band have survived every fickle punch thrown by an uncaring music industry. I recently sat down with vocalist Brendan Murphy for an exclusive chat.

Counterparts hail from Hamilton, Canada. How did that environment shape your sound?

Hamilton is a nice place now, but back in the day when we were growing up it wasn’t the best place to be. If you wanted to do something cool, you had to go to Toronto, and when you’re thirteen, your parents aren’t gonna let you go, so the only things me and my friends had to do was skateboard and play music. So it was either that or get into crime and drugs because there wasn’t a lot else going on. Basically we just connected with people on the internet and that helped shaped us.

You’ve had a revolving line-up over the years. Has that helped or stunted the bands development?

I think that’s what’s made the band stick around for as long as we have.

You don’t want to be on tour with

people who don’t want to be there. The people that come and go, they’re leaving for a reason, apart from one person everybody that’s left has been voluntary, so it just gets to a point where people say ‘I don’t want to do this any more’. Rather than have someone on tour who’s miserable and dragging the band down, they should really leave and let somebody who’s excited and actually wants to be here step up. The setback is minor, having to teach some one a whole batch of songs and try to figure out someone’s vibe, but for the most part it’s been for the better, every single time.

Has it been an option to call it quits when someone’s left?

It went through my head when our original guitar player Jesse, who wrote most of the stuff, quit. My first thought was ‘Oh shit, we gotta break up, there’s no way we’re gonna bounce back’, but in a weird way that made me want to keep going. When people thought we were through, I thought, ‘Now I have to prove all these kids wrong’, so we pushed on and if we can continue after loosing someone as vital as Jesse we can carry on regardless. But our original guitar player Alex is back, so it’s all good now.

I wonder how your songwriting has developed over the years?

For the most part, I think we know what a Counterparts song should be.

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When people return to the band or new people come in, they know what a Counterparts song is. I wouldn’t say it’s easier now, but it’s easier to make decisions. Back in the day, if we were faced with two options it would hard to make a choice, but now we know the way to go.

You’re sound has evolved over the years so how do you walk the line between pleasing yourself as artists and keeping the fans happy?

I think all us in the band have evolved.

It’s not that I don’t like heavy music any more, I rarely listen to any new heavy bands, I’m more into pop stuff, so when we come to write a song I follow my feelings: this should be a big sing-along, we should repeat this part so for the most part it’s easy.

It’s like what I want to hear, the fans want to hear too. I think going back to 2013/2015, those records, then there was a tightrope walk not to screw up but now we know our direction.

You’ve released six albums and a

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handful of EPs in ten years. Do you wish you had spent more time working on each record?

Definitely. Being a band that has nine records sucks! Being the size band we are now it kinda makes sense but I hate having about 100 Counterparts songs out there. It’s hard putting a set list together, then you have to put out new music and going forward I think instead of releasing an album every two years, make it three. I think more EPs instead of full lengths because it’s too much.

Somebody checking out Counterparts for the first time and they go to our Spotify, they’ll be like ‘This is too much! I’ll just go listen to something else’.

How do you look back on your work once it’s been released?

We do that all the time. When I look back on ‘Prophets’ [2010] or ‘Nothing Left to Love’, there’s always going to be things you’d want to change, knowing what you know now, but that’s the thing, you didn’t know

everything then, hindsight is a 20/20 thing. I look at every album we’ve done since ‘The Difference Between Hell and Home’ [2013] as a time frame in my life. I look back at things I’ve said but at the time all you can write about is what you know at that exact moment and that’s what make Counterparts.

You’ve been very open about your struggles with depression. Is music a kind of therapy for you?

100%, definitely. Counterparts is my outlet to make myself feel better and if I didn’t have this then I don’t know what I’d be doing and that thought is so crazy to me. Right now, if something bad happens, I write about it and that becomes a Counterparts song.

But what’s it like reliving those dark moments through your lyrics on stage every night?

