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Moongoose’s Yorkie Interviewed: “Soundtrack music for the imagination.

There are some words you never expect to have to type out next to each other. ‘Electro mariachi music’ are three such words, but then along came Tokyo Glow, the latest album from Moongoose.

Moongoose are David ‘Yorkie’ Palmer, ex-bassist from Space and all round local legend, along with guitars from Paul Cavanagh and video treatments from Mark Jordan.  (Incidentally, can I say how much I love seeing a video person listed as a band member.  It shows a post punk sensibility and takes me back to the heady days of early gigs from the like of Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League.)

Yorkie’s place in legend first came thanks to his involvement in the punk and post punk scenes in Liverpool. Tales of the likes of Echo and the Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes rehearsing in his mum’s basement are part of the unique folklore that accompanies the city coming back to life and stepping out of the Merseybeat shadow.

Moongoose have had an enigmatic path so far.  EPs were slowly leaked out, there was a gig in a cinema, the occasional burst of activity on social media, and two under the radar albums.  But nothing that prepared us for Tokyo Glow.

Tokyo Glow took me completely by surprise.  The Moongoose tracks I had heard before this have been very good indeed, but when taken together in one hit like this, the effect is to be unexpectedly plunged into another world.

All 10 tracks on Tokyo Glow are instrumentals.  But really they are much more than this; they are soundtracks.  Listening to this album is like watching a film in your own imagination; by the end you feel like you have watched a Blade Runner style spaghetti western from beginning to end.

The songs that make up Tokyo Glow are expansive in both scale and ambition.  Opener Bullet introduces us to the aforementioned electro mariachi, which is catchy as hell and an irresistible call to move.  Imagine this playing over an epic Tarantino film trailer.

The Clash play Liverpool Eric’s: “That day everything changed… nothing in Liverpool was ever the same again”

But one of the albums strengths is that no two tracks sound the same, yet they all sound like Moongoose.

Track 2, Tokyo Aflame, is another upbeat track, rich in atmosphere and texture.  A soundtrack to a Bond film, should they ever get around to making a good one again.

A Floating World calms things down and would not sound out of place playing at the Café Del Mar, soundtracking an Ibizan sunset.

This is carried over into Sleep to Disappear and actually, most of the album.  By this point, it is easy to forget that we are listening to just one band and not a mix CD that has been expertly put together to take the listeners on a journey.  The range of feelings, moods and sounds is astonishing.

To listen to Tokyo Glow on headphones is to be carried away on a near psychedelic journey, blissed out and happy.

By the time the title track closes the album, we have come a long way together, Moongoose and I. It has been a journey of spiritual peaks, my own visuals and Moongoose’s extraordinary vision.

It is a journey I will be repeating many time over the coming months and years.  This is an album that will stay with me, we will become firm and lifelong friends.

Undoubtedly one of last year’s finest albums, Tokyo Glow is just superb.

The question is, how could Moongoose follow this up?

During the lockdown, a lot of bands have found difficulty in doing what they need to do, whereas Yorkie has responded to this new world by doing what he does best – being creative.

The band have released two EPs, Yellow and Black, both on German Shepherd Records, which can be found by clicking the links. Further Moongoose works can also be found on Bandcamp here.

The Black EP is full of John Barry flourishes and, for those of us of a certain age, slightly hints at theme tunes to The Persuaders and the like. The tracks are variations on a theme and are best listened to as a single piece of music that kaleidoscopes its way into your brain.

Yellow is again rich with imagery, with the mind filling in visuals to go along with the cinematic feel of the music.

Sun 13 spoke to Moongoose mainstay David ‘Yorkie’ Palmer to see how things are in Moongoose world.

Hi Yorkie. How are you?

“I’m very well thank you. Just working on a couple of anniversary releases:

A Moongoose box set and a re-release of my solo album ‘Pitch A Ladder To The Moon’ and all of its related b’sides and Ep’s.”

How have you been getting on with the lockdown?

“It’s been a very unusual few months.

When lockdown was first put in place, my first priority was to give my three boys their own rooms, so I relocated my House Of Light studio downstairs in the house.

This proved to be a godsend as everyone has been getting along with each other, without any arguments.

The new studio location is much better as well. Much more room and natural light.“

How would you describe Moongoose?

“Soundtrack music for the imagination.”

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How do you go about writing your songs?

“I don’t stick to one formula, I like to approach each project differently so as to (hopefully) keep each release fresh.

The albums Organic Technology, Missives From The Memory Machine and Tokyo Glow make up a sort of sci-fi trilogy about how technology has infiltrated into our daily lives. There are good points and bad.

I love comparing the reality of today with the old utopian/dystopian sci-fi movies I grew up with, such as ‘Rollerball’, ‘Soylent Green’, ‘Planet Of The Apes’, ‘Logans Run’, etc.

One thing I find really inspirational is titles, I love making up titles as a starting point/jumping off point for the listener.

I used to be a singer, and of course a lyricist, but because Moongoose is an instrumental band titles are my only outlet in that area…so I make the most of them.”

Do you bring your post punk past with you into Moongoose?

“My PUNK past has informed everything I have ever done. If you lived through Punk, I don’t think it ever leaves you.”

Your songs sound like soundtracks, is this something you have in mind when you all get together?

“When I first started Moongoose that was the main intention: to do instrumental music, music that was designed or intended to be instrumental, as opposed to those tracks labelled instrumental because the singer couldn’t get his shit together.

All the band members have a love of soundtrack and instrumental music. As a kid I always bought soundtrack albums, sometimes for films I was too young to see, or were no longer being shown in cinemas (for example the early James Bond films with their magnificent John Barry scores).

My brother thought I was a right weirdo. I remember him walking in the room while I was listening to Jerry Goldsmith’s wonderful score for Logan’sRun with the lights out. The look of scorn on his face was priceless.”

How has the lockdown affected the way you work?

“Well, after the release of ‘Tokyo Glow’ I wasn’t intending to do anything new with Moongoose till next year. However, while relocating my studio downstairs and sorting the boys rooms, I was listening to a lot of old Film Noir and Giallo soundtracks as well as watching films from both genres.

As the studio move was completed, I wanted to try out the new room and found myself wanting to do something to reflect my love of both these sometime neglected or forgotten genres.

I had touched upon Noir with my previous band The Balcony and with Space introduced some elements of Giallo. The only problem during lockdown was that I couldn’t get the usual band members around to contribute their usual essential talents.

I could send Mark Jordan tracks for him to do videos for, but the others were unavailable, so I asked my son Jack if he would be interested in helping out.

He brought a fresh perspective and outlook to the Yellow and Black Ep’s and contributed guitar, bass and keyboards across the tracks.

The fact that he wasn’t aware of either of the genres (well, he loves Dario Argento’s Suspiria) meant that what he contributed was based purely on the titles for the tracks and what he felt the atmosphere dictated.

Bob Osborne has been a great supporter over the years, so German Shepherd Records were the obvious choice to release the last two Ep’s.

Just wanted them released as soon as possible and he made it possible. We were still recording and mixing while he was arranging the releases.”

How is it making music with your family?

“It’s always a joy. I recorded a song about 13 years ago called Alone. It uses the Edgar Allan Poe poem of the same name as it text. It was suggested to me by an old friend many years ago, but I hadn’t gotten round to it.

I recorded it with my good friend and Windmill compadre Mick Dolan and we got my 5 year old son Matthew to add vocals.

It is now included in the forthcoming film about Derek Jarman by Mark Jordan.

For both Windmill albums (‘Wanderlust’ and ‘A Different Door’) both Jack and my youngest son Ben sang backing vocals.

They both played keyboards on the  b’side to the Moongoose single ‘Headache’: ‘20th Century Spirals’.“

What have you been listening to lately?

“I’ve been listening loads to This Heat, Faust, African Head Charge, Andrzej Korzynski, The Ghost Box label, Swans, Midsommar (soundtrack), A Year In The Country, The Room In The Wood.

As well as this, I’m compiling the Yorkie album and the Moongoose box set.”

In amongst all the stress and disruption that has come about as a result of the pandemic and the lockdown, it is easy to feel that the world has ground to a halt, that all we are able to do is to try to keep ourselves afloat, treading water but not necessarily getting anywhere.

It is reassuring and impressive to hear that art and artists are still doing what they do, creating, making music and making plans.

Both Yorkie’s solo album and the Moongoose box set give us something to look forward to, a light shining in the fog.

And that is art at its best.

Banjo 

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Features

The Clash play Liverpool Eric’s: “That day everything changed… nothing in Liverpool was ever the same again”

Clash were undoubtedly Liverpool’s favourite punk band. While the Sex Pistols’ debut gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall has been acknowledged as the starting point of that city’s punk scene, The Clash’s first gig at Eric’s performed a similar magic for Liverpool.

The gig was witnessed by Jayne Casey, Julian Cope and Ian McCulloch, who went on to form Big in Japan, The Teardrop Explodes and Echo & The Bunnymen respectively, amongst other bands.

Also in attendance was one Pete Wylie of Wah! fame who, legend has it, approached The Clash’s Mick Jones after the gig to tell him how he had been inspired him to form a band.

The story goes that Jones handed Wylie his guitar with the words “Pay me back when you’re famous.” Wylie later stated “That day everything changed… nothing in Liverpool was ever the same again”

It wasn’t that Liverpool didn’t love Sex Pistols, but that, apparently, they just weren’t that good when they played Eric’s, for what would be the only gig the band ever played in the city.

Also, this was only the 3rd gig at Eric’s, so both band and venue were still unknown quantities, which meant that only around 50 people were present.

Of course, over the years the number of people who have since claimed they were there is probably over 100 times the number that actually attended, such is the impact punk has made on history.

By the time The Clash played on May 5 1977, things had changed. Punk was exploding all over the country, attracting the outcasts, the curious and those in search of something to match how they felt and to give voice to the noises in their heads.

Liverpool at the time was not in a particularly good place; financially in the trough of an economic slump following the decline of its docks and shipping industries and culturally still looking for a way out of the shadow cast by The Beatles’ unprecedented success.

Musically, Liverpool had yet to find a post-Beatles identity, although The Real Thing had kept the city’s flame burning in the charts.

When Roger Eagle and Ken Testi decided to open Eric’s, Roger, perhaps sensing that change was in the air, asked those members of his club he took under his wing not to listen to The Beatles, for fear that the past would infiltrate the new present.

Jayne Casey, One of those who were so instructed, remembered “A couple of years ago we’d been to a funeral and we were all sat round a table. There was me, Ian McCulloch and Pete Wylie. Ian looked at me and said, “Have you listened yet?” And I said, “No, have you?” And he said, “No” and we both looked at Wylie and said, “Have you?” And he said, “No” and we both in the same second said, “Yes you have! We know you have!” And he was like “I haven’t, I haven’t” but we were like “We can tell from your composition that you’ve listened to them for years!” So we’re convinced that he listened, he pretends he didn’t but he did.”

But the music that was being made by the new generation paid no heed to the likes of The Beatles. The Clash themselves penned a song called 1977 that famously claimed “No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones in 1977”.

The Clash (Copyright: Chalkie Davies)
The Clash (Copyright: Chalkie Davies)

The Clash were everything a band should have been at that particular point and place in music. Young, good looking, well dressed, confused and even contradictory.

