Thanks so much to Peter Watts for this great interview. The first time I heard “Giving Way to Trains” I was so surprised. It was such a fantastic song and I couldn’t believe it was THIS obscure. It deserved better. It deserved to be an indiepop classic. Happily I found his actual band, Spygenius, and Peter was kind enough to answer some questions for me. Hopefully now the Murrumbidgee Whalers are not that obscure anymore!

++ Hi Peter! Thanks for the interview! How are you doing these days? I see you are still involved with music through your band Spygenius! What surprises me is that you are still making guitar pop music! I guess this is the music you love the most? Why would you say is that?

Well, guitar pop was my first love, and it’s always stood by me!  At a young age I got obsessed with the Beatles, especially circa 1965 / 1966 (yes, I know, so did everyone…). And then the Byrds, when I bought a 7” single which had Mr. Tambourine Man on one side and Turn, Turn, Turn on the other.  I became completely besotted with the electric 12 string jangle and just wanted to make that noise – so at first I tried to find ways of making my six string sound like a twelve string, using lots or arpeggios and open strings, kind of like on Revolver, then I actually had a go a building an electric 12 string, out of an old neck from an acoustic guitar and some really cheap fender copy body.  You could play it, just about, but it would only stay in tune for half a song… so as soon as I got some money I bought a proper one….

From the Beatles and the Byrds I got into psychedelia – all those West Coast bands – I love the folk and country influences and the big harmonies.  But I guess as much as those sixties influences, the period in which I woke up musically was an era of classic intelligent British guitar pop – Squeeze, XTC, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, the Smiths, the Jazz Butcher, Robyn Hitchcock – all of which seeped into my musical consciousness. And then alongside that there was the whole paisley revival thing in the 80s – the Rain Parade, Guadalcanal Diary, the Smithereens, Let’s Active, those sorts of chaps.  And REM, I suppose, if you push me on it… so it was guitars all the way, and I just sort of joined in.  Actually, there’s loads of other genres of music that I love too (all those classic Capitol easy listening tracks, and exotica), but the guitar is the only instrument that I’ve ever been able to master, so I guess that is another reason why my music comes out this way…

++ Tell me about Spygenius. What are the differences between it and the Murrumbidgee Whalers? How many releases you have? Do you play often?

Well the main difference is that Spygenius has managed to stay together for the better part of a decade instead of imploding under the stress of young egos clashing with each other!  Also, we have a guitar-bass-drums-keys line up rather than a guitar-guitar-bass-drums line up.  The full Spygenius line up is me (guitar), my wife Ruth Rogers (bass), Matt Byrne (Keyboards) and Alan Cannings (Drums).  And we all sing.  It started out with just me, Ruth and Matt working as an acoustic trio – we’d all been in bands before and seen them flourish and then fade away, and so I suppose our aim with Spygenius was really just to try to write, record and perform original music to the highest standard we could muster, for as long as we could get away with it!  The acoustic thing was great, but I think we really came into our own as a group after we found Alan hiding in the van… I think another difference between Spygenius and the Whalers is that the whole approach is a bit more mature – the Whalers had a lot of ideas and energy and attitude, but Spygenius have a bit more in the way of knowledge and skill and experience. So there are some advantages to getting older!

We don’t play that often nowadays – usually we play in Canterbury (in the south east of England) where Ruth and I live, but we do venture out of the city from time to time – we usually play the International Pop Overthrow festival in London and Liverpool – and in fact last year we played at the IPO in Los Angeles which was a great experience – I think we’re a very English band, so it was relief and a joy that we went down OK with an LA crowd.

Spygenius has released three official albums to date, mostly recorded in our home studio – ‘Songs from the Devil’s Typist’, ‘Red Lounge’ and ‘The Comforting Suture’.  We’re currently working on a fourth studio album, plus we recorded a couple of gigs a few months back, and as soon as we’ve tidied those recordings up a bit we’re going to release them, probably just as a download for hard core fans.  Hopefully we’ll get them done before the IPO Liverpool in May.

++ And how come you decided to re-record “Giving Way to Trains” with your new band? Have you “recovered” some other songs from that period?

Giving Way to Trains has been part of Spygenius’s repertoire for a few years now so it made sense to record it, because the Whaler’s version didn’t really mean a lot to the folk who come to see Spygenius now.  I think I originally wanted to put it in the set because ex-Whalers would occasionally come to Spygenius gigs, so I thought we could give them a little treat!  And yes, Spygenius do play a lot of the songs that the Whalers used to – as I said before, we were all pretty young when the Whalers were going and I think quite often our ideas outstripped our ability to realize them – so it’s good sometimes to revisit a tune to try to finish the job.  ‘Trains’ is a bit of an exception to that rule because the 7” exists, and so effectively I recorded a cover version of myself – which was a bit strange… quite pleased with the result, though.

++ About “Giving Way to Trains”, it’s such a great song, I think it should have been a classic. What’s the story behind this song?

Well, where should I start?  I know it sounds like it’s about one particular relationship, but it’s not.  In the UK Highway Code there is (or was, back in the 1980s, I haven’t checked lately) a line that says that at level crossings you should always give way to trains (or in American English, that you should ‘yield’ to trains).  And it makes it sound so polite, like it’s just a matter of etiquette – but of course if you don’t ‘yield’ to the train you’ll get completely splattered into oblivion.  And it seemed to me that that happens sometimes in life – that there are things you need to just walk away from even if you really don’t want to.  And I have to admit that I’m not very good at doing that, and on occasions I’ve made a real mess of things because I haven’t known when to stop.  So, the song is an aide memoir to me – don’t be an idiot: sometimes it’s better to walk away.  (Although, having said that, sometimes, just sometimes, running in front of the train (metaphorically speaking), taking the risk and forgetting about the consequences, well, that can be what makes you feel alive…  But no – I’m not going to advocate that! Don’t try this at home, kids! Safety first…) So there you go – existential conundrums explored through the medium of train related guitar pop – what could be finer!?

++ Let’s go a bit back to the early days of the Murrumbidgee Whalers. When did the band start and how did you all come together? How did you know each other? And you were based in Sussex then, right?

Actually we were based in Surrey, in a place called Carshalton Beeches which is about 14 miles south of central London (more of CB later!).  ‘Sussex Rd’ was just the name of the street I lived in, with my brother who was also in the band.

Anyway, I guess the Whalers started with me and my brother learning to play guitars in our bedroom, where we used to bash through classic 60s pop tunes together.  Then I decided to get together with some mates from school to form a band – I guess I was about 14 years old – and after quite few years and a lot of racket the Whalers emerged.  There were a lot of line-up changes, but the classic line-up was me (guitar / vocals), my elder brother Chris (guitar, vocals, occasional faltering keyboards – brave man!), David Fisher (first bass, then drums and vocals) and Rob Telford (bass and vocals).  I can’t actually remember how I got to know David – he was someone I knew of from the local musician scene and I think he replaced me on guitar in a side-project band that I’d been involved in.  The first time we ever played together, I think, was in some sort of pick-up rock ‘n’ roll band playing on the fringe of a dodgy festival somewhere in the Midlands.  I don’t remember it too well, because I was, well, let’s be honest, very drunk.  He had a pink beard, was playing the drums that night, and fell off the stage along with his kit, which I thought was pretty rock ‘n’ roll, so it was fine by me.  Anyway, I think we got to know each other after that, and when we lost our previous bass player, he asked to join and the rest is history.  Rob I met through David.

Actually, though, the single of Giving Way to Trains was recorded by the previous line-up, with David on bass and a guy called Martin Gregory on drums. I think I met Martin because he was a friend of the younger brother of the guy I used to sit next to at school.  Or maybe it was through a youth club?  I’m not sure, but he was also part of the local musician scene. I always had an ear to the ground in those days for the names of people who were playing, you know, just in case you’d suddenly need a new drummer…

++ And who came up with the name? What’s the name about? I read there’s a river in Australia of the same name? But also a song by Harry Robertson?

I think we must have been named after the song, but not even realized it!  Or at least I never did.  I’d never heard of the song until just now when you asked the question and I looked it up on Youtube – the person who came up with the name was a former bass player I think (am I right, Simon?  Was it you?) and as far as I remember we decided we liked it because of the idea of telling tall tales – obviously there are no whales in the Murrumbidgee, so if you’re claiming to be a Murrumbidgee Whaler then there’s got to be something fishy going on from the outset.  That seems to be what the song is about, so I guess that was the original inspiration – I knew the story, but I’d just heard it as an anecdote, I didn’t know about the song.  It kind of fitted us though, because there was always a bit of a folk influence in our music – people kept saying I sounded like Ian Anderson (which I never understood – although I did have a habit of standing on one leg on stage at that time…).  In any case it was a terrible name for a band doing what we were doing because promoters couldn’t spell it (“Tonight!  The Murrum Bridge Whalers!”) and / or they would think that we were a reggae band (“No, ‘Whalers’, not ‘Wailers’”).

++ So you released the one and only 7″, which you were telling me only 250 copies were made! That’s so little. How come you didn’t press more? And also, why weren’t there more releases by your band?

The original 7” was entirely self-funded and we didn’t have a lot of money, so we just pressed enough to use for promotion purposes.  I seem to remember that we printed 500 sleeves, so that we could just get the discs done if we ever ran to another batch.  We sent out loads of them to anyone we could think of – record companies, magazines, management companies – and got occasional nice reviews, but never really much interest. I seem to remember being invited to sit in the lobby of Chrysalis records for several hours before meeting someone for about 30 seconds, but it never came to anything.  As for why there were no more releases, well I guess the band dissolving in a maelstrom of youthful egos didn’t help!

++ This release was self-released under Ahab! Records. I guess you were a big Moby Dick fan as well? Just to keep with the whale theme, right? How did you enjoy doing the label bit? Sending out records, promotion? How was your setup?

I’d really, really like to be able to claim that we called the label ‘Ahab!’ because Albert Camus presents the good Captain as an exemplar of the ‘absurd hero’.  But I can’t. It’s not true.  We did indeed use that name just to keep the whale theme going, and to be honest even now I still haven’t read the book.  I have seen the ‘Dicky Moe’ Tom and Jerry cartoon, though, and that was a life-changing moment… In fact, ‘Ahab!’ wasn’t really a proper label, it was a marketing ploy to make the record look more official than it really was.  I think we did consider turning it into a real label, but we were pretty naïve and never quite got our act together.  I can’t really say much about our set up, because it was all pretty chaotic and hit and miss (mostly miss, to be honest…) – we’d send out and chase up the records ourselves – that’s the four of us plus our good friend James Kliffen who acted as our manager.

++ In this record the B side was “In a Garden” which I still haven’t had the chance to listen. But do tell me what is this song about?