It’s not as bad as you’d think. People often ask me, ‘Every night you sing ‘I hate the world, I hate myself’ and ‘Put a bullet in my head’. Doesn’t that bum you out?’ Well, no, because at the time when I wrote it I really meant it and I have a way of disassociating between how I feel now and how I felt then.

Most normal people would think, ‘That sucks to say that every night’, but when I wrote it I was in a dark place, but I got it off my chest, so in a way it makes me happy that I’m in a happier place.

punishing touring and recording cycles?

I don’t know, my legs are shot, these last couple of days I’ve been physically exhausted. It’s bad but I’m going to do it for as long as I physically can whether it’s another year or another ten I don’t know but I’ll burn myself out with the band because it’s all I’ve got.

There’s currently a resurgence of heavy hardcore bands singing deep and heavy lyrics. Do you think this is systematic of modern times? A case of art imitating life?

I do, for sure. Personal lyrics have always been a thing but I think the one thing we have going for us now is that younger and younger kids are realising ‘I can talk about this, I can start a band and maybe go on tour’. nothingleft2love.ca www.facebook.com/ counterpartsband

For how long can you keep up your

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Frenchy’s Rants This Month: And Then, He Took His Test ... Life Choices The fifteenth part in an exclusive series by Flicknife Records co-founder Marco ‘Frenchy’ Gloder.

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I was all set up to write a piece about what some people would call a lifestyle choice although in my case, it was more of a chance meeting that took me down that road. I can’t say what it is because I have been told not to write this rant until I and certain people could talk face to face, which is fair enough considering the topic: it’s not the kind of lifestyle choice you wanna fuck with. So, here is the replacement bus ... and one that will split people right down the middle.

Now, I have nothing against cyclists per se, because some of them are good people and they cycle about in their civvies, going from A to B, doing their thing. That’s OK. What I hate is the spandex brigade who think they are on a stage of the Tour De France, who undertake you despite the fact you’ve been indicated a left turn for 250 yards and are all surprised they get knocked off their precious Trek Madone bikes with brand new Campagnolo gears.

“WTF?!”, they come out screaming, “are you a moron? Didn’t you see me?”

Well, no, as it happens, you came out of nowhere, undertaking me (which is against the law) and ignored my indicator: you got what you deserved!

And that sets them off even more. The driver, who has passed a driving test, pays a road tax and pays insurance, becomes the devil incarnate. Insults flow from someone who uses the roads without having to pass a test, pays no road tax or insurance. And to add injury

to insults, the old bill usually side with them: “You ought to be a bit more careful, sir”. I was frigging careful, I indicated, I was as left as I could get, I committed no offence while that spandex monkey undertook me, disregarding my indicator. It’ s so aggravating because people who use bicycles every day are usually pretty clued up and they know where they can get hurt so they are careful. No, it’s the Eddie Merckxes in waiting that are dangerous, pouncing about on their bikes, wearing Team Ineos shirts… why don’t you go into your garage and do that thing … whatsname …

PELOTON!! That’s it, stay indoors and pretend to be Mark Cavendish on Peloton. With a bit of luck, they might never come out again.

Since the lockdown started, have you noticed how many cyclist wannabes there are about? They are everywhere, usually 100 to 200 yards apart, in twos so you can’t overtake. I reckon that anyone using the Queen’s public highways and byways should be made to pass a test to see if they know the highway code and can ride their bicyclettes properly, pay a road tax and be insured like a car driver. Let’s do that and see how many actually get their cycling test. Coz if you’re a biker, like meself, you have to do all that, you have to have a valid licence, road tax and insurance. You’d see a lot less of the pests if that was the case. Why should they get to use the roads for free? Without a licence? Let’ s talk

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numbers because numbers don’t lie (only the way you interpret them!): in 2018, overall, ninety-nine cyclists were killed, 4,106 seriously injured and 13,345 slightly injured in Great Britain.

That’s a lot and mostly, it’s their fault or so the stats say. Look at this one: In 2018, per one billion miles covered, two car drivers died but 29 cyclists lost their life. That can’t be a coincidence.