Their songs combined political thrust with killer riffs, signing about hate, war, being bored and riots. Live they were described as being like “three James Deans coming at you”, as the front line of Mick Jones, Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon charged and attacked, backed up by the mighty Topper Headon.

That gig revitalized the city’s music scene. People met there and were jointly inspired to do something.

What nobody could have predicted at the time was how much they could go on to do. There are times in life when the stars just seem to line up and things work out right, a one in a billion meeting of minds and talents, and this seems to have been one of those occasions.

People formed bands before they knew what kind of musicians they would turn out to be, taken by The Clash’s messianic call. We can thank the gods of chance, or perhaps some other agent of destiny, that this crowd included the extraordinary voices of Ian MCCulloch, Pete Burns, Pete Wylie and Holly Johnson, along with the mercurial talents of guitarist Will Sergeant, drummer extraordinaire Budgie and art prankster/cultural terrorist Bill Drummond.

It may be the case that this astonishing pool of talent would have come together regardless of this particular gig, but the point remains that The Clash lit the touch paper and the firework duly went into the higher atmosphere and exploded.

The Clash were one of the first bands this writer saw at Eric’s, a few months on from their debut appearance,  on their Tommy Gun tour.

As confession is alleged to be good for the soul, I will hold my hand up and say that I was never a massive fan after their initial run of singles, nailing my colours to the Pistols’ mast instead.

That said, this was without question one of the most thrilling gigs I have ever seen, The Clash were undoubtedly at their best live, unmarred by the poor production of their first album and the American sheen of their second.

To this day I can remember the energy of the gig, along with the heat, the packed crowd and the feeling that, somehow, this was a gig that would stay with you long after we had left the venue.

I had never seen Eric’s so crowded, perhaps the fullest I ever saw it, with the possible exception of Iggy Pop. The size of the crowd was such that people had spilled out from stage front through to the bar area, making even a glimpse of the stage tricky.

The Specials were supporting them on this tour and, although I tell people I saw them it is probably more honest to say that I glimpsed them, through a doorway and over people’s heads. The crowd looked hot and we didn’t fancy getting caught up in the heat and mess of it, just for a support band.

If I had the chance I would tell my teenage self to get in there and catch one of our era’s most important bands while they were still unknown. I was amazed at how popular they seemed to be despite few people in my social circle having heard of them.

As The Specials left the stage and people headed to the bar, we saw our chance and pushed our way in. Thankfully we got to within a few people of the front of the stage and The Clash burst forth and blew our teenage minds!

Playing their first album and early singles, they already had a run of songs to make most new bands weep with envy.

With the Sex Pistols banned from almost everywhere and soon to split up, The Clash were head of the punk pack at this point, and made a nonsense of the myth that punk bands couldn’t play their instruments.

The people inspired by their first Liverpool, gig have achieved much in the years since and have doubtless inspired other people in their turn.

Perhaps this is the ultimate compliment for a gig, or even a band – that they create these ripples in a pond to such extent that they are still being felt all these years later.

Liverpool, and indeed the whole world, would be so much worse without them.

Banjo

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Features

The Teardrop Explodes and Club Zoo

Banjo looks at the Teardrop Explodes and their Club Zoo folly, where one of Liverpool’s most famous bands went off the rails.

Continue reading “The Teardrop Explodes and Club Zoo”
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Features

The Warehouse: Liverpool’s Forgotten Club

The Dead Kennedys at Liverpool Warehouse. Photo by Andy Carroll

For some reason, the Warehouse tends to be left out of Liverpool’s clubbing history, so Banjo attempts to put that right.

Continue reading “The Warehouse: Liverpool’s Forgotten Club”
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Features

Eric’s – a personal journey through Liverpool’s original punk club

Joy Division at Eric's. Photo by Gis Southworth

Punk has become many things in the 40 years since it went overground.

It has become acceptable, stripped by time and familiarity of the ability to shock.  It has become common place – punk fashion and influence can be seen pretty much everywhere.  It has become an exercise in nostalgia; punk bands still play gigs to the same crowds who saw them decades ago, cosy gigs reliving a collective youth.

And it has become commodified, a trend that in truth started worryingly early.  These days, Ramones and Joy Division t-shirts can be snapped up in Primark, extravagantly dyed hair, ripped jeans and multiple earrings are mainstream and raise not a single eyebrow.

But it was not always like this.  Oh no – once upon a time, Punk was a dangerous, exciting thing to be involved with. Questions were asked about it in the Houses of Parliament and just looking like a punk could get you chased, beaten and worse.

In those far off days, this shocking new phenomenon was news!  Music papers particularly couldn’t get enough of it, devoting almost whole issues to its rise. But, John Peel aside, it was almost impossible for young teens to actually hear the music itself.

Thank God then for Roger Eagle being, not for the first time in his life, in the right place at the right time. And, more importantly, with the right attitude.

Following on from creating successful and influential nights at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester and the Stadium in Liverpool, Roger, along with Pete Fulwell and Ken Testi, opened Eric’s in 1976, just in time for punk to spread out from London to Manchester and then to the provinces.

The first band to appear at Eric’s were The Stranglers, followed a week later by The Runaways and then The Sex Pistols. Eric’s had clearly tapped into a rich vein of exciting new music with punk beginning to explode. Not that it was ever a punk club per se, also featuring gigs from such diverse artists as Steve Hillage, Van der Graaf Generator, B.B. King and many reggae artists such as Prince Far I and Inner Circle.

The first run of gigs at Eric's
The first run of gigs at Eric’s

Roger Eagle was one of the rare breed of people who were more interested in the art of what they were doing rather than the finances, so the more popular gigs by the likes of The Clash and The Damned funded gigs by artists less likely to pull in a large number of paying guests, but Roger would rather spend time and money showcasing wonderful music for a smaller audience than have it ignored.

His legendary enthusiasm for music and for turning other people on to bands he loved was undoubtedly one of Eric’s best assets.

This writer’s own calling to Eric’s came whilst still a fresh-out-of -school 16 year old, starting what would be my final summer holiday, marooned between the childish world of school and the more grown-up world of college. 

Towards the end of my school life, a schoolmate had moved away, only about 5 miles down the road, but enough at that age to make it difficult to maintain a friendship where seeing each other every day was normal and effort free.

We have, in fact, remained friends to this day. We got into punk together that year, neither of us knowing the full seismic effect this would have on the rest of our lives.

On the second week of this summer break, this friend phoned with an invitation to join him and some others in going to a punk club in Liverpool to see Magazine play a matinee show. To my eternal regret, after hearing all the shock horror stories in the press, I bottled out and stayed at home, wracked with jealousy.

When I found out the day had passed without major incident, we plans to go the following week to see Rich Kids, the band  Glen Matlock formed after leaving The Sex Pistols. So when the next Saturday came around, I pocketed my £2.50 pocket money and headed off to a brave new world.

Graffiti was quite big with punks at the time, not the arty tags or Banksy murals we see now, but crude Magic Marker scrawlings of band names and slogans. We all set pen to the train shelter while waiting for the train into town.

Terrible really, and the kind of thing I hate to see these days, but it seemed to be somehow important then; part of the Destroy culture that punk embodied, a lack of respect for your elders and surroundings. We thought we had a point to prove; to go against the grain, be disruptive, sign your contempt for the world and your surroundings as boldly as you can.

There was an interview with John Lydon’s wife Nora, many years later, where she recalled in 1976 being advised not to have these punks in her house, not because they would steal or break anything but because they were likely to write on her walls in paint and pen.

Arriving at Eric’s, we found we had to first become members before being allowed entry (something about it being a members only club gave it extra freedoms within the law, such as staying open late).

At first this extra expense was dismaying, taking my last 50p as it did, but looking back, 50p for a year’s membership of Eric’s must be classed as something of a bargain.

I paid this and the £1.00 entry fee and went down the Eric’s staircase for the first time. Memories of this portentous event are scarce, but it was like nothing we’d seen before.

Previous experiences of music played at anything above front room levels of volume had been local discos, and Eric’s was nothing like that. Dark, damp and with dirty red walls, walking down those stairs was walking into another world.

Proper bands played here, proper punks came here and we were entering their world. This was a big deal, although how big a deal was not immediately apparent.

As this was a matinee gig for under 18s the bar served only soft drinks, so we bought Cokes. This was a masterstroke of Eric’s – adding a matinee show meant that bands could be booked for two shows in Liverpool and then another night at Manchester’s Factory venue which in turn, made it more financially viable for bands  to make the trip North.

Away from those practical considerations, it meant that a generation of kids, ideally aged in 1977 for the shockwaves and upheaval of punk, could be part of things in a way that otherwise would have been beyond our means, schemes and wildest dreams.

It is impossible to overemphasise the impact this had on a bunch of 16 year olds from the sticks. Being a punk in a small town was to be in a small minority and made walking its streets and corridors a dangerous prospect, but Eric’s gave young outsiders a place to belong, maybe for the first time.

In return, the Eric’s owners, movers and shakers seemed genuinely fond of the young crowd and what they brought to the club.  Big in Japan dedicated their only proper release to “the Eric’s matinee crowd” and their singer, Jayne Casey, still tells the tale of when Iggy Pop played Eric’s on his birthday.

The matinee crowd, myself included, burst into a spontaneous version of Happy Birthday to You in a way that a grown-up crowd would most definitely not have done. Not expecting this reaction, Iggy grinned from ear to ear, his rock star persona punctured by this young gesture.

Iggy Pop at Liverpool Eric’s: Shock was part of the currency of the early punks and, in Iggy, they had inspiration of sorts

Memory is not perhaps 100% reliable here, but there were a plethora soon-to-be famous faces working on the bar or on the door.  Ian Broudie certainly used to be on the door a fair bit, and there are blurry recollections of Mac, Julian Cope and Pete Wylie’s talents being employed in some capacity or other.

I seem to remember Pete Burns DJing occasionally. I always strongly suspected that he brought records down from his day job at Probe Records, played them in the club and then took them back and sold them, along with a nice crackly coating of sweat and beer.

The bar area was the first room you walked in to as you came down the stairs, with a dark seated area with the legendary Eric’s jukebox to the right and the stage area through a doorway in front.

After collecting our Cokes, we took our place stage left, me marvelling at the fact that I was in a punk club for the first time in my life.

Everyone looked punkier than us, so mental notes were made to make a few changes to wardrobe in future. The long hair had already gone, chopped off a few days after hearing God Save The Queen for the first time.

After standing around for a while, the support band came on. I had no idea who they were and had never heard them before; few people had then. The lead singer walked to the mic and said, “Hello. we’re Joy Division.”

So the first live punk band we saw at Eric’s turned out to be Joy Division!  Sometimes fate just seems to treat you well. Obviously this gig was now a long time ago and we had no idea just how immense Joy Division would turn out to be, but I can clearly remember the bass lines of Transmission and She’s Lost Control and can recall them playing Ice Age and They Walked in Line.

We were instantly hooked. From now on Joy Division were our band and we saw them every time they played a matinee show, as well as gigs in Preston and Leeds. We saw them go from support band to headline act, although the first headline show I saw them play was to less than 20 people.

After they finished their set, we waited for Rich Kids to take to the stage. We were about to see a Sex Pistol and were beside ourselves with excitement. Again, time has dimmed my memory of the gig somewhat, but loud punk music (or Power Pop as the Rich Kids were briefly classed) had well and truly got us and this was without question the most exciting day of our young lives.