Yes, hmm, In a Garden.  Not a great song, which is one of the reasons why Spygenius has never picked it up, I suppose.  Ghastly lovelorn teenage angst about a girl I dated way back in the last millennium.  It has a folky tune, sung over a guitar part that sounds like Johnny Marr c1983 if he had joined the Cure.  Actually that makes it sound better than it is.  I have recently made an mp3 copy of the Whalers’ version, and keep planning to put it on Sound Cloud, then chickening out in the interests of public decency… not my strongest moment.  I suppose it has some sort of naïve charm, but the lyrics are just awful.  Not awesome, awful… but I will let you know if I ever do commit it to the internet…

++ “Giving Way to Trains” was also included in a 7″ compilation released by House of Dolls. How did this release came about?

Well, there’s the thing.  None of us can remember.  When you first contacted me about doing the interview I got in touch with David, Robert, Chris and James and everyone thinks that someone else in the band was responsible for sorting out that contact.  David told me to ask Chris, Chris thought that James had set up the deal following a suggestion from David or Robert, Robert thought that James had set it up, but James doesn’t think it was his idea.  I know it wasn’t mine!  I know that somehow we got an interview for House of Dolls (which was conducted in a Buddhist Café in Croydon for some reason…?) and getting the track on the EP came from that – but how we got the interview?  Sorry, none of us has any idea, it’s lost in the mists of time… this may partly explain why we never rose to any massive success: we were all very easily confused….

++ What about other recordings by the band? Are there any? Maybe lying in some demo tapes in someone’s cupboard?

Actually, they’re in a sideboard.  Yes, the Whalers did record another four songs on 16 track, and I do have a quarter inch reel of tape which I think has these songs on, but I don’t have a reel to reel recorder, and anyway I think the tape would have to be baked or something before it can be played.  I will get around to making digital copies of them one day.  I can’t actually remember which songs are on there, but I think one of them was a song called ‘Heathen’ which is scheduled to be revisited on the next Spygenius release.

++ How was Carshalton back then? What were your favourite places to hang out? Did you go out there often? Or did you mostly commuted to London and see bands there?

Carshalton is an ancient village mentioned in the Doomsday Book.  Carshalton Beeches, which is where I’m from, isn’t.  It is mentioned in a Monty Python sketch, though.  Carshalton Beeches is a mile or so up the road from Carshalton proper, and is an area where a lot of medium priced housing was put up between the wars, so that people could live there and commute to London.  It centers on, and is actually named after, the railway station.  In fact, the house that my brother and I grew up in backed onto the railway station.  (And if you listen to Spygenius’s version of ‘California Sunshine’, on our third album, it starts with a station announcer – that’s more or less what I could hear from my bedroom every morning when I was a kid.)  Back in the 80s there wasn’t a whole lot for teenagers to do in Carshalton Beeches (or in Carshalton, for that matter) – in fact there was pretty much nothing to do.  There were no clubs or bars or venues to speak of, and even now the only real landmark apart from the station is a baker’s shop.  That baker’s shop is the geographical hub of Carshalton Beeches….

So, mostly I’d go to London – up to the Mean Fiddler (the old one in Harlesden), Dingwalls, the Bull and Gate in Kentish Town, places like that.  Back then there was a pretty good pub scene for original live music, and the Whalers were part of that – playing at the Bull and Gate, the Half Moon (Herne Hill) and, erm, I’ve forgotten… other similar pubs, most of which are now gone.  First tribute bands and then Karaoke started to erode the original music scene, and then everyone decided to stay at home and watch their home cinema systems instead of going to gigs, so one by one the pubs died or changed their trade.  I was really pleased to discover the other year that the Bull and Gate was still operating as venue (in fact Spygenius played a gig there, twenty-odd years on, and it had hardly changed.  Same sticky stains on the floor…).  But I just heard that the Bull and Gate is going to close down soon, as well…

++ Did you gig a lot? Any favourite gigs that you remember? Any anecdotes you’d share?

The Whalers mostly gigged around London playing short sets – half an hour or forty minutes – which were great, but they’ve all sort of blurred into one in my head over the years.  But, whenever we could we would also get gigs in student unions which were really good because you’d get paid!  Those are the ones I tend to remember – as for anedotes, well, the event that always sticks in my mind was at a gig at one of the colleges in Cambridge.  I always used to wear this hat on stage – it was a really beautifully worn out railwayman’s cap, and quite often as we were jumping about and what have you, it would fall off, which it had on this occasion.  So there I was, standing at the front, lips glued to the microphone, so I can’t see the rest of that band – but then I became aware that Rob’s playing had become just a wee bit random, that there was a lot of cheering going on in the crowd, and that a lot eyes were pointed in Rob’s direction.  So as soon as there was a gap in the singing I turned around to see what all the commotion was about, and basically, what was happening was that the pizza that Rob had eaten before going on stage had turned out to be a bit dodgy and had decided to escape back to the outside world.  So, no polite way of putting this, Rob was throwing up, on stage, into my hat – and at no point did he stop playing, which I thought demonstrated consummate professionalism.  In any case, the crowd seemed to enjoy it.  I was a bit conflicted, though, because I was very fond of that hat, and tried to rescue it – I thought I’d figure out how to clean it later.  So we stowed our gear in a ‘secure’ room somewhere on the campus, and went back to our accommodation for the night (a floor, in a corridor, in some or other halls of residence).  Next day we discovered that someone had managed to get into the room where our gear was stored and had made off with two microphones, and my befouled hat.  Weird.  Why would anyone do that?  Pinching the microphones I can understand, but why the violated hat?  Some sort of trophy?

++ During those late 80s there were many great guitar pop bands. Did you like any of them? Did you feel part of a scene?

Yeah, I really liked the whole guitar pop scene of the mid-late 80s – in addition to the groups I mentioned before, I got massively into the Throwing Muses and the Pixies – I think they did a tour of the UK together sometime in 87 or 88 and I remember getting to as many of those shows as I could.  I don’t know if we really felt part of that scene, though, we weren’t successful enough!  But we certainly felt akin to it, we sort of aspired towards it – I think we felt part of a sort of pub-sub-scene!? There were loads of groups playing around the London pub circuit at that time, people who fitted musically with the guitar pop culture of the late 80s, and who were just out there trying to make a name for themselves.  We’d bump into each other a lot, and sometimes arrange joint shows.  There was a band called the Bicycle Thieves who we used to hook up with quite a bit (not the same as the one from Liverpool or the one from Texas – they were from Lewisham) – I don’t know what happened to them…?  But another great thing about the London live music scene in the 80s was that you didn’t just have aspiring bands and up-and-coming bands and American bands – you also had people who’d once been pretty big playing in some really cool intimate little venues – guys like Geno Washington and my personal favorite, Wilko Johnson – Wilko’s just finished his farewell tour and it occurred to me that I’ve been going to see him quite regularly for 28 years.  Back in the 80s I went to see Wilko a lot, every chance I got – I picked up so much about stagecraft and about how to play killer rhythm/riffing guitar from watching that man.  I remember not long after I saw him for the first time dragging the entire Murrumbidgee Whalers along to one of his gigs to sit and learn at the feet of the master.  Love him.  I’m really going to miss him.

++ And when and why did you split? What did you guys do after?

I think we split in 1990.  Why?  Well, did I already mention the whole ‘egos of young men in their early 20s’, thing? I did?  Also, the whole experience was very intense and I think we’d burned out a bit – we’d not managed to achieve the success we’d hoped for, and then the musical backdrop changed – the ‘Madchester’ thing started happening and we began to feel out of step – also, Rob wanted to go back to University and David wanted to branch out on his own, so I guess the thing had just run its course. Following the Whalers David set up his own group (Jubilee) which Chris got involved with, and I formed a series of bands trying to pick up where the Whalers left off – the most recent and successful of which is Spygenius.

++ Are you all still in touch? What are you all up to these days? Any other hobbies aside making music?

Yes, we’re all still great friends and hang out when we get the time, we’re all still playing to one degree or another, and we all get involved in each other’s projects.  David has released a couple of albums of his songs, which Rob, Chris and I have all played on.  David has also recorded and mixed some of Spygenius’s recordings, and Spygenius has on occasions worked as David’s backing band.  In fact David and I co-wrote a song a couple of years back – California Sunshine – which we’ve both recorded and released.  I think Rob and David are gigging together at the moment, along with Alan (Spygenius’s drummer).  And it’s good – more relaxed than in the 80s, which, on balance, makes for a more creative environment!  And the Murrumbidgee Whalers did actually do a reunion gig a few years ago – just the one!  A bit rusty, but it was fun. There are no plans for any more, though.  And we’re all still in touch with James as well, who maintains a keen interest in what we’re all doing musically – in fact a few years back he asked both David and Spygenius to play at his wedding, which was great fun, and somehow ended up with us all having a jam with Robyn Hitchcock – an unexpected bonus and a long story…. The only ex-Whaler I’m not really in touch with any more is Martin Gregory who played drums on the single – he moved to the States, to Boston.  Ruth and I did go to visit him back in 2005, but he forgot we were coming and drove to Maine for the weekend, so we never got to meet up.  Still, Boston has lots to entertain the stranded British tourist, so we were just fine.

++ One last question, looking back, what would you say was the biggest highlight of the band?

On a good night, there was a real chemistry between the four of us.  I think if you’ve never been in a band it can be hard to understand the power of that collective mind thing – it’s elusive and fleeting, but, damn, it’s good when it happens.  And I’m not saying there hasn’t been chemistry and good chemistry in bands I’ve been in since – there has – but the Whalers was where I first experienced it, and you never really forget that.

++ Alright, let’s wrap it here. Thanks so much Peter, happy to have heard the story of the band, and being a little less obscure for me at last. Anything else you’d like to add?

Only to say thanks very much for requesting the interview.  It is amazing to me, and really, really, pleasing, to think that people have heard and liked our record, and that they care enough to want to know more.  Music ultimately is about communication, so it’s both weird and wonderful to be getting some replies now to that little musical message in a bottle we sent out all those years ago.  I love it!

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
Murrumbidgee Whalers – Giving Way to Trains

Thanks so much to Phil and Graham for the interview! I’ve written a bit about Life Studies before on the blog and then we’ve shared a great Practice Session as well if you want to check it up. Happily I was in touch at last with the original members from the band and the mystery of Life Studies is no mystery no more!

++ Hi! Thanks so much for being up for the interview. Whereabouts are you these days? Still based in Gloucester? Still making music?

Phil: No I moved up North to near Manchester in the 90’s.

Gray. I still live near Gloucester, we keep in touch with Martyn, he now lives in Devon.

Phil: Gray and I have made more music together in the last five years that we had ever done before. I invested in a home studio (a spare bedroom and a Mac!) and we get together and record.