This means that the more miles cyclists cover, the more likely they are to die which is understandable but 15 times more likely than a car driver?! That’s huge. Now, if cyclists had to take some form of test, I bet you my bottom dollar that these figures would go down.

Some cyclists seem completely unaware of other road users, they look like they own the roads. It’s baffling because if you look at motorcyclists (not the moped delivery boys because they haven’t got licences either, but proper bikers), they don’t get in those situations with cars. They know the

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rules, the highway code and it shows, Most bikers who die on the roads have been sidewiped by a car or collided head-on with an overtaking vehicle: not their fault except for the small percentage who went too fast and couldn’t handle it: know your limits.

Despite all that, I don’t hate cyclists. I know plenty of decent people who use bicycles. I just think it would be only fair and right for cyclists to take a test, pay road tax and be insured like all other road users. It looks like a fair deal to me and it would be to their advantage: They would be protected and mostly, other road users would be protected from them. Because I don’t know about you but when I see one near me, I get nervous ... www.flickniferecords.co.uk Page 82: Frenchy on his motorbike, Bonnie.

Oasis Please Stop!

By Paul Foden.

So, a new (old) single by Oasis has been unleashed upon us. Allegedly, ‘Don’t Stop’, released on 30th April through the newly formed Oasis Music label, was recently found in Noel’s Lockdown Attic and, even though my first question has to be “WHY!!??”, I’m not prepared to try and speculate on reason for its release further than: Pride in his work, perhaps? The arrogance of trying to remain relevant? The warm glow and comfort of nostalgia (which isn’t like it used to be)? Oasis reforming? Who knows? Who cares?

the correct phrase: “I thought I’d finally look and find out what was actually on the hundreds of faceless unmarked CDs I’ve got lying around at home.

As fate would have it, I have stumbled across an old demo which I thought had been lost for ever.” Handy, that, eh? “I know some of you love this tune, so we thought we’d put it ‘out there’ for you to enjoy / argue over”, he added. How kind.

The music is very reminiscent of both America’s ‘Horse With No Name’ (‘America’, 1971) and an acoustic Neil Young. Noel’s vocals are similar to America. However, lyrically, it is very Paul Weller, circa ‘Wild Wood’ (1994).

It is very undemanding and easy on the ears and it’s all been done before (by him and them), so it doesn’t exactly grab you. www.facebook.com/ OasisOfficial Below: Oasis in 2005.

This is the 2005 demo of the song that Noel says he recently found during a Lockdown investigation of stuff he just happened to have lying around, if that’s

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Sparks

Tapped Genius

Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews ‘A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip’.

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The opening track of Sparks’ twenty-fourth album ‘A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip’, ‘All That’ finds Sparks in an uncharacteristically sentimental mood for one of the most beautiful five minutes of music that you hear all year. It is the same sort of odd, ethereal and incredibly moving beauty, both musically and lyrically, that The Flaming Lips managed to achieve with ‘Do You Realize???’ (‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’, 2002). But let’s not make comparisons, because, frankly, who else could you say actually sounds like Sparks? Over the last half a century, brothers Ron and Russell Mael have released a body of work exploring every nook and cranny of the musical landscape and of their own utterly unique imaginations, defying any sort of genre categorization. A Sparks album will generally offer a myriad of influences in its own right, although it is true to say that, despite being at various times loosely associated with glam, art rock, new wave, disco, pop, synth-pop (the list goes on), they are only ever really influenced by themselves and their own bizarre, mysterious world.