Following the gig, the band came out of the dressing room and hung around the bar, chatting and signing autographs.

At the tender age of 16 and in one single afternoon, we had been to a punk club, seen Joy Division and got an autograph from a Sex Pistol. How could we not fall in love with this wonderful place?!

My second trip to Eric’s was to see The Clash on their Tommy Gun tour, ably supported by The Specials, in one of the best and most overcrowded gigs we ever attended. Eric’s had delivered again and our fate had been sealed.

For the next two years or so we would be back every Saturday. I even once, through a special mixture of sulking and badgering,  forced my poor suffering parents to cut a holiday in London short so I could be back in my beloved Eric’s to watch Joy Division again.

It doesn’t happen often in life that we are lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, but when it happened  I am eternally glad that I made the most of it and have so many memories of my time at this legendary club.

Banjo

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Lost Albums

The Teardrop Explodes Wilder: “A bloody-minded look into the downside of success”

The post punk boom of the late 70s and early 80s made stars of some strange people.

Marc Almond bringing high camp to Top of the Pops, Phil Oakey appearing in Jackie magazine with a chain between his two pierced nipples and Adam Ant displaying his Pure Sex tattoo to theatres full of young fans are but three examples of how punk sensibility clashed with a world not quite ready to take it all in.

We can add to this Julian Cope standing on a piano, tripping his face off and wearing a night shirt on Top of the Pops, with The Teardrop Explodes.

There is a sense with all of these of square pegs in round holes, of people perhaps not immediately cut out for mainstream fame bringing their baggage with them.

And none more so than the archdrood himself, Julian Cope.

When they first started, The Teardrop Explodes were a fine, if slightly odd, band formed in the embers of the punk scene that had raged through the UK. Countless bands were inspired by the likes of Sex Pistols and The Clash to pick up guitars and make music of their own.

Where the post punk bands covered themselves in glory was by refusing to follow the path of identikit punk thrash that was well trod by 2nd and 3rd generation punk bands and by applying their emerging musical abilities in a new and different way.

These bands had an innate desire not to follow the crowd. This led to some of the most wonderful music we will ever know being committed to vinyl by bands who were not interested in fame or its trappings, doing what they were doing out of a need to create.

It was in these post punk bands that the true spirit of the explosions of 76/77 bore fruit.

One of these bands was The Teardrop Explodes.

Formed around the triumvirate of Eric’s, Probe and the Armadillo Tea Rooms, Liverpool bands sprung up regularly, often lasting no longer than a day or two. Eventually though, some of these bands left the tea rooms for the rehearsal rooms and actually started writing songs.

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The Teardrop Explodes wrote three songs, Sleeping Gas, Camera Camera and Kirby Worker’s Dream Fades. Bill Drummond, ex of Big In Japan persuaded the band to record all three songs, releasing them as the band’s first single.

On it’s release, Sleeping Gas was awarded Single of the Week in the weekly music papers. Suddenly The Teardrop Explodes found the spotlight shining on them for the first time.

Further singles Bouncing Babies and Treason were released and The Teardrops were one of Liverpool’s brightest hopes. However, success eluded them and their rivals Echo and the Bunnymen signed to a major label and left Julian and co behind.

It wasn’t until 4th single Reward went top ten that it seemed to be time for The Teardrop Explodes to have their own chance at the big time.

Treason was subsequently re-released and made it to number three, and The Teardrop Explodes became pop stars.

Lacking a stable line up, Julian Cope became the band’s face and focus, essentially employing and firing a series of players who were little more than session musicians.

Debut album Kilimanjaro gathered rave reviews and it seemed that everybody loved The Teardrop Explodes. What could possibly go wrong.

Well the answer to that is pretty much everything.

Pop fame sat uneasily on Cope’s shoulders and took to taking huge amounts of LSD and isolating himself. An American tour came to a messy end and Cope sacked fan favourite Alfie Agius. By now he had a reputation approaching that of Mark E Smith when it came to the ruthless way he dealt with band members.

Drummer Gary Dwyer was the only other continuous member of The Teardrop Explodes, and deserves great credit for his part in their story and for being the prop that held the band up when falling apart may have seemed inevitable.

Nevertheless, anticipation for the Teardrop’s 2nd album was so high that Cope had wanted to call it Everybody Wants To Shag The Teardrop Explodes. 

Eventually called Wilder, it was in part designed to turn off The Teardrop Explodes new audience of pop fans.

There is still a rich vein of Cope’s love of classic pop running through Wilder, but it has an angular, awkward and arty approach that belied their status as staples of Smash Hits magazine.

Opening track Bent Out of Shape is a straight forward enough song, but underpinned by some strange noises and opens with Cope singing “All my life I’ve been bent out of shape, can’t you see it’s killing me’ adding “these are dreams that I never had” as if he has already had enough of the fame that landed at his feet.

Next up is Colours Fly Away, starting with a brass band section that harks back to the glory days of Reward. Fans could be forgiven that The Teardrop Explodes have picked up from where Kilimanjaro left off. But again, the opening lines show Cope’s unease with his success: “More by luck than judgement here I am, smiling at the fighting once again.”

Seven Views of Jerusalem is a jumble of beats and squawks with Cope seemingly in stream of consciousness territory, singing “I cut off my nose to spite my face, look at all pests around the place. Everyone’s laughing they think it’s disguise, but haven’t you seen all the lines round my eyes”

Lyrics such as these seem a long way from the same person who burst into the public’s affections by singing “Bless my cotton socks, I’m in the news”

Pure Joy is trite and throwaway, but next track Falling Down Around Me is one of the album’s highlights. Built around a stuttering mix of bass and drums that seem to have little in common with the guitar track, the song has echoes of David Bowie from his early days, in particular the World of David Bowie album that was so popular amongst the Liverpool post punk cognoscenti.

The Culture Bunker is classic Teardrop and references Cope’s early days in Liverpool as he mentions The Crucial Three, the band he started with Pete Wylie and Ian McCulloch, as he sings “I’ve been waiting so long, waiting for The Crucial Three, wondering what went wrong”

Passionate Friend is another classic. Apparently written for Ian McCulloch’s sister, thus deepening the rift that had grown up between the two one time friends.

Tiny Children takes things down several notches and gives us a sense of Julian as a lonely figure writing his disquiet and depression down for us all to read, as if we were sneaking furtive glances through his diary. Lyrics such as “I could make a meal of that wonderful despair I feel” provide a glimpse into a troubled psyche and his approach to the people he now has to deal with is detailed when he sings “But each character is plundering my home and taking everything that is my own”

The chorus of “Oh no, I’m not sure about those things that I cared about. Oh no, I’m not sure, not anymore” give the impression of an unhappy soul rocking himself in a dark corner.

One Dove’s Morning Dove White: “Screamadelica’s little sister, younger and more effortlessly cool than its grown up sibling“

Like Leila Khaled Said further details an unhappy outlook, for some reason juxtaposed with Leila Khaled, member of the revolutionary Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the first woman to hijack a plane. Smash Hits suddenly seems a long way off.

And The Fighting Takes Over continues the downbeat, introspective theme still further, reading like an examination of Julian’s failing marriage in a sad but blame free manner, concluding “we were just a pair of little children, two children, no surprise”

Closing track The Great Dominions is perhaps the greatest song The Teardrop Explodes ever recorded, an open-hearted epic that again seems to look at his crumbling marriage.

The band provide a sympathetic backing as Julian pours his heart out in his own symbolic manner. The Great Dominions reads like the aftermath of a long and emotional argument, with Cope singing “Suddenly I came to my senses, a night on fire put out all traces of feeling”

The ending refrain saw Julian singing naked in a dark studio, his voice cracking as the tears come towards the end of the repeated line “Mummy I’ve been fighting again”, as the song climaxes around him.

As emotional as this is, it is difficult to see that the young fans who bought Reward would take to this tearful soul bearing with the same enthusiasm.

Of course, the post punk fans that the band had brought with them were more than able to love the sounds they found on Wilder, it was the pop fans that might have found it a more challenging listen.

Cope’s aim was not to make bad music, but to shake of his teenybopper image, a mantle that is easy to imagine never sat well on his shoulders.

Before the band could finish their third album, it was all over for The Teardrop Explodes. They remain one of the bands who have never reformed and probably for good reasons. Theirs is a tale that has too much depth, too many messy relationships and involved too many bad trips.

But, despite Wilder perhaps starting the death knell of one of post punk’s greatest bands, it is a mighty statement and one that deserves returning to.

A pop star who is prepared to open himself up to his public in this manner is a rare thing. We are reminded of the troubled output of Syd Barrett and Tim Buckley, but presented in a pop arena.

Wilder is a bloody-minded and honest look into the downside of success, when all The Teardrop Explodes had to do to ensure their continued success was to put on a happy face and smile for the pages of the pop glossies.

And as such, it is one of the bravest documents a band hungry for fame have ever committed to tape.

Banjo

Categories
Interviews

Glen Matlock Interview: “When you’re an older bloke you take what comes along and as long as you approach it with a good heart, it all comes out alright in the end”

Punk rock progenitor and one-quarter of arguably the greatest ever punk band, The Sex Pistols in conversation with Sun 13’s Banjo

Like a lot of people, Glen Matlock looms large in my cultural background.  As one quarter of Sex Pistols, he was directly responsible for the total upheaval of my teenage world.  He was the band’s main musician and was the closest we were likely to get to a Sex Pistol you could take home to meet your mum.

The Pistols and punk appeared quite suddenly in my life.  I have a crystal clear memory of a day in my last year at school when I was told of a band who had appeared on TV the day before and swore ‘like troopers’. 

Again like a lot of people, this was the first time I had heard about Sex Pistols.  It was not to be the last.

I lived hundreds of miles away from where the program was broadcast and nobody in my school had seen it, but its shock waves had made it to my neck of the woods the very next morning, so we can see the effect this program had on spreading punk across the country.

But, and this is an important point to Matlock, there is more to him than his past.  To the point that it is easy to imagine him coming across this article and feeling immediately dispirited that yet another interview with him starts off with that band and that interview. 

He has played with Iggy Pop, The Damned and The Faces, but the shadow of the Sex Pistols looms large over him to this day.

Glen has a new album, Good to Go, released this Friday, 21st September.  Recorded with Earl Slick and Slim Jim Phantom, it is an album of unashamed, unadorned rock n roll.  To promote Good to Go, he has been keeping himself busy, playing gigs in such far-flung corners of the globe as Korea’s demilitarised zone and the banks of the river Ganges in India.

When I spoke to him he was in the middle of an intensive couple of days of back to back interviews, and sounding fairly worn out and weary with the whole thing, as anyone would be spending that much time answering the same questions and giving out the same details.

‘Sorry’ he tells us at one point as he struggles to answer a question, ‘I’m a bit interviewed out today, I’ve done about 9 or 10 interviews so far.’  Yeah, I saw your schedule I tell him, I’m amazed you’re still going.

Back on a roll, he continues.  ‘I’ll tell you what I did do earlier’ he says, ‘I did The Wright Stuff tv program, then I did some Russian tv thing.  But it’s all part of life’s rich pageant.  I think my maxim to life these days is just say yes to most things that come your way.’