Gray: Anything from crooning covers like People are Strange and Scott Walker’s After the Lights Go Out, to new Life Studies stuff harking back to the jangly 80’s. We are just setting up to record remotely so we can put stuff together without having to travel!

++ There’s so much mystery about your band, only one single and then you disappeared. What had happened? Why did you split? Why didn’t you get to release more music?

Phil: Gray and I started the band in 1979 and we went through several incarnations until we got to the band that made the single. Things were changing so fast musically then that by the time we got to recording Homeward we already had our hearts set on new horizons. I suppose Martyn moving abroad left a creative gap and that seemed to be a natural place at which to rethink.

Gray: I had already started drumming with some other fiends who formed a group called the Erratic Strides which was a whole different sound to Life Studies. We didn’t really ‘split’ and various bands grew out of Life Studies with Phil and I being the constant. At one gig we did a purely acoustic set of Cole Porter songs with female singer so I guess we were experimenting in real time.

Phil: We did go back into the studio a few times but in those days it was a big undertaking and cost money. We didn’t make much from gigging and whilst we all had day jobs we didn’t always have the funds for recording.

++ But I assume that you had many more songs than the ones included in the 7″, right? Are there any more recordings of yours lying around somewhere? Maybe on some dusty tapes forgotten in a box?

Gray: There are some surviving tapes but the quality, both musically and sound is variable. There are some tapes which we can’t find that include some decent studio recordings.

Phil: I had thought it would be fun to see if any master tapes still exist. We could put them into Pro Tools and re do some of the overproduced stuff and clean it up.

Gray: It was great that Paul still had some copies there was stuff on there we hadn’t heard for 30 years!

++ I read that the single was played and championed many times by John Peel! That must have been a highlight for the band? How was the first time you heard your songs being played on the radio? Where were you?

Gray: We didn’t hear it! A friend of the band did and a few other fans confirmed it was played at least twice. Apparently John said ‘1983 seems to be the year of the acoustic guitar’ I would like to have heard his tone of voice.

Phil: A lot of Peel fans used to record his shows, me included, so there might even be a recording of it somewhere. We did get to meet him briefly at a Fall gig in London but didn’t think to ask him if he remembered it. I doubt he would have!

++ And then I have also read that two of you joined a band called The Trout Faced Few. I’ve never heard their songs, were there any releases? And how did they sound like? Similar to Life Studies?

Gray: TFF was a sort of combination of The Erratic Strides and Life Studies with some others thrown in. We sounded pretty much like the Fall. You could get away with it in the mid 80’s in Gloucester as the Fall were not that well know or heard.

Phil: Julian the vocalist did a passable impression of Mark Smith, but there is an obvious Beefheart influence, hence the name.

Gray: We also had two drummers which the Fall had started doing around ’82. That raised a few eyebrows when we played small pubs!

Phil: There is a video of us in the studio and a studio recording of a few tracks. They’re pretty good. I had switched to playing bass and we used two guitarists and keyboards. After that three of us formed The Citizens and short lived venture that were closer to Life Studies but more electric. There is a video of one of those gigs too.

++ Let’s go back in time now, was Life Studies your first band?

Gray: Not really. I had sang with a rock band but we didn’t last long. Before that in my early teens, me and a friend had a pretend band called ‘Marble Sky”. We had a home made guitar and odd bits of furniture as a drum kit. I seem to remember playing for my sister and some of her friends.

Phil: I was in a band when I lived in Somerset in 1975 but we were all fairly basic musicians and never gigged. Our bass player was into Can and very early Kraftwerk so he influenced the sound but on reflection I don’t think we were that inspired.

++ And how did Life Studies start as a band? Who were in the band and how did you all knew each other?

Phil: Gray and I first met at a Bowie gig in 1978 and I suppose that shared interest led us to get together. When we started there were four of us. Gray and I and a chap called Tony Wilson (no not the legendary Manchester impresario) and a chap who was a excellent guitarist although he was a Clapton/Hendrix aficionado and didn’t really fit our indie sensibilities. It may be a myth but I am sure Gray asked him to leave because he insisted on wearing flared jeans!

Gray: We only did one gig with him. Our First, supporting a band called Primal Scream, no not that one! We went down to a three piece, I bought a synth-drum and we set off down the doom and gloom Joy Division route as pretty much every band in the country was doing.

Phil: That band was the one that did one of our best gigs. We played the local pub and packed it out. A good tape taken from the mixing desk exitis somewhere, that’s the one thing I would still like to hear.
Gray: Martyn who became the other key member of the band once Tony had left was in the same year as Phil at school.

Phil: I remember making my own Stranglers T-Shirt and Martyn spotted this and we started talking, again the love of the same music brought us together.

++ Where does the name Life Studies comes from?

Phil: It’s from the autobiographical book of poems by American Poet Robert Lowell. Not sure why we settled on it but it stuck.

++ You released one fantastic record that I feel was ahead of it’s time. This jangly kind of pop was more 1986 than 1983! So I wonder, what were you listening at the time? Who were your influences?

Gray: We had moved from post punk doom laden stuff to lighter stuff although I can’t recall the precise journey. For me there were two releases that influenced our listening and therefore our music. The first was the C81 NME cassette, this had tracks on by Orange Juice, Josef K and Aztec Camera which we were blown away by. There was a rough edged pop sensibility to the Postcard Label stuff which was a relief after the industrial sound of the late seventies. The second release was the Cherry Red LP Pillows and Prayers which came out a year later. This had bands on like The Monochrome Set and Felt. Felt are still one of our favourite bands.

Phil: There was definite move to wards more complex song writing and Tracy Thorn and Ben Watt were on that LP too and you can really hear the influence of them in Inside Out on the Homeward EP.
The Felt track, ‘My Face is On Fire’ had an acoustic guitar riff that we tried to emulate on Citizen of Love. We had to describe it to the studio engineer as Grand Canyon Guitar. I need to mention the Pale Fountains too who’s ‘Thank you’ single was a big template for Girl on Fire, not that you could hear it!

++ The three songs on the record are really good. I wonder if in a few words you could tell me the story behind each one of the songs?

Phil: I got the title Girl on Fire from an article about Edie Sedgwick in a Sunday Paper. I don’t think it was about anyone in particular, I suppose it is about the paradox of loving someone who is independent and passionate and allowing them to maintain those qualities whilst having a relationship. We’ve all been there. Inside Out started as a bit of a rant against my impending domesticity. The fear of moving towards a quieter, more traditional, and in my eyes boring life. I was only 22! Citizen of Love was Martyns song. I will ask him and let you know, he was probably struggling living with his girlfriend at the time and maintaining independence. You can see theme emerging here. Mart is not a good electronic communicator so it may take a while to get a contribution!

++ On this record you had some guest musicians helping you. How were the recording sessions for the single?

Gray: Not sure I can remember a lot. The studio was a converted barn where the control room was upstairs so the relationship with the engineer was a bit remote. I am not even sure how long it took. People would come and go and do their bit. It was always fascinating having a ‘real’ musicians turn up. Richard the violinist was particularly accomplished and when he played it suddenly transformed the sound.

Phil: My biggest regret was we overproduced things. It was our first time in the studio and we were a bit like kids in a sweetshop. The engineer, John, had just bought a keyboard with all sorts of samples on it hence the strings, vibraphones and other things we put in because we could. There is a demo version of Girl on Fire which, in my opinion, is much better, more stripped down and slower.

++ Tell me about the artwork of the record, were you all big fans of the “Spirit of the Beehive” movie?

Gray: I designed the cover, Phil found the photo. I also designed and drew the label and put all the artwork together.

Phil: I had seen the film in the 70’s it was my first introduction to foreign cinema. I was a horror fan and knew the film had something to do with Frankenstein. It was shown on BBC2 as part of their World Cinema series. Probably around 1975. The fact it little to do with Frankenstein it blew me away. I notice that Criterion DVD reissue contains the same image! Obviously at the time very few people knew the film. Of course it has since become one of the most iconic images of Spanish cinema!

++ I assume Occasion Records was your own label name? Is that so?

Gray: Yes. I set it up and registered it and agreed the distribution arrangements with The Cartel who were a national distribution company for small independents. There was a record shop in Bristol, Revolver, and the guy who ran that helped with advice.

++ There’s this practice session that Paul Hopkins shared with me, “Practice Session Spadger Sound Studios 1983”. Three songs, one of them a cover of New Order. Those were the last days of the band, right? What do you remember from this session, and those last days?

Phil: Having listened to the version of Leave Me Alone you’d think it was the last days of civilisation not just the band. I don’t remember doing that and it is obviously too slow. The rest of the stuff on the tape is a bit better we seemed to have reverted to just drums, bass and acoustic guitar.

Gray: It was a rehearsal for our last gig and The Flying Machine in the village where we hailed from. I recall the gig being a bit of a damp squib.

Phil: Yea, the Strides played too and they were great. They used to cover Take Me to the River but based on the Talking Heads cover rather than the Al Green one. It was a show stopper. I seemed to remember singing a song on my own at the end of the set while Paul and Gray quite rightly went to the bar!

Gray: I didn’t think of us ever splitting up. Phil wasn’t in the Erratic Strides so we just drifted into forming the Trout Faced Few

++ Tell me about gigs. Did you gig a lot? Any favourite venues or cities that you played? Which other bands did you like sharing the bill with?

Gray: We did gig quite a bit. There was a reasonably healthy live music scene in Gloucester. Because we knew a lot of people we would always draw a good crowd which the promoters liked. we didn’t travel too far. The Trouts did get to play Dingwalls in London which is a legendary venue in the UK. Our most disastrous gig was an outdoor festival in Gloucester that a local entrepreneur had organised. We were ok but we were a four piece (with Paul Hopkins and George Weeks from the Strides) but there were more people on stage than in the audience. It was an embarrassment.

Phil: I do still dine out on the story that Bananarama’s first gig was supporting us, I suspect they don’t mention it much . We were asked to support a band called Department S, in Cheltenham. they had a top 40 single called ‘Is Vic There?’ and they bought along Bananarama who mimed to their first single Aie a Mwana. I think they were session backing vocalists before then.

++ How was Gloucestershire back then? Was there much space for your kind of music? Where there any bands that you liked?

Gray: We probably didn’t realise it at the time but Gloucester was a pretty good place for bands and live music. We would often bump into other bands on the circuit and we did share ideas, there was little competition, everyone did their own thing. there was a local journalist who decide we were the best band in Gloucester if not the UK and used to write reviews that were a bit over the top, but it was fun at the time. I remember he tried to get us a manger who came round to Phil’s house to listen to us but Ceremony by New Order had just been released so we insisted he listened to that several times instead! We did tend to sabotage any attempts to be taken too seriously.