Even on ‘All That’ alone, Ron and Russell manage to conjure up images of smoky old jazz bars during its introduction, whilst the main body of the song features acoustic guitars, some ecstatic hand-clapping, huge sounding keyboards, a short burst of

virtuoso electric slide guitar, Russell’s famous falsetto vocals and various little interjecting orchestral passages, making for a fascinating and otherworldly piece of music that is the aural equivalent of an Escher painting. And then there are the heart-melting lyrics (“All the smiles and all the frowns, And all the ups and all the downs, And all the fears that would soon be gone, You ignore my gaping flaws, And I see you and I’m in awe, And look outside, it’s very nearly dawn, I can’t believe my luck in meeting you, Hey, help me out, I can’t find my left shoe”), which make for a song that is every bit as moving as the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ (‘Pet Sounds’, 1966) and should be held in the same esteem. Yes, this song really is, ahem, all that!

If you manage to resist repeatedly pressing repeat to just hear the first track one more time, you will find the highly theatrical heavy glam-rock guitar driven ‘I’m Toast’, which simultaneously manages to hark back to the sound of the duo’s breakthrough album ‘Kimono My House’ (1974) (there is certainly a hint of ‘Amateur Hour’ in there in particular) and, lyrically, offer a brilliantly written critique of the modern age, imbued with all the wit that we have come to expect of Sparks (“Alexa, get me out of here”). ‘Lawnmower’, which now comes complete with a laugh out loud funny video that the duo made in quarantine, is similarly entertaining. A infectiously melodic song that at first

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sounds silly in a manner akin to The Wurzels’ ‘Combine Harvester’ (‘The Combine Harvester’, 1976), ‘Lawnmower’ lyrically actually reveals itself to be a very clever piece of writing about life in suburbia and keeping up with the Jones’s (“You’re pushing on your lawnmower, Your lawn will be a showstopper ...”), whilst musically, you are likely to still have that multi-layered “La-la-la” refrain stuck in your head for all eternity.

Just when you think Sparks can’t possibly manage to get any more addictive comes the dizzyingly hi-energy euro-pop styled ‘Sainthood is Not in Your Future’ before the pace is taken down for ‘Pacific Standard Time’, a ballad which features an truly outstanding operatic vocal performance from Russell and piano and synth-derived strings sounds by Ron that are reminiscent of their work created with Giorgio Moroder on the 1979 album ‘No.1 in Heaven’ (1979).

There are so many incredible moments on this album that it is far too difficult to pick a standout track. However, following track, the intentionally pompous and overblown orchestral monolith ‘Stravinsky’s Only Hit’ is one of the most glorious pieces of production work you will hear this year in itself, whilst the Latino-flavoured ‘Left Out in the Cold’ isn’t far behind.

If you have bought the fantastically colourful and highly recommended vinyl version of ‘A Steady Drip, Drip,

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Drip’, you will have now reached the album’s second side, which opens with the lead single ‘Self-Effacing’.

Wonderfully poetic, fast-paced and almost as instantly loveable as the song that brought them to widespread attention, 1974’s ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us’ (‘Kimono My House’), this bombastic ode to being modest (who else would have thought of that?!) is a sure-fire Sparks classic in the making. Perfectly crafted pop songs like ‘Self-Effacing’ and the following ‘One of the Ages’ with its suspense-filled verses and simple and dramatic catchy five word chorus are testament to Sparks’ influence on the pop music that followed in the wake of them coming to widespread public attention in the early ‘70s, not least on synth-led duos who came to prominence in the decade that followed, such as the Pet Shop Boys and Erasure.

The short and sweet, oompah-rhythmed ‘Onomata Pia’ which finds the Mael brothers creating a fully-rounded character out of a phonetic imitation is testament to the sheer brilliance of the wordplay on this album, whilst eleven tracks into this incredible piece of work, the similarly upbeat ‘iPhone’ keeps the more than manages to keep the momentum going with a plea to technology-addicted: “Put your fucking iPhone down and listen to me!”