There’s a mate of mine who’s in the fashion business, and when we ask what we’re up to, we always quote Newton’s Law of Motion at each other – a body at rest stays at rest, a body in motion stays in motion, unless an exterior or equal force acts on it, or something like that.  

But if you say I’m just waiting for the phone to ring it invariably doesn’t, and one thing begets other things.’

Iggy Pop at Liverpool Eric’s: Shock was part of the currency of the early punks and, in Iggy, they had inspiration of sorts

Glen Matlock also still sounds like someone who is passionate about the music he is making and is very keen that it gets listened to.

Tell us about the tour and these far flung dates you’ve been playing.

‘Well it’s not really a tour, but I’ve been playing selected dates.  I’ve just got back from Korea, I’ve had something in India, just a one-off thing, and I’ve had a five night residency in a place in Canary Wharf, I’m going over to Dubai for a gig with Chris Spedding and then in September I’m going to Scandinavia for some shows, just me and my acoustic, which is kind of one down from being a comedian I think. ‘

It all sounds a long way from Monday nights in the 100 Club. 

Yeah, but that’s alright too.  When you’re an older bloke you take what comes along and as long as you approach it with a good heart, it all comes out alright in the end.  The main reason I’m doing this is for the new album, which I’ve got to get people to dig somehow.’

So tell us about your new album?

‘It’s a bunch of songs I’ve been writing over the last four years.  I wanted to so something a bit different, not the same old punk kinda thing, which is fine, but not when you’re not playing to the people who did it with the first time around. 

And I saw Bob Dylan play, maybe three or four years ago and I can appreciate Bob Dylan.  I’m not his biggest fan, but the band he had were fantastic.  He had Charlie Sexton on guitar and the bass player was Tony Matthews, who plays stand up bass.  And the drummer was fantastic and spent most of the set playing with brushes, and I thought that’s really cool, you can get the songs to come through, how can I do something similar? 

And I thought ‘I know, I’ll call Slim Jim Phantom, he only uses half a drum kit, I’ll ask him if he’s up for doing it.’  And he suggested using Earl Slick on guitar, who I’d worked with before.  Chris Spedding plays guitar on a track which I’m quite pleased with, with him being a member of The Wombles! 

And I wanted to make the album a little more Americana-ish.  I don’t think I’m ever going to get on Radio 1 these days, but I know that Radio 2 and Radio 6 are playing music like that, so I thought maybe I should change the tune, production wise.’

Would you want your stuff to be played on Radio 1 these days?  Did you ever want your stuff to be played on Radio 1?

‘I think anyone who writes a song wants as many people as possible to hear it and then be able to decide whether they like it or not.  If you write something that’s catchy and people hear it a couple of times they might think it’s really catchy. 

Music is about communication, so the more avenues there are to get it out there the better really.’

Where do you look to for your influences these days?

‘Just what’s going on in my life really, and how I’m dealing with it and how you’re rising or not rising to the occasion or dealing with the pitfalls of it all.  I’m not on some heavy political bent, because we all know what’s wrong with the world and you end up preaching to the converted and can come across as a bit Billy Bragg, which I don’t want to be.

You write in songs what you can’t necessarily express on a piece of paper and it brings out some emotional thing.  Or that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.’

Has the way you write music changed over the years?

‘Nah, it’s the same old shit basically.  Most songs I write, I’m walking down the street and an idea comes into my head, and if that idea doesn’t go away it’s time to pick up the guitar and work out the chords that go with it. 

Every songwriter’s got a mental bag of half ideas that they can use and reference, but the whole thing is about trying to get across what’s on your mind.  It doesn’t always have to be of the most fantastic consequence, but I think it’s got to be as succinct and direct as possible.

I try to write songs as if I’m having a conversation with somebody.  I do like to think there’s a bit of humour in my songs, I think we can all be a bit tongue in cheek about things sometimes.’

Well it must all work for you.  You’ve written some of the best songs ever recorded and it’s taken you all over the world and last over 40 years.   You must be doing something right.

‘I suppose I must be.  I don’t know what yet.  [laughs]’

One thing I noticed recently, looking at the calendar, is that a few weeks ago it was the 40th Anniversary of the first time I went to Eric’s in Liverpool, and it was to see you in Rich Kids.

‘Were we any good?’ 

You were great, Rich Kids were a brilliant group.

‘I’ll tell you what I do remember about Eric’s, it used to whiff a lot because they had a problem with the drains, but also I do remember playing there with Iggy Pop, must have been in ’79, and I’m pretty sure we did a matinee performance for the underage people. 

And instead of having the usual intro music to come on to, we played the theme tune from A Fistful of Dollars and Iggy would come on.

But by the time he’d come on, in that Iggy Pop style he has, there was all these kids dressed as scouts down the front. 

And they started singing Happy Birthday, and for a split second he was dumbfounded and then he turned to the band and said ‘well fuck you’ and we went straight into Kill City.

Jah Wobble Interview: “Joining the Pistols would have been a huge mistake”

I met some really cool people there, in fact we played there with the Pistols really early on.  We played upstairs and there weren’t that many people there, but I skived out of packing the van and when I went downstairs there was this whole thing going on. 

Yachts were playing and I was stood there having a drink and everyone was waiting for me.  I got in the doghouse with everyone over that, but I met Clive Langer, Maybe Ian Broudie and Jayne from Pink Military. 

It was good to realise that there was this thing outside of London.  In our capital city ways, we may have been too high minded to think there possibly could have been.

But also likewise I remember going down to Newport or Bridgend in Wales, we did a series of gigs there and I met Steve Strange for the first time and got chatting to him. 

And they were the same, they looked like punks before punk had been invented.  And he asked where we were playing next, and it was a gig in Burton on Trent. 

We stayed in Wales and by the time we got up, he was already in the car park waiting for us.  He actually helped us carry the gear in, which I doubt he ever did since [laughs].’

Were you aware at the time, when you were playing these gigs, of the effect you were having on people and the outburst of creativity that you left in your wake?

‘You know what, I don’t want to sound big-headed, but yeah I think so. We knew we were polarizing people somehow. 

We had this self-confidence, maybe not so much on my part personally, but Steve was the biggest ne’er do well in London.  He was the spirit of the Sex Pistols, John put it all in words, I came up with the tunes and Paul provided the backbeat and kind of went along with what Steve said. 

They were a double act and to me, they were always like Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, which was fine by me as I liked Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.’

How do you feel about the way the Sex Pistols and punk turned out over the years to now, where we can still feel the ripples from what you did?

‘Good I suppose.  I don’t really know any different.  I remember reading some interview with Keith Richards and the interviewer asked him about the price of milk, and he replied ‘Don’t ask me mate, I’ve been a rock star all my life, what would I know’

And I don’t know any different, I’ve always been saddled with the Pistols thing.  I’m proud of it, but it’s a bit of a double-edged sword because here we are talking about that rather than what I’m doing now. 

And I kind of hate it for that sometimes.  A little bit.’

Well back to your new album then.  There’s quite an old school rock n roll feel running through it.

‘Maybe so, I like all that kind of stuff.  I’ve tried to do something slightly different within the confines of what I like and do and the people I’m playing with and get the songs across.  My favourite song on the album is Speak Too Soon, which is kind of earthy and quite up.’

My favourite is Wanderlust at the moment, although that could change – there are some catchy riffs on there.

‘That’s a bit of an older one that I’d never really recorded before, that’s kind of my hats off to Roadrunner, but not by Jonathan Richman, but by Junior Walker and the All Stars.  I do like the bluesy kind of stuff sometimes.

I’m chums with Pete Wylie, although I haven’t seen him in a long while. But I’m a big admirer of his, and he called one of his album Songs of Strength and Heartbreak and that’s what I subscribe to lyrically, finding a way through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 

Pete Wylie does the most fantastic version of a Gilbert O’Sullivan song, Alone Again Naturally, just him and an acoustic guitar. It’s heart-rending.’

Matlock has a huge library of tales he can tell about his time in music, with every mention of a band of a city inspiring more anecdotes of a life well lived.  And more tales are doubtless being generated as he continues to tour and make music.

Do you still keep up with new music?

‘I do, my kid’s in a band and they play me new stuff and it sounds alright, rocky kind of stuff.  One of the bands I played with in Canada were really good, and the name is fantastic too.  They were called Ringo Deathstar.  And Ringo went to see them. [laughs]

I met him, I was helping out his son Zac, and his dad actually plays pretty good guitar.  We did a showcase gig for the record we were making at Raymond’s Review Bar we were telling Zac we needed to go on stage.  And he was saying ‘no, no I’ve got to wait for my dad’ and I thought ‘wait for your dad?’  before remembering who his dad was! ‘

Well according to your schedule Glen, you’re late for a radio interview now.

‘Have I?  oh blimey, I didn’t know that.  I’d better go then’

And with that Glen Matlock says his goodbyes and heads straight into another interview, no doubt adding further to his fatigue and world weariness.  It says something of the man that he is still prepared to put himself through such a punishing schedule to promote his work. He is obviously still proud of his work if a little frustrated that it is not naturally finding a wider audience.

Reflecting on our conversation later, I think to myself that one of the common threads that runs through the lives of people who were caught up in shaping the early days of punk is that of the huge difficulty dealing with the huge void that followed when their part in it all seemingly came to an end. 

Steve Jones and many others turned to heroin to fill their days, The Slits’ Ari Up retreated to Borneo, living with a tribe almost completely cut off from civilisation while others abandoned music completely, turning to other careers.  Others were not so lucky and didn’t manage to make old bones at all.

Matlock’s approach to all this has been to keep his head down and keep making music.  There is a certain dignity to this calm and steady approach, one that shows that Matlock has managed to avoid the pitfalls of his profession with ease. 

We wish him well in his quest to carry on doing what he does, especially when what he does is release top drawer rock n roll in this manner.

Glen Matlock has left his past behind him and has, as always it seems, still got an eye on the future and a place in his heart for rock n roll.

Banjo

Categories
Features

Iggy Pop at Liverpool Eric’s: Shock was part of the currency of the early punks and, in Iggy, they had inspiration of sorts

Iggy Pop is a survivor. Not many people who were aware of him in the 60s would have bet money on him surviving the 60s, much less his 60s.

But, in the year zero declarations that accompanied the early days of punk, Iggy was one of the few members of the old guard to be given any form of credibility or kudos, along with Patti Smith and Can.

Iggy’s exertions and his attitude with The Stooges had some common ground with the new breed who were decrying what had gone before as boring and irrelevant.

Iggy and the Stooges were far from being boring and the noise they made was similarly far from irrelevance in the brave new world that was being created in 1976 and beyond.

Punk’s early dalliance with self harm was echoed in the antics of Iggy, an act that carried with it much shock value. Shock was part of the currency of the punks and, in Iggy, they had inspiration of sorts.

As a result he was adopted by the punks. This admiration was a two way street, as he had often struggled to find an audience and now a new appreciative crowd was opening up for him. It seemed the times had finally caught up with Iggy Pop.

On a personal note, my initial reaction to seeing Iggy on the cover of my brother’s Raw Power album was to think that he couldn’t be a punk as he had long hair. This was enough at the time for us to decry him as being part of the older generation and that the likes of Johnny Rotten had got this one wrong.

We played the album lifting the needle off the opening Search and Destroy, thinking it plain old Heavy Rock. Second track Gimme Danger had acoustic guitars on it for god’s sake, and so the experiment was quickly abandoned.