Phil: Gloucester had a reputation fro Punk music. the most successful band were called Demob who were hardcore punk and they set the tone for Gloucester bands for a few years. We got to know some of them quite well and like us they would crop up in various groups from time to time. being a parochial sort of place meant you could build up a reputation quite quickly.

++ And what are your favourite spots, places, sights, in your area? I would love to visit some day!

Gray: It is a market town and like many places in England it looks like many other towns. The countryside is still green and pleasant. It has a successful Rugby team and a famous cathedral where some scenes from Harry Potter were filmed.

Phil: I like going back. I spent my formative years in Gloucester so I have soft spot for it. I always try and get Lardy Cakes (Sticky cakes made with currants, dough and lots of butter) whenever I go back.

Gray: If you do visit I guess the Docks and the Cathedral are the high spots.

++ What would you say was the biggest highlight of Life Studies?

Gray: Producing a physical record was a great achievement. Holding the artefact in you hand was a thrill. I also recall a friend who moved to Edinburgh and had met someone who had bought the single after hearing it on John Peel. That was impressive!

Phil: If I am honest the only rock star moment I ever had was when walking home with Martyn through the back streets of Gloucester, the pubs had shut and we were in search of chips when suddenly someone shouted from a top floor flat window. ‘Aren’t you from Life Studies? We’re having a party come on up’ It was a woman we had never met , and we knew no one at the party, that was cool!

++ And these days, what else do enjoy doing? Any hobbies that you have?

Gray: I play guitar a lot now and play with a covers band now and again.

Phil: I make music all the time. I do quite a bit of sync music, music I send to agencies in the hope that someone will pick it up for a radio or TV advert. I had my first royalty cheque last year, £52 for a Portuguese TV commercial so I can’t retire yet!

++ Let’s wrap it here, thanks again so much for the interview! Anything else you’d like to add?

Gray: Just thanks for the interest, it is good to know that someone still likes the record after 30 years! And thanks to Paul for putting us in touch.

Phil: It has inspired me to put some new Life Studies tracks together which can’t be a bad thing. Three songs so far, but this time with Gray singing! watch this space.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
Life Studies – Inside Out

Thanks so much to Trevor Jones for the interview. The Miracle Mile released one fantastic 7″ in the 80s and then came back in the 90s, with a  different lineup to release many great albums that deserve to be more known. It’s time for you all to discover them and if you like them, don’t forget to like them on facebook.

++ Thanks so much Trev for the interview. I didn’t know The Miracle Mile were still going, you were saying you are right now finishing a new album! Care to tell me a bit about this new release?

Sure. ‘In Cassidy’s Care’ is the first Miracle Mile CD since Limbo in 2007. In the interim I have recorded 2 solo albums ‘Hopeland’ and ‘Keepers’. The new album’s subtext is interesting; I wrote a short story that then became the songs on the album.

++ I know you thanks to your first release, the “Bless this Ship” 7″ released in 1986. Who were the band back then and how did you know each other?

The band back in 86 was Steve Smith (vocals) Phil Sands (drums) and me on guitar. Old mates from up north, we came down to conquer London (first) and then the world. Things didn’t quite pan out…That line up split shortly after the release of Bless This Ship and I carried the name forward; became the singer and went on to eventually record the debut MM album ‘Bicycle Thieves’ in 1997.

++ Were you involved with other bands before The Miracle Mile?

The usual youth club bands… hopeful no hopers.

++ And where does the name of the band comes from?

Speaking of ‘hopeful no hopers’; the miracle mile is an area near San Francisco. It originates from the old gold rush days when the miners would come back out of the hills with their gold dust. The towns grew up around their wants and needs: there was a bank to change the gold into dollars, there were brothels and bars for the spending of the money, there was a church where the miners could unburden their sins, then there was inevitably the grave yard. All of these along a strip of road that offered hope, sin and retribution: nominally a miracle mile…

++ Who or what would you say inspired you all to make music? And if you would list your five most influential bands, who would they be?

I like my music mournful; you can’t beat a sad song. I’m drawn to unique lyricists who offer poetry; the likes of Tom Waits, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell. I love the voices of David Sylvian, Peter Gabriel and Paul Buchanan. I admire the sultry productions of Daniel Lanois, Joe Henry and Mitchell Froom. Favourite bands? The Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout, The Go Betweens, Elbow.

++ This 7″ came out on your own Miracle Records. Were you three doing the label thing?

It was a self financed thing that I think I’m still paying for.

++ How did the creative process work for you guys?

In those days it was a live line up so things were pretty collaborative. Since Slow Fade in 2000 I have worked exclusively with Marcus Cliffe. The MM are essentially a duo who use session musicians when needed.

++ So on this 7″ you included two songs, “Bless This Ship” and “Breaking Down the Barriers”. What’s the story behind these two songs?

‘Bless this ship, it makes me happy when there is love on board’ is a pretty self explanatory line; the ‘b’ side carries on that hoary search for the elusive.

++ And from this period, are there any more recordings?

Plenty of demos but they will remain in my dusty attic until my genius is finally recognized 50 years after my death…

++ What about gigging with this first incarnation of The Miracle Mile? Did you play live a lot? Any particular gigs that you remember? Any fun anecdotes to share?

That original line gigged quite a bit, mainly around London’s usual venues for the ‘up and coming’. We played The Borderline, The Mean Fiddler, The Marquis Café. In those days you virtually had to pay to gig, there was so much competition. I loved it but it was a young man’s folly. I don’t think I could do it anymore; I’d need a changing room, a guest list and a rider now.

++ How do you remember London back then? There were many guitar pop bands at the time. Did you like any of them? Was there a sense of a happening scene? What were your favourite venues, places, to see bands?

We seemed to do a lot of shows with Energy Orchard. It was the time of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions; there was some serious jingle jangle blues going on; all dressed up in lumberjack shirts and turned up jeans.

++ And how come you guys split? And why weren’t there other releases made at the time? Was there any interest from majors at all?

We did many showcases for the Majors but never really got a bite; a familiar tale for many. Steve and Phil split to form their own band ‘Molly and the Moonbeans’ while I kept MM going.

++ After the split you continued with Miracle Mile with Marcus Cliff. Whatever happened to Steve and Phil?

Steve is now living in LA; writes and records as ‘The Delta Boy’. He’s a great writer; reminds me of Stephen Duffy. Phil retreated to Cornwall where he’s probably skinning up with the surfers as we speak.

++ But it took around 10 years between the 7″ release and the “Bicycle Thieves” album, right? What happened in between those years?

Writing, reimagining, paying off debts…

++ I was listening to the tracks that are streaming in the Miracle Mile website and they are really good. Great pop, a bit different from the first Miracle Mile, more of orchestrated pop music, baroque pop, you could call it. I noticed you released many records. I was wondering, if I was to start with one record of yours, which one would you recommend? and why?

I’d say start with the first ‘Bicycle Thieves’ and follow the development of the band through to the forthcoming 8th album. If you’re short on time the easy reference would be ‘Coffee and Stars’ an oversight of some of the band’s better moments. I’ll send you a copy with the 7”.

++ And among all the songs you’ve written, which are many, which are your favourites? And among your releases, where does the Miracle Mile first 7″ stand?

Excuse the platitude but my songs are like children to me; some are a bit crossed eyed and smelly but it makes me love them more. I’d hate to single one out for special attention. ‘Bless this Ship’ was effectively a different band. I remember those days with affection but feel that my musical progression renders that stuff as nowt but nostalgia.

++ And are you still playing gigs? I would love to check out the Miracle Mile next time I visit London!

There may be something to promote the new album. I’ll keep you posted.

++ Do tell me about London, I visit quite often but I can always do with suggestions, what are your favourite places in town? best restaurant? best pub? best sight for a tourist like me?

Anywhere in Soho is a blast; it’s dirty, smelly, vibrant. My favourite walk is to cross Westminster Bridge going south and turn left, walking eastwards on the southbank. You’ll get the immensity of the City across the Thames and you will pass the London Eye, The Tate Modern, You can cross ‘the wobbly bridge’ to St Pauls, then back on to the South bank to Southwark Cathedral and towards Borough Market, one of the great world food markets. The original band used to rehearse in Clink Street around that area, one of the great historical parts of London, where the old bear pits were.

++ And aside from making music, what other things do you like doing? Any hobbies?

We have a house in Corsica; I like to retreat there to write, read and listen to music. Travel is good for the soul. I play squash to keep fit. Music is still my main passion. Listening, searching for that magical moment. And of course writing. I still believe my next song will be my best…

++ Let’s wrap it here, I promise I will discover the rest of the Miracle Mile music, I really like what I’m hearing. Do tell me though, as I’ve seen many musicians from the 80s move to electronic and the like, how come you always stayed making fantastic pop music? What do you love so much about it?

It’s funny, Miracle Mile are always referred to as a ‘pop band’. I’ve never thought of us as such. ‘Pop’ suggests something fleeting, transient. I’ve always hoped our music would be regarded as more substantial and enduring. Still, as Noel Coward famously said, “there’s nothing quite as potent as cheap music”.

++ Thanks again Trev, anything else you’d like to add?

Maybe just this biog; a bit long winded but it might offer you some insight…

MIRACLE MILE BIOGRAPHY

In the mid 90’s, singer-songwriter Trevor Jones began working with producer Steve Davis on material that was to become Miracle Mile’s debut album ‘Bicycle Thieves’.

“Meticulously orchestrated, careful and complex, this is canny songwriting leavened by bona fide humanity.”
Q ****

TJ: “Steve and I developed the recording band into a live unit, adding Les Nemes (bass) and Phil Smith (sax/keyboards) plus Trevor Smith on drums. After the release of ‘Bicycle Thieves’ in 1997, Mark Hornby joined the fold for gigs and the recording of the follow up ‘Candids’.”

“A little gem, loaded with nagging guitar hooks and dynamic vocal interplay. Intellectually as well as emotionally engaging.”
MOJO

TJ: “After ‘Candids’ was released in 1998 I took the decision to stop doing live shows, as I wasn’t sure that the direction of my writing was in line with the gusto and spirit of that live band.”

The songs kept coming and in 1999 Steve and Trevor started work on new material for the third album, ‘Slow Fade’. These recordings were more intimate, less orchestrated with the accent on the songs and the singer. Marcus Cliffe was brought in on Upright Bass, Trevor Smith remained on the drum stool, and the
 legend that is BJ Cole was draughted in to add some pedal steel magic.