Meanwhile, the jazzy, paranoia-soaked ‘The Existential Threat’ (imagine John Williams’ ‘Cantina Band’ from ‘Star

Wars’ (1977) with an utter lunatic in the middle of a fear-induced night-sweat singing over it) is a joy to behold, before the tempo is lowered a touch for penultimate track ‘Nothing Travels Faster Than the Speed of Light’, which calls into question the fundamental laws of the universe amidst an awe-inspiring electronically-simulated falling, rising and crashing orchestral soundscape. It is then left the plea to just be nice to each other in these uncertain times, ‘Please Don’t Fuck Up My World’, complete with a full choir (actually built by multi-tracking Russell’s falsetto many times) singing

“Please don’t fuck up our world, So much now needs addressing, Please don’t fuck up our world, So much now is depressing” to close the proceedings on an album that, a full forty-nine years after they released their debut album ‘Halfnelson’ (aka ‘Sparks’), isn’t just one of the best Sparks albums, but the very best and one that anybody will be hard-pressed to better this year. allsparks.com www.facebook.com/ sparksofficial

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Stardust Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide Review by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

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Back in 1998, David Bowie was creatively somewhere between exploring British jungle and drum ‘n’ bass for his 1997 album ‘Earthling’ and taking a much simpler, more reflective approach for what would become his next album, 1999’s ‘Hours’ when he was alerted to a new film that was in the works entitled ‘Velvet Goldmine’.

Bowie took an instant dislike to the proposed premise of Todd Haynes’ musical drama, feeling that its premise bore far too many similarities to his own life and threatened to sue, resulting in vast swathes of the film being rewritten.

He also vetoed the use of the song ‘Velvet Goldmine’, an outtake from the recording sessions from his landmark 1972 album ‘Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’ and five other songs for the soundtrack. The resulting film was still rather cheekily adapted from events in Bowie’s life, but just about fictionalized as to not ensue The Dame’s wrath. Now, in a world without his presence and in the wake of a series of successful box-office record-breaking music biopics, namely ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (2018) and ‘Rocketman’ (2019), comes the one many have dreaded, the Bowie biopic, ‘Stardust’. And with its arrival, we learn how clever Haynes was to pull the ‘Velvet Goldmine’ project out of the wreckage, because after Bowie’s son Duncan Jones refused permission to

use any of his father’s songs in the film, instead of taking a new tact like ‘Velvet Goldmine’, the making of ‘Stardust’ carried on regardless to become a Bowie biopic with, you guessed it, no Bowie songs. At this point, we would forgive you for stopping reading this review.

Upon being approached to play Bowie in the film and being presented with the original script, which rather ambitiously attempted to track the legendary singer-songwriter’s whole career from start to finish, Johnny Flynn (most recently seen in Autumn de Wilde’s new adaptation of ‘Emma’ released in February) initially wanted nothing to do with it, considering it to be dangerous territory and fearing that the result could be patronising to Bowie’s legacy. Recently acquired director Gabriel Range (best known for the 2006 fictional political documentary ‘Death of a President’ and the 2010 television film ‘I Am Slave’) agreed and helped to rewrite the script with Christopher Bell and the eventual result is a film that covers just one moment in Bowie’s life, specifically January / February 1971, when he toured America for the first time being interviewed by radio stations and the media before returning to Britain with the framework firmly in place for what would become his most celebrated persona and one of the most influential cultural icons of the twentieth century, Ziggy Stardust.

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David Bowie and Ron Oberman at Dulles International Airport, Virginia, 1971

It is difficult not to feel sorry for Flynn, who, complete with long blonde locks and the hippy get up that typified the 24 year old Bowie’s image, seems to simply be trying his best in order to get paid, go home and probably pray that this career blip goes unnoticed. The lack of original Bowie songs is exacerbated rather than covered up by Flynn performing a few covers of songs that he used to play back in the day, including Jacques Brel’s ‘My Death’ (performed on the Ziggy Stardust tour) and The Yardbirds’ ‘I Wish You Would’ (featured on the 1973 stop-gap homage to the swingin’ sixties, ‘Pin-Ups’, released three months after Ziggy had broken up the band at Hammersmith Odeon on 3rd July).