We hated Iggy Pop.

A few weeks later, John Peel played Sick of You and we fell in love with it, rushing to see each other in the playground the next day to tell each other about this incredible ‘new’ song.

We decided to give my brother’s record another go, and this time we’d listen to the whole thing, rather than the opening few seconds of the opening few tracks.

Raw Power blew us away. Yes, the production was dreadful, but here was the attitude and power of punk writ large in an album recorded way back in 1973. We got it.

We loved Iggy Pop.

His legend preceded him, and we discovered that his life was already the stuff of legend. The drugs, women and self-mutilation, the stage diving, the silver hair, the peanut butter!

We started buying his other records, notably the first two Stooges albums. Live album Metallic KO made the hairs on the back of our neck stand up as we listened to Iggy bait the Hells Angels in the audience, who in turn responded by showering the stage with bottles.

In June of 1978, we started going to matinee shows at Eric’s and getting hands on with the whole punk thing. It was an incredibly exciting time and, looking back, we can appreciate just how spoiled we were.

My first Eric’s gig was Joy Division and Rich Kids, my second was The Clash and The Specials. Further shows included Gang of Four, Ultravox!, The Cure and a memorable afternoon that gave us Echo and the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes for 50p.

Like I say, spoiled.

Then, a year or so later, we got the news that Iggy was coming to Eric’s. and, incredibly, that gig was 41 years ago at the time of writing, April 21 1979.

Now, when we went to Eric’s there were always flyers available on the door and, once a month we got the new schedule and we could check who were going to be seeing for the next few weeks.

This time though there was something different. A second flyer. This one didn’t have a list of bands on it, it was for one particular show, it was for Iggy Pop.

Adding to the unusual nature of this show, we could buy tickets in advance rather than just paying on the door.

Our excitement was tempered by the price of the tickets, which were a shocking two pounds! Most gigs at Eric’s were only a quid, so this was a 100% price increase. By foregoing records for a couple of weeks we managed to save enough for this extravagance and bought tickets.

In 1977, Iggy had played at the Manchester Apollo, a famous gig that was filmed for Granada TV, who played a clip of him singing Lust for Life, wearing leather trousers and a horse tail. And yet, just 18 months later he was playing Eric’s, with a capacity of around 300 people.

One reason for this, according to Doreen Allen, who worked at the club and was given the job of sorting out Iggy’s rider, is that he wanted to play in Liverpool and no other venue would book him.

The blow was surely softened by the fact that they were able to book him for two shows, a matinee in the afternoon and an evening show later on, thereby doubling the attendance.

Come showtime of course, the venue was rammed. I had seen the place packed out before, notably The Clash gig I mentioned earlier and when The Skids played after appearing on Top of the Pops just a couple of days earlier with their breakthrough hit Into the Valley, but this was smoothing else.

Although this was ostensibly a matinee show for under 18s, such was the demand to see Iggy that there was a real mix of ages at the show. Demand far outstripped supply, so fans took whichever Iggy show they could get tickets for, with some lucky punters going to both shows.

Iggy walked on to the stage and launched straight into Kill City. My first thoughts, after months of seeing him only in the pages on the NME and Sounds, was amazement that he was actually in colour, not just black and white like in the photos! And he was also 3D – wow!

As an added treat for us young punks, ex-Sex Pistol Glen Matlock was playing bass in Iggy’s band.

Somehow, and this used to happen fairly regularly, I managed to squeeze my way to the front of the crowd and had a view of the gig from about three rows back. This also happened with The Clash although I am at a complete loss as to how I managed it.

The audience were aware that this particular day was Iggy’s birthday. Whether he actually announced it from the stage or not I can’t remember but, seeing as the majority of the audience were young kids, we burst into a spontaneous singalong of Happy Birthday.

There was always a part of the Eric’s crowd who were too cool to clap, but we were 15 and 16 years old and cool was a problem for another age. Such issues weren’t going to stop us wishing Iggy Pop a happy birthday in song. Of course they weren’t!

At first he seemed unsure how to react to this and it is easy to imagine that this kind of thing had never happened at an Iggy Pop gig previously.

But as it became cleat that yes, we were going to sing the whole song to him, he relaxed into it. Towards the end, after the “happy birthday dear Iggeeeee” he ran around the front of the stage with the biggest smile I think I had ever witnessed plastered across his face.

Once we had finished, I stuck my hand out when he was within striking distance. He grabbed my and shook it and my teenage life was complete. I swore there and then that I would never wash it again.

Glen Matlock has his own, kind of strange memories of this: “We did it this matinee at Eric’s in Liverpool and it was all these Boy Scouts and Cubs. Just after the music Iggy would come on. All these kids started singing ‘Happy birthday to you…. happy birthday Iggy Pop, happy birthday to you!’

Iggy was really taken aback (it was his birthday obviously!). He looked at me, looked around, looked at the crowd, and went ‘Well fuck you’ and went straight in to ‘Kill City’! There was all these 13 year-old kids! That was quite funny.”

I’m not sure where he got the Boy Scouts thing from, but it’s good to know that it still sticks in his memory all these years later.

The rousing version of Happy Birthday we were able top provide him with can be heard below.

We were all treated to a full Iggy show, taking in 17 songs including the likes of Sister Midnight, Shake Appeal and finishing with a storming I Wanna Be Your Dog.

Iggy Pop at Eric’s is a gig that tends to stick in people’s minds. Author Frank Cottrell Boyce mentioned it when he appeared on Desert Island Discs, the Liverpool Echo included in their top ten punk gigs in Liverpool and it gets mentions in Liverpool Museum, The Independent and… well, you get the picture.

At last year’s Sound City, I somehow found myself on stage sat next to Andy McClusky from OMD on a panel discussing the importance of Eric’s to Liverpool’s music scene.

I was asked what was the best gig I had seen at Eric’s. I replied that, as we saw so many incredible bands there it wasn’t possible to say which was the best, but the one that stuck in my mind the most was this one.

It was a genuine anyone-who-was-anyone-was -there-where-were-you-sucker type of gigs, one of those incredible moments that, even as you were watching it you knew it was never going to truly leave you.

And here we are, 41 years later, still talking about it, still recounting those shock waves that rocked our teenage years.

Banjo

1 Intro
2 Kill City
3 Sister Midnight
4 I`m Bored
5 Happy Birthday To Iggy
6 Fortune Teller
7 Loose
8 Five Foot One
9 Little Doll
10 Endless Sea
11 Cock In My Pocket
12 Shake Appeal
13 New Values
14 Girls
15 Dirt
16 Don’t Look Down
17 I Wanna Be Your Dog

Categories
Interviews

Wayne Hussey Interview: ” still get a big kick out of making records and writing songs. When it kicks into place there’s nothing quite like it”

Wayne Hussey

Wayne Hussey can be said to be something of a well travelled soul, both musically and geographically speaking.  Moving to Liverpool in the late 70s, he was involved with the scene that sprung up around the famous Eric’s club and joined ex-Penetration singer Pauline Murray in The Invisible Girls, later being snapped up by Pete Burns and Dead or Alive. 

From here he joined the Sisters of Mercy and moved to Leeds.  When The Sisters fell apart, he formed The Mission, where success took him to London.  Later in life, love took him to Brazil, where he now lives with his wife. 

It is fair to say that The Mission has been his most enduring and successful band, still active over thirty years later. 

The band rode the crest of a wave as, for want of a better term, goth started to flourish and became a huge live draw, headlining Reading Festival twice and selling out Wembley, tearing around the world on a diet of Blue Nun wine.    

While The Sisters have become what is politely referred to as a ‘Heritage Act’, whereby they tour old material to a nostalgic audience, effectively becoming their own tribute act, The Mission seem to have reached a perfect balance whereby they cease operations almost completely between albums and tours, coming together again when their muse strikes. 

Outside of The Mission, Hussey has released solo albums and collaborations, testament to his creative drive and desire to continue making music. 

Ahead of The Mission’s latest Liverpool gig at the O2 Academy on May 19, Getintothis caught up with Wayne, to discuss life, love and Liverpool.

Hussey has an immediately recognizable voice.  Anyone who was even vaguely into the 80’s goth scene will have come across The Mission and, more than likely, seen them live.  His voice has an almost jovial quality to it and, unusually for an interview situation, he asks almost as many questions as he receives, turning the whole thing into more of a chat than any kind of formal question and answer session. 

He also has an infectious laugh that peppers our conversation, which adds further to the good-natured atmosphere.  It is also easy to tell that Wayne has done many interviews over the years, and chooses his words well, not being afraid of pausing to search for the right word or phrase to best express himself. 

As Wayne was a Liverpool resident for some years, this is naturally where our conversation starts. 

“It’s been a while since we played there actually.  We have been busy, but considering that I lived in Liverpool for six years, it’s always nice to go back.  I think it must be getting on for ten years actually”

Do you still feel any connection with Liverpool, given that you spent some of your formative musical years there? 

“I have very, very fond memories of living in Liverpool.  I moved there when I was just turned 19 and left 83/84, so I was there for five or six years.  I remember it just being sunny all the time, but I know that’s not right because I’ve been to Liverpool since [Laughs]”

No, I can assure you it isn’t sunny all the time.

“No, but that’s how I remember it.  It must have had something to do with the drugs at the time I guess [laughs].  I lived in the Tuebrook area, but moved to Sefton Park, as you did then when you were in that kind of crowd”

What are your main memories of that time? 

“Well, obviously I used to go to Eric’s.  It was kind of the epicenter for our generation of musicians.  When I saw our generation of musicians, I mean the alternative musicians, not the ones who would play the nightclubs and clubs but the more…..punk musicians I suppose. 

Not that I ever considered myself to be punk.  But I saw a lot of bands at Eric’s, I was even in bands myself who supported big bands there.  It was a good time. 

And I’m still obviously a big Liverpool supporter.  When I was a kid, football was my big passion, but then in 1972 I saw T Rex and Bowie, so that changed the course of my life” 

So how did punk affect you when it first broke? 

“Well I was still in Bristol am I saw The Damned supporting T Rex on 76, I saw The Clash, Television supported by Blondie before I moved to Liverpool.  And then once I got there I met some people who told me about Eric’s and I saw a lot of gigs there. 

We supported The Pretenders, the original Ultravox, Joy Division supported the band I was in”

So that would be [late 70s Liverpool band] Ded Byrds then? 

“Yeah, that was Ded Byrds.  Bloody hell, you’ve done your research [laughs]”

Well I saw Ded Byrds there a few times, I saw your gig with Ultravox.  In fact, I have your autographs somewhere. 

“Bloody hell [laughs] You must have been the first person to ask for my autograph. 

I think there were too many egos in that band.  When we supported The Pretenders, Seymour Stein was at the show, as he’d just signed them for America, and he saw us and loved us, so we signed to Sire, we were about to go on tour with The Ramones, then we just had a fight and split up”

That must have been really frustrating!  

“Well, I don’t know.  You never know what course you would have taken if things had been different, maybe the Ded Byrds would have been around and we’d be playing The Masonic [laughs]”

After all these years of playing music, what’s in it for you these days?  “Well, I love music.  I love listening to it, I love sitting down with a guitar and trying to play along to somebody else’s record and seeing if I can play it. 

And if I can’t then I just take what I’ve worked out and write my own song [laughs]. 