TJ: “Steve and I parted company mid-stream. Not the usual “musical differences”, just an honest admission from Steve that, with family and a day job to attend to, he simply didn’t have the time. I was blessed with Marcus. Having already struck up a friendship we decided to complete the album together as co-producers and musical partners.”
Cliffe had played with many fine folk (Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Daniel Lanois, Mark Knopfler) a pedigree apparent in the musical backdrops with which he furnished the songs. Slow Fade received ecstatic reviews and saw the further development of a more intimate direction.
“Gorgeous! A lovely, low key collection of sensitive, enchanting songs.” THE TIMES ****

In the summer of 2001 MM started work on ‘Alaska’ at Marcus’s ‘Norbury Brook’ studio. At the time Jones was asked about the lyrical content of ‘Alaska’:
TJ: “These are hardly original ideas. The grass is always greener. The human condition is invariably in a state of disappointment. Is ‘different’ better? When habit and convention demoralizes and casts us adrift, how do we reset our course? Change? The thought of real change is intimidating; it could save us, yet we fear it, and remain content with cold compromise. Dissatisfied, we crave happiness and, when denied, we look elsewhere for a quick fix. As consumers, we’re so used to instant gratification, that we can only be disappointed. We want to be ‘of substance’’, yet we deny the process that makes the fabric hardy – life. We focus on the horizon, rather than on the small dramas in front of us. We desire to be “anywhere but here”, the possibilities of the ‘other life’ making us resent our real lives even more. Traditionally these ‘other lives’ were just vague unobtainable pipedreams, seen in fuzzy black and white. Now, digital clarity presents a focused and immediate reality that we demand, without investment or preparation. Thus, even if we make the dream reality, we’re unable to appreciate or recognise the gravity of it’s arrival; we just use it and move on to something else; easy come, easy go, there goes Mexico, or Alaska, or Sidcup, or Oz… or God. A lot of these songs focus on the tricks that we use, the games that we play, and the skills we develop, to stop ourselves from becoming unglued.”
MC: “The recording of ‘Alaska’ was a difficult time for us both. I was having problems with my family life, Trev had just lost his sister to suicide. I wouldn’t say that it made for a darker album, but there was an emotional edge that gave it a certain grain.”
‘Alaska’ was released in 2002 to overwhelming acclaim:

“Gentle enchantment. The loveliest melodies you’ve ever heard.”
UNCUT
In 2003 Cliffe was due to tour with Mark Knopfler for the bulk of that year. Unfortunately Knopfler was knocked from his motorcycle on the morning of the first rehearsal, badly breaking his shoulder. The tour was cancelled, and Marcus had time on his hands:
MC: “I didn’t want to twiddle my thumbs, so I spoke with Trev. After clearing the emotional decks with ‘Alaska’ he had songs coming out of his ears! We started in on the recordings that would become ‘Stories We Could Tell’.”
For this album, the duo continued with their ambient use of pedal steel, profiling the differing styles of BJ Cole and Melvin Duffy, but they also coloured the sound with woodwind, brass and other instruments not usually associated with their style of music. Lyrically the album attempted to highlight what Jones called “…the profundity of the mundane. It’s interesting how common our ‘unique’ experiences are. However we choose to present ourselves to the world, we’re all made of the same stuff. I’m intrigued by how distance converts experience into memory, and ultimately, into the stories we tell.”
“Miracle Mile’s obscurity remains unfathomable. Perfect adult pop.” THE SUNDAY TIMES ****
Again, a Miracle Mile release that inspired the critics and a small but dedicated following, but met with commercial indifference. Was this due to a stubborn indifference to what makes music ‘commercial’, or a difficulty to place them in the market?
TJ: “Ah, pigeonholes! As the songs became more and more personal, the focus shifted to me and I became more increasingly referred to as a ‘singer songwriter’. If that lends more substance to what we do then it’s OK, but labels can be a misleading, and I don’t think that label does justice to Marcus’s input. We are a musical partnership. Beyond recognizing that my words are personal, I think that defining our roles is pointless; the focus should be on the end product; the song. I guess that we are bloody minded in the pursuit of that perfect song!”
MC: “We always said that we would make the records we wanted to make, and refuse to manicure our sound for a marketplace; we please ourselves. With our music, self-control is everything. Owning my own studio has allowed us to develop our sound without interference or financial constraint. The danger is that you can over indulge, be too particular. The joy is, that while we’re both emotional and instinctive, I think we remain disciplined and focused on the crux of the music; the song stays centre stage.”
Recording for the next album ‘Glow’ started in November of 2004.

TJ: “The first day of recording is always a happy time for me. There’s
nothing more exciting than a blank piece of paper, the possibilities are endless. I get to articulate all the stuff that I’ve been storing up.”

Recordings were completed by May of 2005 and on release Trevor offered:

“Whether half remembered or best forgotten, memories are filtered, the haze of a childhood that can never be reclaimed is where we all start and end.”

This gives a fair impression of the lyrical scope and compelling, emotive power of the songwriting. Added to that were Marcus Cliffe’s excellent playing and multi-instrumental skills, plus his ear for sublime arrangements; ‘Glow’ was an album to cherish.

MC: ‘Sonically it blends traditional elements; acoustic guitar, piano, double bass, with the ambient pedal steel of BJ Cole and Melvin Duffy. These, mixed with some unlikely woodwind and brass arrangements, make for (we hope) a quietly beguiling concoction’.

It’s almost impossible to explain how such simple, natural song craft can weave such a complex web of feelings, lingering images and possibilities, but weave it does. Once you’re caught up there is no getting away either. This is a record to last the rest of your life.

Praise for ‘Glow’:

“Gorgeous melodies, hooks galore, intelligent lyrics that demand and repay careful listening, beautifully produced instrumentation, and an overall effect that combines poignancy and joy in equal measure. The result is as close to a pop masterpiece as you’re likely to hear this or indeed any other year. ‘Glow’ is one of those rare albums where music and words come together in a state as close to perfection as makes no difference, and leaves you with a delicious ache that makes you hug yourself with the sheer overwhelming joy of hearing such wonderful music. An indispensable album.”
Americana UK 9/10

“”MM are pop’s most consistently excellent cottage industry”
The Sunday Times ****

“A little oasis illuminated by musical creativity, glimpsed like a lovely mirage. Intelligent tunefulness that doesn’t kowtow to passing trends has always been as rare as fish fingernails, but it’s here.” Mojo ****

“Little miracles of pop perfection” Rockstar ****

“This British duo’s hazy, cerebral sixth release is an acoustic pop gem. Records like ‘Glow’ will never grow old, which is a good thing indeed.” Minor 7th

“How to write ‘Perfect Pop’ and still remain unknown. They are magic, charming, almost naïve in their perception of beauty”
La Repubblica (Italy) ****

“The intimate songs on this album are like a necklace hung with precious jewels. With deceptively fine melodic structures, this is music to exercise your temporal lobes and promote thought upon the minutiae of life. Discover their back catalogue for even more treasures”
69 Magazine *****

“A treat from start to finish. One day large numbers will look back and call this a lost classic.”
Back on the Tracks ****

In January of 2006 Trevor and Marcus began the recordings for what would become ‘Limbo’.

TJ: “I really believed that the ‘Glow’ sessions would be the last time we recorded at Norbury Brook, so this comes as a happy bonus; amazing what you can come to take for granted; people and places. Same cracked mugs, same mad cat, one new guitar (a battered but lovely old Gibson) and Marcus (also battered but lovely) burning incense rather than spraying that inner nose stripping air freshener! He’ll be wearing a kaftan next…look our for a sitar solo!
We always look for a working title. I’m struck by the word ‘Limbo’ for 3 reasons: firstly it kind of sums up the Miracle Mile’s position in the music world, secondly it relates to Marcus’s emotional and domestic circumstance, and thirdly because I’ve just driven past some orange boxes with ‘Limbo’ written on the side! Friday the 13th seems a fateful date to start our recordings; maybe it’ll bring us luck…so there’s a title; ‘Lucky Limbo’?

When recording was completed in the autumn of 2006 Trevor was asked to introduce the album:

“We all rest where compromise leaves us. We could try to be elsewhere, but that wouldn’t have produced this album. It’s the best we could do, for where we were. ‘Limbo’? It’s sorrow’s way; like the unravelling of a lost kite, a gentle rise or fall towards oblivion. We say, “don’t be afraid to forget.” You will not. It will become the palest thought, and one day, when your gaze has drifted, the sadness will buck and buckle and be gone.
Meanwhile, abandoned and liberated, silence stands as failure and threatens everything. So we fill it with music and search for the perfect song. How do you live the perfect life? How do you write the perfect joke? Start with the punch line and work backwards.
We’re all connected by our unravellings. We don’t always feel the tug, but as the line tightens, leaves a mark, then relaxes, you realise that things can never come to rest and you learn to trust the rhythm of chance.
And the perfect joke? A man falling from a great height whispering “so far, so good.”

Limbo was released to critical acclaim with The Sunday Times nominating it their ‘CD of the Week’
“Classic pop songwriting, gorgeously realised”

Indeed, ‘Lights of Home’ went on to be named a Sunday Times ‘Song of the Year’ 2007:
“Trevor Jones finds the poetry in real life; Marcus Cliffe anchors it in the sweetest pop. Gorgeous as ever. You may cry”

During a lull in new recording, in 2008 MM released ‘Coffee and Stars’ a compilation of songs taken from their 7 albums.

TJ: “‘Coffee and Stars’ seems an appropriate title, as caffeine and wonderment have been our prime stimulants for the past decade, during which these songs were written and recorded. Choosing the tracks for this collection was challenging. Marcus and I had different favorites and, like children I guess, we seemed to favour the slightly wonky, cross-eyed ones. We’ve included a couple of those here (can you see them?) alongside the more obvious favourites that aunty always kisses first.
So, this is like a family photo, with most of the family still locked in the attic. Let’s hope that ‘Coffee and Stars’ compels you to visit those neglected children in situ, on their original albums. We hope, like us, that you’ll come to love them all.”

The liner notes to ‘Coffee and Stars’ were written by a much respected music journalist, Johnny Black. Maybe they are the perfect words to conclude this particular part of the Miracle Mile story:

“For the truly creative artist, perfection can never be achieved for more than a fleeting moment. Painting the ultimate landscape or writing the definitive song inevitably redefines perfection, pushes the standard of what might be possible next time a little higher, a little closer to what was once considered impossible.
Every Miracle Mile album since their debut offering, ‘Bicycle Thieves’ in 1997, has included songs, which, at the time, redefined the limits of what the perfect song might be. This compilation includes eighteen of them.
The cuts were selected not so much to provide a simple ‘Best Of’, as to create a sustained listening experience in which each track flows naturally into the next. It would be easy to quibble with the ommisions, but only a fool would deny that the tracks chosen fit together like pieces of a much-loved jigsaw, depicting an aspect of Miracle Mile that none of the seven individual albums could hope to deliver.
On most Miracle Mile songs, the primary elements – melody and lyrics – are provided by songwriter and singer Trevor Jones. For the past seven years, however, Jones has worked so closely with multi-instrumentalist and co-composer Marcus Cliffe that his contributions have become integral to the sound and shape of the music they make. Whether it’s the yearning regret of ‘Yuri’s Dream’, or the playful lyricism of ‘Sunburst Finish’, the Jones-Cliffe partnership transforms each song into much more than the sum of its parts. When Jones captures the bottled lightning of everyday existence with a beautiful turn of phrase like, “Paper planes and pony tails lead me back to you”, Cliffe colours in the word pictures with unfailingly apposite textures and melodic filigrees.
Best of all though, Miracle Mile will never sink a fang into the jugular when they can plant a whisper of a kiss on that sensitive spot at the nape of the neck and set off a tiny ripple that will, in the fullness of time, explode in the heart.”