An actor who must similarly be despairing as ‘Stardust’ is unleashed on merciless film critics and Bowie fans the world over is Marc Maron, last seen in the role of Gene Ufland in a much better film (Eighth Day Magazine’s 2019 Film of the Year, no less), ‘Joker’.

Here, Maron plays Bowie’s struggling publicist Ron Oberman, who has

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David Bowie entertaining in the US, 1971

been tasked with the difficult job of helping the equally struggling soon to be superstar to navigate a world that is not yet ready for him. On the trip across America, Bowie exploits his androgynous image, even wearing the pre-Raphaelite dress he wore on the cover of 1970’s ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ during interviews and meets several key figures who would go on to influence the Ziggy character along the way, including Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. The film also touches on the relationship between Bowie and his beloved older half brother, Terry Burns, who spent most of his life in out of mental institutions before his suicide in 1986 and is here portrayed by Derek Moran. Terry was the inspiration behind several songs from the period that ‘Stardust’ was set in, notably ‘The Bewlay Brothers’, the closing track of ‘Hunky Dory’, the album that Bowie would go on the record between June and August of 1971 and release that December, just six months before ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’. It is difficult to pay any attention to the quality of the

performances given by the undoubtedly very talented cast due to the fact they are consumed by the utterly pointless exercise in filmmaking that surrounds them. However, amidst all this horror, Jena Malone (best known for playing Johana Mason in ‘The Hunger Games’ trilogy between 2013 and 2015) does play a very convincing Angie Bowie.

That though, I am afraid, is about the nicest thing we can say about ‘Stardust’. We went into this retelling of events that any true music fan, not least a Bowie fan, will know all about anyway with expectations lower than the fieriest level of hell ... and they were met ... and then some. Even its title sounds cheap, vague, uninviting and, particularly in light of its subject having been one of the most

revolutionary musicians of all time, completely uninspired. Watching ‘Stardust’ is akin to watching one of those cheaply made music documentaries about your favourite band or artist on YouTube that have no participation from the artists themselves or anybody in any way associated with them and always begin with the disclaimer “This biography contains no original music by the artist”, BUT with some of those acting types reconstructing the events in a Crimewatch sort of style. ‘Velvet Goldmine’ may have had its fair share of detractors but at least it had the good grace to change the names to protect the innocent and having just endured ‘Stardust’, we would suggest it is well overdue a reappraisal.

Johhny Flynn as Bowie and Marc Maron as Ron Oberman in ‘Stardust’

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Rock For Ray

Nowhere Inn, Gilwell St, Plymouth, 14/03/20 Review and photography by Paul Foden.

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Introduction The festival was held on Saturday 14th March in memory of Ray Tuohy, a Nowhere stalwart, live music lover and all-round wonderful bloke, in aid of Cancer Research, with all bands playing for free. It was the last gig that I attended before the dreaded lockdown commenced and it was a belter!

The Gig I couldn’t arrive until about six o’clock, alas, so I missed Modern Life and Lack of Discipline, which was a bit of a pisser. However, Butt Plug Babies had just kicked off as I got my arse to the bar.

You might remember my write-up on the Buttplugs’ ‘Going in Dry’ album launch gig and interview back in Issue Eleven (August 2019), which took place at the very same venue.

Happily, the line-up of Fatlip Jordan on Vocals, Morv on shit-hot guitar, Billi on bass and her dad, Muddy on drums, remains the same.

For this gig, they again began with album opener ‘Cont(servative)’.

However, they added a few new ones into the set, which were received with enthusiasm from the gathered crowd / rabble.

The Mighty Raffle followed and just about everybody with a pulse won a

prize, ranging from merch, goggles and CDs to DVDs and a didgeridoo! I chose two CDs for my prizes, ‘Imitations’ by Mark Lanegan and ‘A Bit Strange (But I Think We Got Away With It)’ by Secrets and Lies. Nice.