From the time I first started playing guitar I could never play anybody else’s song, so I listened to records and tried to assimilate what I could and end up writing my own song. 

Which has actually stood me in pretty good stead I think, and I still get a big kick out of making records and writing songs.  When it kicks into place there’s nothing quite like it”

I remember Billy Duffy [Guitarist from the Cult] saying that punk stopped him from listening to a lot of older rock music, and that when his punk conscience let him, he discovered that he really liked a lot of it.  Was there a similar thing for you at any time? 

“Not really, because I was into a lot of music before punk came along, so I was into Bowie and T Rex from the tail end of 71/72, and then Roxy Music.  So I was kind of one of those weird kids at school who moved from pop music into rock. 

I got into Black Sabath and Pink Floyd – Pink Floyd were actually the first band I ever saw live.  Pink Floyd cost me a quid [laughs]”. 

Bloody hell, it cost me a quid to see Ded Byrds. 

“[laughs]  Billy was a few years younger than me, but what punk did for me was it made me realise that anybody could get up and play, it wasn’t about being a virtuoso, it was about having energy and good ideas.  And an attitude as well. 

Although I have to say the a lot of the punk music at the time, particularly the English side of it, was a little too non-musical for my tastes.  I preferred more the New York end of things, Talking Heads, Television, that kind of vibe. 

For an 18/19 year old, it seemed a bit more musical to me.  So I never had that, but I do think that when punk came along there was a degree of de-learning. 

By then I’d been playing for three or four years, so I was already of a certain proficiency on the guitar and I think I had to kind of, not dumb it down, but to approach it differently, and to de-learn. 

With punk you had to throw the rule book out of the window” 

Which is what made the music that came after it so interesting I think. 

“Yeah, absolutely.  Without punk there wouldn’t be 95% of the bands that are around today”

What records are you listening to these days? 

“Well I don’t go out and actively look for new things to listen to, but I read reviews and if there’s something that sounds interesting I’ll search it out.  Or if someone recommends something I’ll have a listen. 

But someone said that when they look at my Facebook page, I’m always recommending bands!  They said you recommend Tame Impale, you recommend The XX, Laura Marling, or The Smoke Fairies.  I said I suppose so, but I considered that I just went backwards into more and more older music. 

But I still like to hear new things and I think there is a lot of good music out there, I’m just not particularly exposed to it out in Brazil”

So why did you settle in Brazil? 

“Well my wife’s an actress, so she needs to be there for her work, where I can pretty much do mine anywhere in the world.  I do miss the interaction I have to say, when there’s a group of you in the studio playing, I do miss that”

So you kind of write by email these days? 

“Well throughout the band’s history I’ve kind of written the songs and then taken them to the group.  It kind of gives me license to say that this is how it goes.  Sometimes I go in with very strong ideas and sometimes with almost no idea at all and we bash it around until we find something we like”

I wrote an article on your fans and the lengths they would go to follow you around and go to your gigs and they still do to this day.  You have the most dedicated fans I think I’ve ever known, what do you put that down to? 

“I don’t know really, to be honest with you.  I’d like to attribute it to some kind of integrity that the band have, but I don’t think we’ve got more integrity than anybody else. 

I think there are a whole load of bands from the 80s who benefitted from the fact that the fans were young at that time and have stayed with them.

I’m not sure that the same thing applies to 90s bands.  I think that, whether we like it or not, nostalgia is a big seller and I think that people come to shows not just for the visceral moment of being there, but also they come to relive something, to remember something” 

But at the same time, you’ve never really rested on your laurels, you’ve always created new music and moved it forward. 

“Well there is that, but I would say that’s been more detrimental to us really.  There are some bands that haven’t made records for years and they still command a very loyal audience. 

There are bands that make the same record over and over again and are huge.

I think with us, my boredom threshold is very low, so I like to make records that challenge me as well as challenge the audience”

So what’s next for The Mission? 

“Well we do these shows, then we have some more in November playing with Alice Cooper and then after that we’re going to take a break.  I think we’ve been back together since 2011 and I’m just starting to feel a little bit bored with the rock band format. 

And I think that with the last album we did I kind of tied up a lot of loose ends in my own little mind and I think it’s just time to do something else. 

That’s not to say that we won’t get back to it at some point, but I think it’s time we all had a little break from it and did something else.  And I know that Craig, Simon and Mike need it too.  So we’ll finish the shows this year and take a little time out.  Also, I’m writing my autobiography” 

Well that should be a good read. 

“Well we’ll see [laughs].  It depends on what I decide to keep in or edit out.  But I’m having fun writing it that’s for sure.  It’s amazing how you can remember one thing and it opens up a load of other memories. 

And it’s quite interesting, even when I’m talking with Craig and Simon, and we’re talking about a particular incident we all remember it completely differently.  So this will be my take, my memory of things”

Well, one last question Wayne.  How easy is it to get Blue Nun these days? 

“I haven’t drunk Blue Nun in years! Somebody brought a bottle to a show two or three years ago, and we opened it and tried it and, aw God man, how did we ever drink that stuff [laughs]. 

I’m on the red these days”

And with that we say our goodbyes.  Wayne Hussey has come a long way since the Ded Byrds, and even a long way from his time in The Sisters. 

From Liverpool to Brazil and from cheap white to a (presumably) more classy red.  He sounds like that rarest of creatures, a musician who is at peace with his past, is enjoying his present and has an eye on his future. 

We wish him well and we’ll see him from the mosh pit soon.

Banjo

Categories
Interviews

Zee Davine Interview: “Pop music now, I feel, can be anything”

Queen Zee

With Queen Zee having split up, Sun 13’s’ Banjo spoke to Zee Davine about creating art, subculture and what the future holds.

Zee Davine, ex-singer, guitarist and focal point of the wonderful Queen Zee, is many things. A musician, a spokesman and a role model, definitely. But the first thing that strikes you when you see Zee live is a certain undeniable star quality.

Star quality is a difficult thing to define, but an easy thing to recognise. Some people just have that something extra, something more that means you can’t take your eyes off them. They command, even demand, your attention and you, in turn, are happy to give it.

With Davine at their head, Queen Zee were, however briefly, the best band in the world.

But then, just when things were going well and their rise seemed unstoppable, Queen Zee announced their split, saying ‘It has been an honour to be a voice for the freaks, weirdos and queers for the last three years.

This band has taken us on the greatest personal journeys of our lives so far We are not mourning a loss, we are celebrating our time together.’

Those of us in the know, who had been affected and infected by their sense of purpose, their sense of fun and the sheer exhilaration of seeing them live fell to mourning.

But before too long came notice that Zee Davine was again ready to take to the stage, this time under a new, more personal name.

But what would this new stage show be? What would Zee’s new music sound like? What could we expect from this news?

In Zee’s first interview since Queen Zee split up, we were able to ask these questions, to find out what is going on in Zee’s world and to hopefully have something to look forward to.

We started by looking back and finished by looking forward. Obviously, the first thing we wanted to know about was what happened to Queen Zee.

Why did Queen Zee split up just as it seemed you were about to take over the world?

 “That’s kind of been the reaction I’ve had. I think to everyone outside of the band it felt like a weird time, but I think inside the band it made total sense to us. We never really had any intention to do any of the things we did, [Queen Zee] was a DIY local punk band that just seemed to get out of hand.

It was such an amazing and beautiful experience for our last run of shows, playing Brixton Academy and Reading Festival, being backstage with Dave Grohl, it was surreal!

So with all the joy that brought us we didn’t feel there was any more to achieve. To view the industry as this game of milestones, to tick them all off and get to the stage where you’re headlining Glastonbury or Coachella or becoming a multi-platinum Adele type artist just feels really bizarre to me.

With Queen Zee we always had a message that we wanted to put out there, we had some songs that we wanted to do and we did that.

We never even wanted to do an album, we only did the album because we got PRS funding for 500 vinyl copies. I feel like there was always a timespan for Queen Zee, it was five individuals who all had very different tastes and different views on how we should be artists, how we should conduct ourselves.

We were just enjoying each other’s company, enjoying making music and creating and I think everyone just wanted to go and fulfill themselves in some creative way and Queen Zee just wasn’t that way.

It’s nice that the reaction has been that everyone felt we could have done more. I’d rather people had that reaction than ‘about time!’“

Go out on a peak.

“Yeah, how else could you top a great year than go ‘right, that’s it’.”

Have you got a band together for your upcoming shows?

“Yes and no. It’s not so much as band orientated as Queen Zee was, people come and go, it’s more of a collective feel. But yeah, all seven of us on stage.“

That’s a big band for The Stockroom.

“It is, the band are bigger than the stages we’re playing on this tour, but we’ll make it work.

Dave from Queen Zee is still playing drums, we’ve got bass, guitar, keys, saxophone, there’s a lot of electronic elements, it’s a bit more diverse than Queen Zee. A punk bite remains, but I’ve been able to delve into my other loves a bit more. “

So what’s influencing your new music?

“Probably the same stuff, but I’m taking it to a different place. Instead of looking at the energy of a song being created through the distortion and the noise of it, creating the energy through its tempo or its arrangement, clashing keys or creating a dissonance in the song.

I’m getting a lot more into the songwriting of it in this project, getting into creating something that challenges the ideas we have around Pop and what a Pop song should be.

That’s something that’s always fascinated me, how far can we push what it popular, how can we get the weirdest thing ever to be Pop music, get the masses singing along to something that’s really bizarre. That’s what I’m trying to achieve.”

So that’s the plan, to go to Pop music, whatever version of Pop music it might be?

“Yeah. I’ve always had that love of Pop, I think Pop has always driven everything I’ve done. I’ve always tried to make my music quite concise and to the point. It’s just where I come from, its my background. It’s such a bizarre time for Pop, what was Pop in the 70s was very different from what was Pop in the 80s.

But now, there are no subcultures. You can like Billie Eilish and you can like Black Metal or Ska Punk, and that subculture vibe of ‘I’m a mod’ or ‘I’m a goth’, that is so gone. Pop music now, I feel, can be anything.

So it’s Pop in the sense of popular, but Pop in the sense of Kylie, maybe not so.”

I know you’re an Iggy Pop fan, it sounds like you’ve perhaps moved from Raw Power to The Idiot.

“The Idiot is my favourite Iggy record, so probably there’ll be a bit of that in there.”

Do you still have the same message or manifesto as when you were in Queen Zee?

“I think it’s a little more intense this time. The liberating thing about picking up again and creating your own stuff, which I never really intended to do, I intended to not do music but I think it was the message that has motivated me to keep creating, to keep going. “

You’ve been doing this for a while now, you’ve been a mouthpiece for the LGBT scene for a number of years, have you noticed any changes in that time? Do you think Queen Zee made a difference, do you think you’ve made a difference?

“I’m not sure how much I made a difference, but I’m always amazed when I see the reaction to Queen Zee. I’m not sure how much of it was Queen Zee or how much was down to a general movement in music around 2016/2017. There was a lot of queer artists, it was almost like another wave of Riot Grrl and Queercore.

I’m not sure who spearheaded that, I don’t know why that happened, but it did. I think you can feel an undercurrent in the Punk scene at least and that is very much a part of it again.

In terms of the world, the world is in a state of psychedelic flux. Of course we’ve seen great changes, when I first started Queen Zee I didn’t come out, even though it was very much there in the material and the songs, I wouldn’t talk about it personally, about my queerness or my identity.