Johnny Black
Spring, 2008

Trevor Jones has since gone on to produce two critically acclaimed solo albums ‘Hopeland’ and ‘Keepers’.

Praise for ‘Hopeland’:

“Moves you to tears and refreshes the soul. Scintillating.”
***** Maverick

“The beauty on offer here is enough to make you weep. It did me.”
9/10 Americana UK

“The title track must simply be the most beautiful ballad anyone has written this year.” **** SUNDAY TIMES

Praise for ‘Keepers’:

“A tender sadness. Songs that have universal resonance.”
Netrhythms

“A lush swoon of gorgeous pop. Genuinely life enhancing and life changing” 9/10 Americana Uk

“A melancholic ocean of poetry and sublime song-craft.
Life is indeed worth living and all the richer for hearing this.”
Properganda ‘Album of the Week’

‘Trevor Jones has produced a gorgeous pop album that few will hear — unless there’s justice in the world.’ The Wall Street Journal
“Jones has compiled possibly the finest catalogue of adult pop. Gently beautiful and genuinely moving”
The Sunday Times ****

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
The Miracle Mile – Breaking the Barriers

Thanks so much to Katie Bergström for the interview. These days Katie has been releasing records under her latest band Katie Goes to Tokyo but before that, earlier this century, she had a band called The Wilson Hospital that I really like! And even before that she was involved with Backfish who released in the great Swedish label West Side Fabrication. But this time we talk about The Wilson Hospital who only released one album, but what an album that was!

++ Hi Katie, thanks so much for the interview. I hear you are in Toronto these days? What are you up there?

Hi Roque, nice to be interviewed by you! I was staying in Toronto for a couple of months to write songs for my new album. Now I am in LA, doing the same thing.

++ Hopefully we can do a second part interview for Katie Goes to Tokyo, but this time let’s go back in time, The Wilson Hospital wasn’t your first band, right? It was Backfish who released an album on West Side Fabrication. Who were Backfish? What do you remember from those days?

Backfish was my first band and it will always have a special place in my heart. Backfish (German word for a young girl that moves to a new town) was put together by some friends of mine, and I was hired as their keyboard player at first, but then I advanced to be the singer/songwriter of the band. Our first record was produced by Ken Stringfellow (the Posies). I have so many good memories from my time with Backfish and I was so sad when we finally decided to split.

++ How cool was it to release a record on a quite important independent label of Sweden like West Side Fabrication, home of so many fantastic bands?

I don’t know, pretty cool I guess 🙂 Backfish actually got an offer from another record label as well called NONS, but West Side was located in our hometown and all our music friends were tied to that label one way or the other. I guess we just wanted to be a part of “the big family”. I think we were shocked to get a record contract so soon. I can see now that West side has made a huge impact as a indie label- they’re a hardworking company and great at finding new great bands.

++ And then what happened? When did you start The Wilson Hospital? Was immediately after the demise of Backfish? How did you know Mårten?

I actually met Mårten before we quit Backfish. He played drums in a band that supported Backfish in Linköping. After the gig Mårten asked me if I wanted to sing on some of his songs. I thought he was just flirting with me at first, but then we got together and he played me his demos. His songs were amazing! I always wanted to do the 60’es pop thing but couldn’t really get Backfish to go in that direction. So Mårten and I started writing some songs together. At the same time Backfish started to fall apart. It wasn’t because of my new band. It started long before that and I think we just finally realized that it was time to let go.

++ Who came up with the name The Wilson Hospital? And what’s the story behind it?

The Wilson Hospital was actually the name of my fathers old rock-band from the 60’es. Mårten heard the name and loved it (he is a big fan of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys). The “Hospital”-part you will understand if you know your Brian Wilson.

++ Did you play many gigs? If so, any anecdotes you could share?

We played a couple of gigs. Something that hit me pretty early on was that every time we were about to play somewhere, someone in the band got sick. We always had 3 or 4 musicians with us and it was always the same thing. It was almost like a curse. And after a while there was so much pressure building up to a gig that I stared to get stage fright, because I just knew that something would go wrong. I remember one time, we were playing at a festival that was a 6 hour drive away. I was so nervous and anxious that I couldn’t eat anything the whole day. I was hungry, but the second I smelled food I just couldn’t eat. It was just a very weird situation. I had never felt that way before. Immediately after the gig I felt normal again. Then it took me a couple of gigs to get over the stage fright.

++ What would you say were the main musical influences of The Wilson Hospital?  Were there any Swedish bands from the time that you really liked?

I guess we mainly listened to American and British bands at the time. Mårten listened to the Beach Boys and I listened to the Beatles.

++ Tell me about Morphine Lane Records. Who were they? And how did you end up signing with them?

Morphine lane records was funded by the drummer in This Perfect Day- Johan Nilsson – and the keyboardist in Atomic Swing- Micke Lohse. Backfish had toured with This Perfect Day so I knew Johan from before. We heard Johan and Micke were starting a record label together and so we gave them our demo. They loved our music and we loved them for that and that’s how we all got to work together.

++ With them you released your only release, the fantastic album “Medication for a Lost Generation”. What’s the meaning of the title? And which is your favourite song of the record and why?

Haha thank you! It was Mårten that came up with the title. He pictured that our music would be like medication for tired and clueless souls out there, the lost generation, our generation. “The lost generation” is a phrase from Hemingway’s “The sun also rises”.

“Call Me A.S.A.P” is Mårtens favorite song. I love that one too. But I guess “Don’t be late” is my favorite song to play live.

++ Mine might be “Call Me A.S.A.P.” though my choice changes all the time. But if you don’t mind, I’d love to know the story behind this song!

Mårten got the idea to call me A.S.A.P when he was in the subway, waiting for the train. I think for the part “I need to see you baby” he was thinking of me :). Call me A.S.A.P was actually aired a lot on Swedish radio, and we go a lot of attention because of it.

++ And how did the creative process work for you being a duo? Was it much different compared to Backfish?

The creative process was very different from Backfish. With Backfish I wrote most of the songs, so naturally I always got it my way. But when I started working with Mårten, he wrote at least as many songs as I did, maybe more, and on top of that he wanted to change my songs so that they had less chords! It was a struggle. Suddenly I had to compromise and it was just a horrible experience for me. What I learned from that is that I really hate compromising. But we finally made it through I guess.

++ The artwork of the CD is really lovely, all in sepia, like reminding us of a bygone era. Who came up with that idea and why?

Mårten gave me a book with photos from the 30’es – 60’es for my birthday. I love photography and was doing a bit of that myself for a while. There were a lot of pictures of different airplanes in the book and that’s where I got the idea to use the wooden-planes you can see on the cover. I also wanted to have that old photo look to our pictures so that’s why we chose sepia. We had the chance to work with a very talented photographer – Carina Gran.

++ I read you were already recording or were preparing to record a second album, what happened?

Yes, we started recording some new songs, and at first we were really excited to make another record. One of the major labels in Sweden were interested in working with us and to be able to do that they had to buy us from Morphine lane. However Morphine Lane wanted a much higher price to let us go than they were willing to pay, so in the end nothing came out of that. We were really disappointed and didn’t really feel that we could find the energy to start over. It just felt like we were fighting with everybody and when that happens it’s just no fun to write music anymore. So we decided that we would take a break and do other things for a while.

++ And when and why did you split?

Did we split? I think we’re just on a break…still working together in other projects though.

++ What would you say was the biggest highlight for The Wilson Hospital?

I think it was when we released our album and Call me a.s.a.p was all over Swedish radio. We released the album in Japan as well, but we never got to go there.

++ You were based in Stockholm at that time, right? I’m actually traveling there in less than a month. I’m wondering if you could give me some tips of your favourite bars and restaurants? Perhaps even record stores? 🙂

Oh, cool! Well, Stockholm is a really nice and beautiful town. There are not so many record stores left but I would check out Pet Sounds. It’s on Södermalm. There are a few stores and bars on the same street – Bondegatan (Petsounds record store and Pet Sounds bar and some other nice bars). I would also check if there are any concerts at Debaser (Slussen) or Debaser Medis (Medborgarplatsen). You could also go to hotel Rival at Mariatorget – Benny Anderson from ABBA owns the place and I think he plays in the hotel bar with his jazz-band sometimes. Where to eat….hard to say. My favorite places to eat used to be Jimmy’s steakhouse and Tezukuri Sushi in Hammarby Sjöstad) but I’m a vegetarian now…. I haven’t been in Stockholm for almost 1 year, but I imagine everything’s the same as when I left 🙂

++ What about Skellefteå? That’s where you are originally from, right? Do you miss the city at all? I’ve never been there, but I’m wondering, if I ever go, what are the sights that I shouldn’t miss?

When I think about “home” it’s always Skellefteå that comes to mind, not Stockholm though I’ve lived there for a long time. My parents and my little sister still live in Skellefteå. I love the bright summer nights because the sun barely goes down at night and I miss the winters because they are dark and cold and you get the time to just crawl up in the couch and enjoy a cup of hot chocolate and watch a good movie. Any good sights not to miss…well if you go in the summer I would recommend a boat trip on Skellefteälven, and then go and see the Dragrace in Fällfors outside of Skellefteå. My sisters husband builds drag racing cars and hot rods, maybe he could take you for a ride :=) Let me know if you’re going, I might be home! I could show you around.

++ And as you are Swedish, forgive me if this is silly, but, do you like Abba? And if so, which are your favourite songs?

Haha, yes I love ABBA! My favorite song is Bang-A-Boomerang. I listened to them so much when I grew up so I got a bit too ABBA’d for a while.

++ One last question, aside from music, what other hobbies do you have? What do you like to do in your spare time?

I found a new passion – yoga – a couple of months ago. I love going to class everyday and just take a break from the outside world for a while. It makes me feel really good inside. I think it’s really important to have something in your life that is not connected to performance anxiety, self criticism, being judged by others and everything else that comes with being in the music industry. But apart from all that, writing music is my greatest love.