Following the raffle mêlée, the aforementioned Secrets and Lies put on probably the best performance that I have seen from them; even better than last year’s Plymouth Punx Picnic. Ed Thresher, their frontman has settled in good and proper and they have, in Davey Symons, probably one of the best bassists on the Devon and Cornwall punk circuit I have had the pleasure to witness play. This was agreed as much by Dië Spanglë bassist, Paul Pond. The band is completed by Rob Northcott on guitar and sax, Adam Ren on guitar and drummer Andy Copelin.

Denada 3, comprising event organiser Dave Jones (drums), Dan (guitar and vocals), who supplied the amps and PA and associated leads, mic stands, etc and bassist Chris Mildren, are always worth catching, with their short blasts of raw punk. A couple of their songs were instrumentals, giving Dan the opportunity to just get on with it and play the F out of his guitar. They still had five minutes left of their set, so promptly played four more songs, plus applause, indicating how short some of their songs are.

Hailing from deepest, darkest

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Cornwall, Dië Spanglë are possibly / probably / definitely one of the best punk, etc bands of The Peninsula and, if you should find yourself down ‘eeeere, you must go and see one of their gigs. Vocalist Jim really is a rabble-rouser, plonking himself among the merry throng. James (guitar and backing vocals), Paul (bass) and Jimmy on drums complete the line-up and it’s fantastic to see / hear a good drummer that can keep time (No offence; none taken, I’m sure!).

Formed in the mid-’90s, headliners Bus Station Loonies have been at the forefront of the Plymouth and Peninsula punk movement / scene for much of the past twenty-five years and are always well worth catching. With Chris “Wheelie” Willsher on vocals, guitarist Chris Mildren (from Denada 3), bassist Adam Ren and drummer Tony “Popkids” Hopkins on drums, their sound is still kind of raw, yet polished, too. Their set was excellent, capping off a great evening of punk rock, enjoyed by appreciative crowd.

So, yeah, a great day and night was had by all. Good effort everyone.

Post-Script Special thanks again to Simon Barrett, the licensee of the Nowhere, for being great and continuing with live music.

You’re ace, mate. The event raised a total of £400-ish for Cancer Research UK, which is nice and it is hoped that Rock for Ray will be an annual event.

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Things might seem a bit bleak right now but many weeks into the frustrating coronavirus lockdown malarkey, I’m hopeful that pubs and live music will make a massive come back once the ban is finally lifted and the levee breaks. But until then, stay safe and stay home. www.facebook.com/ nowhereinnplymouth Photography: Page : Dië Spanglë; Below, top: Secrets and Lies; Middle: Denada 3; Bottom: Bus Station Loonies.

Drum & Bass: The Movement A Way of Life

Review by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

In 1996, Sheffield based Drum&BassArena was launched, quickly establishing itself as the essential portal for all things related to the drum and bass and jungle movement. Having began with a breakbeat-orientated website, the company has since grown into a worldwide brand encompassing TV-advertised official compilations, tours, merchandise, mobile services, digital distribution and much more.

Now, twenty-four years into their existence, they have now decided to compile their rich history and boundless passion and enthusiasm for the genre into a brand new documentary entitled ‘Drum & Bass: The Movement’. It was made available on streaming sites across the internet on the 25th May.

Directed by Bailey Hyatt, produced by Craig Haynes and written by Dave Jenkins, this lovingly crafted eighty-minute long documentary has been a full five years in the making and explores the evolution of drum and bass from its very beginnings right through to the present day and features many contributions from legendary artists who made it such an enduring phenomenon.

Some of the many highlights of this definitive expose on the genre include Goldie reminiscing about the release of his critically acclaimed 1995 album ‘Timeless’ (“Putting it into the form of an album and ‘Timeless’ being timeless was really just a big middle finger to people who never wanted to believe in the music. Why can’t we make a track that’s twenty-one minutes long, who gives a fuck? I’m going to make you fucking listen!”) and DJ Hype recalling his surprise at Liam Howlett of The Prodigy being so taken by his DJ sets (“I thought they meant it like ‘Alright mate, wanker!’”) and repeatedly talking about his influence on the group to the music press during the mid to late ‘90s.