Non-binary wasn’t a popular term, gender fluid wasn’t really a term and even though I’d grown up with icons like Pete Burns to help me formulate this into some kind of language, people wouldn’t really get it. They would get the reference, you could say ‘gender bender’ and people would get it.

But now non-binary is used on certain passports in the world and can be used for legal documentation and that’s over such a small span of a couple of years, so it’s really gaining public momentum.

And then on the other hand, hate crime has increased, the murder rate has increased, Trump’s attacks on trans people, the Tories have a very minimalist view on the funding that goes into trans help services. We know the rhetoric that Boris Johnson has used before to describe us LGBT people, so I don’t think the climate has changed but I think the undercurrent has.

But that could, if I’m completely honest, have always been there and it was just a different generation taking over.”

You mentioned how there are no subcultures anymore, no one is a goth or anything anymore, but when I would see Queen Zee live, it was like there was a new audience, a new movement. Is all this a grassroots movement that is flourishing despite the authorities and the political climate? Is this where the rebellion is coming from?

“Yeah, totally. I feel that by destroying subculture we’ve almost created a new subculture, one that’s like a youth movement in general. It’s a disenfranchised youth that’s very aware. It’s the most aware young audience there’s been since the 70s.

It’s so politically turned on, it’s living through Brexit, it was raised in austerity and there’s just this mass of young people who want more, that has this aspiration for more vibrancy in their lives, for more colour, just more than the mundane Brexit doom based scenario that they’ve had to live through.

And that’s what Queen Zee wanted to do, we just wanted to inject some colour for 35 minutes and the fact that people responded to that, there’s definitely a hunger for it.

I’m not sure where people are getting it from, or where they’re going to get it from, but if I was going to bet money on the next Beatles or the next band that really, really explodes, I would say it’s going to be the kind of band that can really become the pinnacle of that and become the anti-everything.”

Can we also expect a non-musical direction from you as well?

“Totally. The idea of Zee Davine is not just my musical output, I’m creating as an artist and song is part of it. The shows are just as rooted in performance and rooted in art as they are in music.

That’s something I’m developing more as an artist and exploring more and I fell that’s where the hunger is, that’s where the appetite is, that’s what’s connecting when I see the eyes of the audience at a show. “

How far is this non-music career going to go? Could it be TV, could you become a celebrity?

“It’s everything. I really just view myself as an artist, I create on every platform and in every format, music is just something I’m inherently drawn to.

As a kid, playing around in your big box of toys, music was the one that I grabbed first. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to play with the other toys. It means that that’s maybe my favourite one.

I’m writing a short film at the moment, with a friend, that will come out next year. The album that’s coming out is a series of videos that interlink. There’s 20 minutes in the show that has no music.

So I’d really like to show how far I can push things, because that’s why I do it. I enjoy creating things, seeing what I can do and being that sort of vessel for it. It will be interesting to see where it does go, I honestly don’t know.”

When can we expect the new album?

“I’m being kind of a perfectionist on it, so not really soon, but fairly soon. Definitely 100% this year and probably sooner rather than later but there’s no single locked in, there’s nothing yet.”

So it would seem that, far from Queen Zee’s ardent audience having to console themselves following the split, we are about to experience an amazing burst of multimedia creativity.

Zee’s passion about art and message is as strong as it ever was. What we are seeing is an artist who refuses to let boundaries or pigeonholing define them or what they do.

What we are seeing is a brave and bold move from someone for whom staying true to your vision is more important than being successful.

Despite the highs that Queen Zee scaled and the impact that they had, it would seem that the best is yet to come.

Banjo

https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/63Rggji5w5RZEJjT262Spr

Categories
Features

Meeting Rowland S Howard: A rambling tale of ambition, meeting your heroes and vodka & lime

First a bit of background information.

Being a Birthday Party fan was never easy. Or, more accurately, it was seldom a group activity.

I had friends who liked all kinds of noisy, out there music made by people who inhabited the fringes of society and convention, but none of my immediate social circle were Birthday Party fans.

On the other hand, I loved them! I loved them with an intensity that set them above other bands I followed. Liking the Birthday Party became a badge of honour, a way of identifying like minded souls.

It seems strange in these Internet-enriched times, but finding fellow fans was not easy. At the time, I was writing to a girl who had placed an ad in the classified pages of the NME, wanting contact with fellow Birthday party fanatics, and we were in touch for many years. However, we only met at Birthday Party gigs.

I had one other friend who I dragged to see a Birthday Party show at Liverpool Warehouse – he didn’t say he hated it, but he never came to see them again.

I saw them three times and, at last, here was a band who were a truly unpredictable proposition. You never knew if you were going to get a conventional show or a violent confrontation, a kiss or a kick.

The second time I saw the Birthday party Nick baited the crowd a little, but definitely led from the front. The next time he drank a whole bottle of Jack Daniels whilst performing, in less than an hour and finished the night collapsed at the back of the stage crying.

Moving forward to post-Birthday Party times, Nick definitely had the public’s attention. His shows were getting bigger, the critical reception was generally very good and the spotlight was firmly pointed at him.

Rowland on the other hand seemed to have been critically neglected and his stock was much lower. This was obviously wrong and obviously a shame.

By now I was no longer in touch with my pen pal and finding fellow believers in the cause was even harder. I did manage to drag a friend along to see Crime and the City Solution in Manchester, but no-one I knew liked or would listen to These Immortal Souls.

Moving forward again. I had a job in Our Price records – remember them?

I thought this would be my ideal job – there were after all questions on the application form asking me who my favourite bands were and what kinds of music I preferred. I remember thinking that all application forms should ask these questions if they were expected to reveal anything worthwhile about a person.

It actually turned out to be more concerned with shifting units and marketing the big sellers, but that’s another story.

Again, this may seem strange in these download days, but it was tricky finding records and CDs by some bands, so customers would place an order and we would try to find it for them and then call them to let them know if we were successful.

One day it was my job to phone customers and tell them we had their orders ready to collect. Part way through I came across a CD of Get Lost (Don’t Lie).

I was amazed; I didn’t know one other person who had this! So when I phoned the guy up to tell him his order was in, I couldn’t help myself. I went against company protocol and asked him about it and generally struck up a conversation.

When he came to pick his CD up, we spoke again and arranged to go for a drink a few days later. Fans of These Immortal Souls had to take company where they could find it, and as I mentioned earlier, this was a way of finding people who were on the same page as you. We occasionally went for drinks and swapped tapes and tales.

Anyway, this is all background.

Shortly after this, I saw in the NME that These Immortal Souls were on tour. This was quite an infrequent occurrence so I had to be there.

I contacted my new friend and we got tickets for their Liverpool gig. Bearing in mind that Nick Cave was by now playing some fairly big venues I found it a little sad that Rowland and TIS were playing at the tiny Planet X venue in Liverpool.

I had headlined this venue myself (well, with my band) so I thought they should be playing somewhere much more prestigious. But even this venue seemed to be out of their reach as it was far from sold out, I’d played to bigger crowds there myself!

Hindsight has led me to see this as an unexplainable and shameful neglect of a truly great and individual talent, but there we go, life’s like that sometimes.

Now, occasionally when I went to a gig I had an ambition to do a certain something.

For example when I saw Hanoi Rocks I wanted to have my photograph taken giving Michael Monro a hug, or when I saw the Au Pairs I wanted to share a spliff with Lesley Woods. I’m not sure why these ideas even came up, but both of these ambitions were fulfilled.

When I went to the These Immortal Souls the idea had formed that I wanted to buy Rowland a drink. I wasn’t sure how possible this would be but, for some reason, the ambition was there.

At the gig, the crowd was sparse and the band were just hanging around. Seeing my chance, I went to speak to Rowland.

He was a surprisingly slight figure, but I always thought that when he was in the Birthday Party. It always amazed me that this thin, almost geeky looking individual was responsible for the whirlwind of noise that was emanating from his guitar amp.

Even though he was quite a weedy looking kind of guy, he had an air of something about him. Not violence exactly, but perhaps the potential for violence.

 Not arrogance exactly, but perhaps the potential for an aggressive tirade. He looked like the kind of person you didn’t want to argue with, not for fear of a physical attack, but because you imagine he could cut your argument dead with a well chosen barb or two.

Anyway, he looked a lot more approachable this time around.

I asked him to sign a few things for me. The Honeymoon in Red album, Some Velvet Morning 12”, a CD or two.

We chatted while he was signing. When he was signing Some Velvet Morning I asked him what Lydia Lunch was really like. He replied “when she was good she was very, very good, but when she was bas she was horrid”, which struck me as a great answer. Partly because it sounded true!

I seized my moment and asked if I could buy him a drink. He asked for a vodka and lime which struck me as immeasurably cool, partly because it was so un-rock ‘n’ roll, i.e. because it was about as far away from a Jack Daniels or a pint of lager as you could get, but partly because it gave me a flash back to one of my earliest experiences with the demon drink.

This was when I was about 13 or 14 and my mum asked me to drop some Christmas cards off at next door’s house. The lady of the house invited me in and was obviously a bit tipsy by this point.

She asked me if I wanted a drink and wouldn’t hear of me having a glass of orange, so she gave me a vodka and lime! I don’t know why, I can only assume that they were big spirits drinkers. I

 thought it tasted nice enough, a bit strong on the lime cordial front because I was more used to having it diluted with a glass of water. I don’t remember the vodka tasting of much, but it doesn’t really does it?

It also tasted a little like the Lime Barrel from a box of Terry’s All Gold chocolates, which I also loved. She must have given me three vodka and limes, quite a lot for so young a chap, and I was at least a little drunk by the time I got back home.

So I bought Rowland his drink, and I got one for myself too. I was so enormously pleased to be buying him a drink, and fulfilling my latest gig ambition.

I remember being at the bar asking for two vodka and limes and wanting to shout out “I’m buying a drink for Rowland S Howard!” but thankfully I managed to resist these urges.

I gave Rowland his drink and we chinked glasses.

We chatted a bit more; he seemed to be quite an intense sort, his answers seemed very thought through; possibly because he’d been asked them all before, but possibly because he genuinely gave a lot of thought to what came out of his mouth.

It was, is and always will be such a shame that he didn’t become more famous, because he suited being a star. He had the charisma, the talent and the bearing of someone who was born to be feted, to have his picture on a million teenage bedroom walls, to be admired from afar.

Maybe there’s an alternate universe somewhere where Rowland S Howard is a name synonymous with an almost superhuman level of fame and worship. I hope so.

I was a bit concerned about looking like a bit of a fanboy by this stage, so I went off to chat to the other members of the band.

Genevieve was as lovely as I’d imagined, all elfin and smiley. I didn’t talk much to Harry, but I had a brief chat with Epic about the Swell Maps.

I always thought it odd that two people from this underachieving tinny punk band would go on to become these respected figures, working with some of the greatest musicians I had ever seen.

A friend of mine used to run away from home to stay with the Swell Maps, I asked if he remembered him. He didn’t.

During the gig, the friend I was with kept shouting out for Black Milk. When this song was about to be played, Rowland dedicated it to his ‘friend’ at the front.

After the gig I never saw either of them again.