++ Thanks a lot Katie, can I count you in for a second interview, this time for Katie Goes to Tokyo?

Yes, absolutely. I’ll be here 😉 Thanks Roque!

++ Anything else you’d like to add?

It’s settled now – I AM going to Korea and Japan in May-June!!!!

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
The Wilson Hospital – Call Me A.S.A.P.

Thanks so much to Gary Marshall for the interview. A Game of Soldiers hailed from Liverpool and released only one 7″ though many recordings were made. Many of these, plus new recordings by Gary can be heard on his soundcloud page. There was so little information about them online, so I’m very happy to hear from Gary the whole story of A Game of Soldiers in this interview. And also be their fan on Facebook! Enjoy!

++ Hi Gary! Thanks so much for the interview. Hope all is well. I saw you are still making music these days. Care to tell me a bit about your new adventures? Is it just you or you have a band? And how different it is to the sound of A Game of Soldiers? Do you have any releases?

I still have that burning urge to create and make music after so many years of being in a band.These days it’s just for pleasure and indeed good therapy! I have, what I call a ‘desk top’ studio at home, it’s great to go to when the ideas spring to mind or I hear something on the radio & think ‘I can do that better’! It’s really about putting stuff down for keeps sake, at the moment, kind of a diary or some small legacy to leave for my kids…better out than in…I say! Future releases? maybe? I’d like to compile a cd of new material some day. The main difference from ‘A Game of Soldiers’, I guess is the guitar work, my stuff is very keyboard based.

++ So let’s rewind, let’s go back to 1980. That’s when A Game of Soldiers started as a band, right? How did you get together? How did you know each other?

I actually joined the band as a keyboard player, they were already formed, but placed an advert in the world famous ‘Hessy’s’ store (Frank Hessy’s Liverpool. The Beatles guitar shop). I auditioned & found the band where only two streets away from my home!

++ How many lineup changes happened in the band? I see plenty of people listed on the Facebook page!

Too many to remember! but, yes many came and went.

++ During those early 80s there were plenty of fantastic bands coming out of Liverpool. Which were your favourite bands there and did you feel part of a scene?

Liverpool was so vibrant & exciting in the 80’s. We rehearsed in a place called the ‘ministry’ in the city center. The heart of all the excitement. We had Echo and the Bunnymen, A Flock of Seagulls, Julian Cope/Teardrop Explodes & many others practicing in the same building.I remember sneaking to the rooms for a listen & a chance to meet my our idols.

++ And who or what would you say inspired you to make music?

Living in Liverpool surrounded by such a musical legacy, the beatles etc was really enough to inspire you to play music, or indeed the other option would be to play football.
We as a group,had different tastes in music, from Pink Floyd, Ultravox, Simple Minds, U2, Bowie etc

++ It wasn’t going to be until 1988 when you would release your first record. The fantastic “Big Bad Money World”. What’s the story behind this song? And who released this single?

The song actually was inspired by my fiance! We, like many couples, struggled to pay bills in our new home.My fiance made the statement ‘it’s a big bad money world’!, meaning everything is about money.
That was it. I thought,say that again…wow that’s a great title for a song. We released the single ourselves, and actually gave away many during gigs and to radio stations. It was really about getting our name out there & our music played.

++ Why do you think it took that long to release the record?

During that period we became increasingly frustrated, searching for a manager & trying to get that break we needed. It almost became a case of there being too many unsigned liverpool bands circulating at that time. I guess we were just unlucky. So we decided to fund the single our selves and get it played.

++ I was looking at the video for “Rainforest” on the Facebook page, and I notice there’s some footage of you guys. Did you ever made a video or something?

Yeh,we had a video made our selves. A friend of mine filmed us. He normally did weddings! God, i wish we had facebook & soundcloud back then!. Lots of bands nowadays promote themselves & release stuff online. I guess in a small way, we were already doing it.

++ And was there any interest from the big labels?

We only approached the smaller independant labels.

++ Tell me about the band’s name, A Game of Soldiers, where does it come from?

It’s London Cockney in origin, a variation of ‘Sod this for a lark’. It’s a term of exasperation, meaning that something is not worth the effort or the trouble.I like to say ‘ fck this for a game of soldiers’!

++ Would you consider yourselves a political band?

We we’re certainly no U2. Tho our lyrics did reflect attitude towards the government of the day. We played a gig in support of starvation in africa, around the time of ‘liveaid’. I remember we were confronted at the end of one gig by the manager criticising our anti government comments made inbetween songs! So maybe we were a little political.

++ From all your songs, which would you say was your favourite and why?

That’s a difficult one, I think when your in a band or indeed a songwriter, the last song you did is a favourite for a while, until the next idea comes along. ‘Stop the Dragon’ an anti drug song is certainly one favourite.

++ What about gigging? You seem to have gigged quite a lot, which were the best gigs you reckon? Any anecdotes you could share?

Yeh, we loved gigging & played every week for a while. We played mountford hall, here in Liverpool with the band ‘Toy Dolls’, they had a UK hit with ‘Nelly the Elephant’, bloody awful kids song!
We tried to play all the ‘hip’ places of the day. So there were lots of dark night clubs in basements, some of our audience would be rats! yes, the rodent kind!… running around the place! We played a place called ‘the Venue’, i remember Will Seargant of Echo and the Bunnymen telling us we were ‘cosmic’, i quite liked that label sounded cool. I remember we played on a roof, in the style of The Beatles, Abbey Road gig. It was a great gig, we could see for miles!

++ Aside from the two songs on the 7″ single, are there any more recordings by A Game of Soldiers? Did you release any demo tapes?

We made several demo cassette tapes,remember cassettes? ha, we gave them to local radio stations and had some air play from them. We would send them off to A&R men at indie labels.

++ And then what happened? When and why did you split?

Actually, I don’t specifically remember that we did split?, you know, we kinda got frustrated and disillusioned.It seemed every band around us at the time were getting record deals. We never felt like we got the break we deserved. So really, we just dessolved.

++ What did you guys did after? Were you still involved with bands?

You know, I think its quite telling that none of us joined or formed another band. Some of the guys dont even play to this day. I think we all put our heart & soul into the band,made sacrifices, and did all that we could to drive forward,then having not achieved our goal, really lost the faith.In truth we resigned ourselves to the fact, it just was’nt ment to be.

++ What about today. What do you do? What other hobbies do you have?

I still make music,and write the odd song,but not everyday as back then. Its more of a therapy these days and of course fun too. I wish we had todays synths and software, back then. It’s much quicker and easier to record stuff these days.

++ And looking back in time, what would you say was the biggest highlight of the band?

For me, the biggest highlight, was putting a song I wrote, in about 10 minutes, on a scrap of paper, onto a 7 inch plastic record! I was so proud to hold it in my hands. Even if we had split there and then,I still would of felt we had achieved something special.

++ Alright, let’s wrap it here, but thanks again so much. Anything else you’d like to add?

thank you Roque, its been great to reflect back to those days, so many great memories. thank you.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
A Game of Soldiers – Big Bad Money World

Thanks so much to Nick Langley for the interview. The Penny Candles were a fantastic indiepop band from Hull that left us only one 12″ record and a handful of compilation appearances. They also put out three tapes during the late 80s. Their songs were brilliant, the kind of indiepop I love. Very honoured to learn more about them!

++ First question is what everyone is wondering, will there be a retrospective CD with all of The Penny Candles recordings? Please say yes!

To be honest, it’s not something I’ve ever thought about. Everything that we professionally recorded was released in some form of another. We released a cassette called “Sunny Enough For Cats” initially followed by “Sunny Enough For Cats Too” which was an updated version of the first and then “Wossname”. After that came the single. I don’t think that there’s anything else left to release. I still have some of the master recordings so could potentially release them as MP3s but I’d have to think about that one!

++ Who were The Penny Candles and how did you know each other? What made you all start a band?

The band was originally started by myself and Alison Hughes. Back in the mid-80s, Hull had one music venue, The New Adelphi Club. It was the only venue in the city hat catered for bands playing their own material. Within months of it opening it became the home of all the local musicians – we virtually lived there! Not surprisingly, the hard core of about 40 people became quite good friends. Alison had come to Hull to read Law at the university and formed a band called The Mockingbirds in her final year of study. I saw them play a couple of times at The Adelphi. In 1988, having played drums and sung backing vocals in numerous local bands, I’d decided that, having taken up the bass guitar, I wanted to start my own band. One day I went down to the University Student’s Union to put up adverts saying, “Bassist/Singer/Songwriter looking for Guitarist/Singer/Songwriter to form band” and I bumped in to Alison. We spent the next couple of hours talking about music and bands. She had just graduated with a Law degree and wasn’t sure what she wanted to do next so we decided there and then to form a band. Steve Parry was our original guitarist and was someone that Alison knew. I can’t remember the circumstances around him joining the band – one day it was the two of us, the next Steve was there! We were offered some free studio time from friends of ours who had a record deal with Virgin and had built their own studio but for that we needed a drummer. Hugh Whitaker was a friend from the Adelphi so one day I popped round to his house and asked him if he’d do the recordings for us and he ended up staying in the band for the next 18 months.

++ Where does the name The Penny Candles come from?

Like most bands, we spent HOURS trying to think of a name. Eventually Alison turned up with “The Penny Candles”. It was the least rubbish of all the other names we’d thought of so we opted for that. It comes from the title of a book that Alison was reading at the time called “To Light a Penny Candle” by the Irish author, Maeve Binchy. A penny candle is a candle lit in churches when prayer requests are made. You’re supposed to put a penny in a box to pay for the candle (I think!).

++ Only one release, the Taj Mahal 12″! How many copies were pressed? it seems to difficult to find a copy these days. What do you remember from recording these fantastic four songs!

The main reason for the 12″ was to raise the band’s profile – an attempt to get the record labels to pay more attention to us. We only pressed 1,000. I think I’ve got the last 30 sitting in my studio at home. I remember having a great time during the recording. We loved being in the band. There’s a special camaraderie shared by a small group of people who spend 18 hours a day in each other’s company, sharing new experiences. You become incredibly tight knit and close. We recorded the tracks at the same studio we used for “Sunny Enough For Cats” and I think we did it over a long, 4 day weekend. We were a pretty tight band by that point as we’d gigged a lot up and down the country so it was a fairly quick process. Steve Parry had left the band by that point so the lead guitar parts are played by Mark Eddie Whatmough who spend about 8 months with us. I can honestly say that his guitar solo in “Swings and Roundabouts” is still one of my all time favourites of ANY guitar solos I’ve heard. All the more remarkable because he was only 17 at the time. A lovely bloke. I remember Alison having a moan on the Sunday and refusing to come back to the studio after lunch, as a result all the guitars on “Making The Most (Of It All)” are me – including that terrible solo – and for some reason we had to some pick-ups on “Taj Mahal” which Eddie couldn’t do, so the outro electric guitar is me too. Hugh is great in the studio. Apart from being a rock solid drummer he’s also a rock solid bloke. Alison and I were a bit more, what’s the word? – childish! We’d argue about the tiniest detail and we’re both really stubborn. Hugh was the voice of reason. Also, neither Alison nor I liked the other one criticising each other’s singing. If one of us was singing a line flat we’d get very defensive. However, we’d listen to Hughie. He’s got a great ear for vocals. We used to call him “the referee” partly because he’s step in and resolve arguments and partly because – and here comes the football joke – he’d inspect the pitch!