Simply breathtaking in every way, ‘Drum & Bass: The Movement’ is essential viewing not only for the genre’s disciples, for which it has become more a way of life, but for anybody with even just a fleeting interest in the history of music. breakbeat.co.uk

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before this issue was released, we rang him for a chat about how he and the shop have been coping and his plans for reopening on 15th June.

Action Records

Back in Action!

Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

It goes without saying that the pandemic has been a difficult time for the music industry, not least bands itching to get back out on the road and music venues haemorrhaging money whilst awaiting to host them again, but also spare a thought for the record stores and, in particular, the independents. One such independent record store is Action Records in Preston, a pillar of the city’s music scene which has been run by Gordon Gibson (pictured above (left) with Pete Brown, aka Stomper of local band Evil Blizzard and the most recent addition to fellow Prestonians, Ginnel) for the last forty-one years. In the week

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Since the beginning of the lockdown, Gordon has been continuing to run Action Records online. “We’ve kept everybody on”, he tells us, “We just couldn’t let anybody in! We’ve got our regular people who are buying stuff, so, you know, and we’ve tried delivering some bits locally, that we could. We’re still doing that, you know, but all you can do is the mail order, you’re kind of just working away but there’s no crack, no going out at nights. You need the whole interaction with the scene and we don’t want to lose it; that’s what I’m more worried about.”

Attention then turns to the music venues of Preston, such as local meeting place, The Ferret, which faces an uncertain future having run into financial difficulties. “I know there’s been doing a funding campaign and that, so hopefully all these people will reopen after it’s all over, because you need that”, he continues, “It’s a bit boring everybody saying, ‘Oh, life is never going to be the same again’ and all that, but why not?! Let’s just get over it and get back into it! Being negative’s a real downer, you know.

I’m really hoping too ... You know, people forget the shopping experience too and going out, going for a drink, going for a coffee, going into shops.

Just sitting banging online, after a

while, it’s like, ‘Oh, right, yeah ...! Oh yeah, but there’s so much negative stuff around.”

A rep calls him on the landline. “Hold on a second, Alice ...” A minute or so passes before he picks the conversation back up, saying, “That’s another rep.

See, that’s the problem, everybody’s working from home, so that’s an awful lot of phone calls. We’re dealing with an awful lot of people, but everybody’s at home and then if you talk to anybody who you haven’t spoken to, say a punter, they keep you talking for half an hour because a lot of people aren’t seeing anybody! People love talking away to you! But anyway ... I really can’t see much for this year ...

We’ve got three gigs outstanding at the Blitz [Preston music venue], so that’s a real downer for us, but, I don’t know, I think it’ll be next year before they get rescheduled, I really do.”

I ask Gordon what plans he has for reopening, to which he replies, “Well, basically, so, we’re going to reopen on the 15th. I mean, all we can do is santise everything, have a machine at the front with boxes of disposable gloves that we want people to really put on and try spacing out in the shop, maybe walking around it one way or something. I mean, the shop’s not too bad, I think we can easily get four at a time in it, you know. You could get even get six in it, you know, there’s quite a lot of room. But yeah, I think it’ll be alright and people know to

space out now, don’t they? So, that’s basically all we can do really. I don’t see the point in putting masks out.

If people are going to wear masks, then they’re better off wearing their own, but the gloves we’re supplying, because we’d rather people wear them when they’re in the shop. But apart from that, there’s not a lot else we can do, you’re just relying on people being sensible, really, aren’t you?”

I end the conversation by asking him if he is pleased to be getting back open.

“We’ll definitely be open on the 15th”, he says, “See, that’s when Boris said the shops are reopening and they can’t be quarantining people forever, they’ll be expecting people to go back to work and that. I know a lot of shops are saying about not reopening yet, but we’re going to open.” www.actionrecords.co.uk www.facebook.com/ ActionRecordsUK Below: Action Records, Church Street.

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Virus Villain!

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