Banjo

Categories
Interviews

Stealing Sheep Interview: “you have to be brave and push boundaries and experiment with your own vision”

Sun 13’s Banjo speaks to Stealing Sheep about their influences, rejecting the norm and playing in a beam of light.

After an eventful 12 months, it seems only right that Stealing Sheep are Getintothis’ band of 2019.

The year has seen them release their incredible Big Wows album, which quite rightly made our album of the month back in April, where we noted that ‘ the mere fact that they exist makes pop music a better place.’

They also played the 6 Music Festival held in Liverpool, made a triumphant and extravagant return to Edge Hill Arts Centre and finished the year with a three night residency at The Stockroom, an ‘intimate’ venue with a capacity of just 80 people.

And, something we’re very pleased about, they will be appearing at Liverpool Sound City in 2020.

But more than this, what marks Stealing Sheep out from the pack is the way they naturally, even instinctively, look to do things differently. Not content with the idea of turning up to play a set of songs in their day clothes, they have instead mastered the art of performance.

We can think of no other band capable of putting on a show like Stealing Sheep do and it is simultaneously impressive and inspiring. Every aspect of every detail seems considered and, wherever possible, an alternative, better way of doing things emerges.

The same attitude informs their music, where once again the level of thought and attention to detail raises the Sheep above the masses and makes them stand out and shine.

Personally, no one has impressed me as much in the whole of 2019 and this is a situation I can’t see changing anytime soon.  If I see a better gig than the last one I saw by Stealing Sheep, chances are it will be by Stealing Sheep.

To look back at their year and to find out what might be happening in the future, Getintothis spoke to keyboard player Rebecca Hawley about their dream gig, how they get on with technology and empowerment.

I find it difficult to pinpoint where Stealing Sheep get their influences, but I get hints of post punk bands like The Raincoats. What would you say influences your music?

“I’ve never actually heard The Raincoats, but I get where you’re coming from with the way of making music and them not being from classically trained backgrounds, and being a gang of friends and putting music together.

We actually listen to such a massive mix of music, but film soundtrack stuff, Bernard Herrmann. Also, a lot of electronic music, techno stuff, and we really like Daft Punk and their approach. And we listen to a lot of Suzanne Ciani, Delia Derbyshire, Laurie Anderson, those kind of more conceptual synth women.

But it really is a broad range, because then there’ll be times when we just want to listen to Dad stuff or folk stuff.“

Is that where you see yourself, more at the conceptual side of things?

“We do more ‘art’ shows with dancers, so I feel like we’ve got an outlet where we explore more experimental ideas and then the band side is much more of a party atmosphere, using our album’s recorded material.

But we often remix that for a live audience as well. I guess we try to experiment with different ways of performing live,”

I think that’s where the post punk thing comes into it for me, it was a time when people were questioning everything that went into an album or a gig – do bands just stand there and play or can they do something else, can they take it further?

“Yes, because we’re all individuals and we all come from more artistic backgrounds, so that keeps it really fresh and alive for us, playing with costume and lights, how to make it more like a collective experience for the crowd. And us.”

Which shows do you prefer doing, the more theatrical; ones or more straightforward gigs?

“Both, for different reasons. The ‘spectacle’ shows have more of a barrier between us and the audience and we’re more robotic.

We play into that, we feel that everything has to be completely perfect and in sync in the way that we’ve choreographed it, whereas the band show is a much more free spirited experience where there’s no fourth wall and we can break down the barrier between us and the crowd and have that direct connection.

So they both have quite radically different experience connected to them for us and for the audience. It’s interesting to explore the two extremes like that.”

The last two Edge Hill shows that you’ve done were incredible, and now I’m looking forward to seeing you at the Stockroom to see the other side of Stealing Sheep. What made you play a residency there rather than one night at a bigger venue?

“We have a big history with The Kazimier, so that venue and that area of town is such a massive part of our evolution as a band, along with the people who run that venue. With the car park that’s turned into the gardens, they’ve been really creative with the space and the former stockroom, where all the drinks used to be is somewhere we used to hang out backstage.

It’s got an atmosphere that only comes through all of these years of being on the same theme together. So that venue it’s like a portal, like a beam of light in the middle of the gentrification, that has our history in it.

It’s a place that resonates basically, and it felt like the right thing. Plus the fact that we’ve got quite a big show now that fits on a bigger stage and to bring that into a tiny room to have an intimate show with only 80 people, I think that that experience is going to be really amazing.

And Edge Hill has become this incredible place for us, it’s local but it’s a little out of the way, so it’s good for them to bring more of the Liverpool cultural scene into their venue. They have these amazing facilities where we can road test things that we otherwise couldn’t dream of. That pairing has become revolutionary for what we’re doing.

When they first approached us it was at a time when we really needed it, when we wanted to start pushing our artistic boundaries but we didn’t have the financial backing to do that. We suddenly had this unlimited creative scope, so that’s been massively important in our development.”

Is this part of your search for something different?

“Yes, I think it’s just natural for us to lean that way, to have these different experiences with live shows and spaces. In Edinburgh we played The Caves, which is a space that has a really amazing history because the person who found it knocked through walls and claimed it, he was basically a squatter and he just sat on it for ten years and now it’s an amazing music venue.

We played in a library and the premise of that really appealed to us because it’s about reclaiming libraries as public spaces and diversifying how we experience libraries.”

How will this differ from your last performance there?

“Last time we played we celebrated the centenary of suffrage with a 15 piece female marching band and a 15 strong dance troupe from Edge Hill University. It was a bespoke performance with workshops and a residency with brighter sound a charity based in the northwest with a manifesto to rebalance gender in the music industry. This resonates with Sound City too and made for a magical collab.

In 2020 we’re touring our album show Big Wows, performing tracks from our latest album and live remixes of our past stuff, it’s our 10th anniversary as a band and this is culminating in super eclectic show filled with lasers, choreography, costume changes and rhythmically synchronised lights, programmed and built by Venya Krutikov, one of the directors at the infamous Kazimier Productions.”

Where would be your dream gig?

“We’ve been plotting for a while to do something in the Barbican, because we’ve seen quite a lot of interesting things there, so that’s one of our dreams.

But in a more dreamy, fantastical sense we’ve been looking into a virtual reality dream venue, so I think that will come to fruition in the next year or so, a self-invented space to perform. Inside a rainbow for example or a beam of light”

How would you describe your relationship with technology?

“That’s a theme within the album. We’re from the pre-Internet generation, so we remember what it was like to go and call for your friends and they might not be in and it was a surprise and it was spontaneous, before Instagram and being popular online and how it affected people.

We had that as a discussion within the group and that started coming through the music. It also affects how we make music, how you start making music with acoustic instruments and then how the computer becomes a tool as well.

It’s a love/hate relationship with the computer because it’s an amazing palette that you could never have accessed otherwise and then it’s that journey of trying to find the human, emotive quality in all of the sounds and how slight things like modulation travel through the sound of the synthesiser and gives it an almost organic felling, and then pitch shifting so it sounds more human, because the human voice isn’t just monotone, it fluctuates.

And I feel that this mirrors the conversation that we’re having about technology and how we’re trying to manipulate it to bring back to its human essence.”

Your music is quite intricate and has lots of different parts to it, but it all manages to fit together. How do you go about writing your songs?

“We each have a vision for a song and the meanings we want to get across,  and that’s an independent thing that comes out of one of us having a certain message or a certain chord progression that has a feeling to it and then that person usually directs the vision and we all support that and bring it to life and then we all add our own personalities to it.

On most of the albums there’s kind of a ‘leader’ per track and I think that that comes out. That gives the albums so much variety and dynamic because it’s always going between each of us. And the fact they’ve all got vocals linking together creates a thread that goes through everything that we do that makes it completely ours, no matter how we want to experiment with genres and sounds. It’s our personalities coming through those vocals.”

You’ve changed a lot musically over the years, have we now arrived at the Stealing Sheep sound or is this just another stop on a long journey?

“I’d say the latter, which is kind of annoying because it means we’re never satisfied. We have a personal need to push our boundaries of what we can do and that’s what makes us us, the thirst for fresh energy and sounds and exploration.

But I do feel there’s been a reference to each decade in each album, where we’ve been really enjoying a certain era. They’ve kind of been in the right order too, 60s, then 70s, then early krautrock into more electronic 80s pop, then into where we are now.

Lucy’s been playing a lot of Charleston jazz drumming in the background so I don’t know if that will come through, but who knows.”

You do always seem to have one foot firmly planted in the future as well, so it never seems retro.

“I think that applies to so many things we do as well, like what we want to do with a gig and the album sounds.

We’re on tour at the moment and we have a support artist on tour with us called VideO, who does all of our visuals, she’s very much in tune with who we are and what we represent, and we’ve been working with her as sort of a pen pal over the Internet for a year without even knowing each other and now we’ve got her in real life.

I feel that when we’ve been the support artist in the past it’s been very, very hard, you’re right at the beginning of your career. So we wanted to change things instead of going by the rules of the past and so we have them on tour with us, in the van, making sure they don’t have to spend money unnecessarily, putting them up in our hotels and anything that we can do to make that experience better for the new artist.

Hopefully we’ll be changing the culture in the music industry that way, with little things where we go “we don’t have to just do what everyone did to us, we’re in a position now where we can make it a bit different” and that applies to how we want to do a lot of things.”

Is this questioning of the norm, rejecting of the norm something instinctive or is it something you’ve sat down and talked about?

“I think it’s instinctive and it might be based a little on our backgrounds and the lack of opportunities we might have experienced as younger people and coming at things from a more artistic background, where you’re taught that if you’re following the market you’ll always be behind the market.

So you have to be brave and push boundaries and experiment with your own vision, even though that can be harder and more scary and you could face more rejection.

If you’re coming from a background where things haven’t always gone smoothly, maybe that’s part of your instinct to reject the norm, because the norm didn’t work for you as a child, and for many people who are disenfranchised or on the outskirts of privilege and things like that. So maybe that’s something that’s come through how we’ve been brought up.”

Do you see that as part of what you do, giving a voice to the disenfranchised?

“There’s a feeling of wanting to unite people who have been outcasts, at school or somewhere else. That’s a strong feeling for us, just through different things in our past, like family members that have been rejected. You have more of an empathy, there’s definitely a fight in that and it’s a good fight to have.”

There’s an air of empowerment about Stealing Sheep as well. Is that part of the same thing, the same struggle?

“Yes, that’s something that we’ve experienced through being three women on stage and being constantly compared at the beginning, realising that that shouldn’t be how it is. All this subconscious bias that everybody has and the “which is your favourite?” and “who’s the most talented?” and things like that.

We’ve rebelled against that and realised that it’s about supporting other women, making sure women aren’t a threat to each other, that it shouldn’t be like that. We want people to feel that girls should support each other instead of being seen as competitors.”

What next for Stealing Sheep?

“We’ve got a few plans for 2020. We’ve already announced South by Southwest, and we’re going to announce a US tour and we have the plans for the virtual reality experience that we’d like to start developing. Also, there will be  new music in the new year, so quite a lot.”

So, while Stealing Sheep may be the best band of the last 12 months, it would appear that they are all ready for the next 12.  It is also easy to see they aren’t afraid of a challenge.

They have the songs, the appeal, the intelligence and the drive to take their sound and their performance truly overground in the next year.

Our band of the year may also be our band of the future.

Banjo

Sun 13