++ Why weren’t there more releases? I also know of the existence of a tape called “Sunny Enough For Cats Too!”, care to tell us a bit about this cassette?

“Sunny Enough For Cats” was recorded as our first demo tape which we used to secure gigs. If memory serves me right, the only difference between “Sunny Enough For Cats” and “Sunny Enough For Cats Too” is that we re-recorded the lead vocals for a couple of the tracks but I can’t remember which ones. I think that the track listing is the same but I’m not sure. I’ve got a copy of “Sunny Enough For Cats Too” in front of me and the track list in this is as follows: SIDE 1 “Nicely”, “No Doubt”, “Sometimes”. SIDE 2 “Memorybox”, “Just a Word”, “Turn it Off”.

++ And what about the other two tapes released, “Sunny Enough For Cats Too” and “Wossname”? Do you remember the tracklist for all these three tapes? I can’t seem to find that information!

Unfortunately I can’t find a copy of “Wossname”. I’ve a feeling that I still own one but I’ve no idea where it is. Sorry!

++ You were in a couple of compilations as well like Turquoise Days, Borobudur, Positively Teenage!, You Can’t Be Loved Forever Vol. 2 and Vol.3, and Hell & Happiness. Am I missing any? How did you end up on this, I mean , what was the process?

Truth be told, with the exception of Borubudur, they just lifted recordings from demo tapes and included them on their albums. No one ever sought our permission and, if any money was ever made, we never saw any of it. To be honest though, we always saw things like this as free publicity – all recordings were a way of increasing the band’s profile they were never intended to make any money.

++ The 12″ was released by your own Red Eye Records. How was the experience of running a label?

In those days it was the only sensible way of doing it. Unlike some bands however, we did it properly. We secured a distribution deal with a company called SRS. They made sure that it went in to the shops. A lot of bands started there own labels and ended up with boxes and boxes of unsold records in the basement. Running the label didn’t involve much until the tax man came looking for me! I then had to demonstrate that I hadn’t made a fortune, which, obviously, I hadn’t!! It can’t have put me off that much because I’ve just started a new label a few months ago called Scratch 23 with plans to release stuff this year from a couple of local artists as well as some of my own stuff.

++ What was the creative process for your songs? What inspired you guys?

Unrequited love. What can I say. Just about everything I wrote was about broken hearts. The process is much the same now as it was then: pick up an instrument, fish around until you hear something you like, hum a tune and you’re off. I gave up music in 1993 and didn’t touch and instrument for the next 12 or 13 years. I began writing songs again about 3 years ago and I find it easier now than I did, but it’s the same old process – strum and hum!

++ And what bands would you say influenced your music?

The Beatles were a big influence on me. I’m of an age (just) where they were still together and actively recording. My mum’s from Liverpool and once played at The Cavern so we always felt that they were in some ways “ours”. Apart from them there were loads of contemporary bands, Prefab Sprout, Everything but The Girl … the list would be endless if I thought about it for long enough!

++ Is it true that Taj Mahal was named after a reverb setting? Were other songs named after other uncommon conventions? 🙂

How the hell did you know that??? It was indeed named after a reverb patch in an Alesis Quadraverb. It’s the patch used on the arpeggio guitar at the beginning of the song. I used to quite like giving songs obscure titles but I prefer single word names now as it’s easier to remember them. I can’t really think. There’s a song called “Dial M”. The chorus says, “the morning after can be murder”. Alfred Hitchcock made a film called “Dial M for Murder” so I decided to call it “Dial M”. A bit childish really!

++ How was the scene in Hull during those late eighties? Do you still live there? If so, do you find it has changed much? If I was in the city, doing a “Penny Candles” tour, which place or sight will you show me that was really important for the band?

The music scene in Hull back in those days was amazing. As I said earlier, Paul Jackson bought an old working men’s club called the New Adelphi Club and turned it in to a music venue. From that point on we had a home. We were all on unemployment benefits just dossing around making music and enjoying life. It was fantastic! I still live in Hull in the same area I’ve been in for the last 27 years, with my wife and 4 kids. The city has changed a lot but for the better. Hull was founded on fish, we used to have a massive fishing fleet – 200 trawlers a day used to land fish in Hull – there are about 12 a week now. By the late 1970s the fishing industry was dead and the city went in to a catastrophic decline. Over the last 20 years however, things have picked up and we’re now at the forefront of green, renewable energies so it’s a fairly prosperous city. I run a small project recording studio for teenagers and am fortunate enough to have a recording studio at home. Paul Jackson still owns the Adelphi club, although there are other venues competing with him now, so that’s still the spiritual home of music in Hull. If you ever make it this far north, you MUST go to the Adelphi clucb – it’s legendary. Everyone’s played there at some point, The La’s, Primal Scream, The Happy Mondays, Radiohead, Oasis, the list just goes on and on and on …

++ Did The Penny Candles gig a lot? Any particular gigs you remember as the best time ever? What about the Reading Festival gig?

We’d do a gig just about anywhere. I figured out early on that you make your own luck in the Music Business. We have a saying in this country – a bi fish in a little pond. It’s easy being a big fish in a little pond. A lot of bands are happy playing in their local venue once a month. All their friends come down, get drunk and jump around making them feel like rock stars. Anyone can do that. It’s a different game when you travel 100 mile to a city where no-one’s heard of you. You have to work 10 times harder to make an impression. We accepted every gig we were offered. We’d travel 400 miles there and back for £15 just to have an audience to play in front of. Other local bands would refuse gigs like that. They’d say “I’m not going all that way for that money, we’re worth more than that”. But it’s just an excuse. They’re terrified of taking the risk and getting booed off stage. Alison and I formed the band in June 1988. We did our first gig in September 1988 and our first short tour in January 1989. Other bands were jealous but we got off our arses, worked hard and took risks. We weren’t happy being a big fish in a little pond, we wanted to be a big fish in a BIG pond. To achieve that you have to get out there and work hard, which we did. I loved touring: a different town each night, a different audience, a different vibe, it was a dream come true. We got the Reading Festival gig because of that attitude. The festival is booked by a company called The Mean Fiddler. They own about 8 venues in London. We sent a demo tape in and nagged them for a gig at one of their venues. In those days support bands used to have to pay the venue to play! However, a bloke called Neil O’Brien who worked there, quite liked us. All he could offer was a slot in their acoustic venue which we gladly accepted. We weren’t allowed to use a drum kit so we worked out a special 40 minute set just for that one gig in the middle of a tour. It was nerve racking but a great little gig. Because of our willingness and professionalism he offered us a slot a Reading, which was just amazing. We took about 12 friends with us and more met us there and we had a fantastic weekend AND we were getting paid to do it. It doesn’t get much better than that!

Around May 1990 we were on tour, playing a venue somewhere. We were in the middle of a song and my mind started drifting. Two things struck me: 1) all the songs sounded the same to me, which is NOT a good thing, and 2) my mind shouldn’t be drifting off. I should be wrapped up in the show, but I wasn’t. It was then that I realised that I wanted to leave the band. I felt we’d taken the band as far as we could. It was decided that I’d fulfil all the band’s commitments which were the rest of the tour and then the gigs leading up to Reading, so Reading Festival was my last gig with the band. Alison kept the band going, replacing me with a bass player and adding a keys player. They did one gig at the Adelphi in early 1991 and then she decided to call it quits. I went on to for a band called The Juniper Chute. I wanted to write some songs with a bit more balls to them so for the first time I wrote them all on an electric guitar. I then asked Hugh Whitaker, Eddie and a friend called Matty to form a band an we did a handful of gigs. The sad thing is that it was only intended as an experiment. I was sick of being in a band. I’d spent 2 years of my life trying to get the Penny Candles signed and got nowhere. Neil O’Brien offered us a gig at one of their venues. It was only our second show. In the next few months, after that show, I got rung up by every major record label in the country chasing me up. I was so disillusioned that I never returned the calls. The band members all had other commitments so it was never intended to be a permanent thing, so they drifted off and that was that. I then spent the next couple of years writing songs for a band called Scarlet who were originally from Hull bought who had moved to London. They had a publishing deal with Chrysalis Music and eventually signed a record deal with Warner Chappell. They went on to have a one hit wonder called “Independent Love Song” (sadly, not one of mine) and I had a couple of songs on the album. by that point (1993), I’d had enough. I sold most of my stuff and enrolled at a local university to do a degree.

++ Are you still in touch with the other Penny Candles? What do you all do nowadays?

I still see Hughie and Eddie occasionally. Hugh’s still very eccentric and keeps himself busy playing in a couple of local bands. Eddie still plays in pubs and clubs. Alison became a Producer for the BBC and is based in London these days and has been so for 20 years now. As far as the future is concerned, I’m in the process of writing and recording an album which will hopefully be released later this year.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
The Penny Candles – Swings and Roundabouts

Back L-R are Frank Sweeney, Jenny Benwell, Chris Blawat, and front are Nick Sweeney on the left, and Dirk Higgins.

Thanks a lot to Nick Sweeney for the interview. The Ringing were an obscure band that released the one and only 7″ back in the day on the now legendary Pink Label, home of The June Brides, The Wolfhounds and my favourites McCarthy. This 7″ is truly great, especially the A-side, “Caprice”. If you’ve never heard them before, now it’s the time for you to discover.

++ Hi Nick! Thanks a lot for being up for this interview. First things first, why do you think The Ringing are this obscure? I mean, Pink released The June Brides and McCarthy, it’s strange no one knows much about you. Were you very obscure too back in the day?

Unhelpfully, I don’t know. Maybe the line up of guitar, bass, drums, viola and violin didn’t appeal to the people we were playing to. At the time, though, Dexy’s Midnight Runners had become big with their Come On Eileen phase, and the Pogues were on the rise, so it wasn’t like the strings were unfamiliar. We weren’t folky, exactly. Reviews said we were too eclectic, as we had a broad musical range, with songs that I jokingly called ‘Country and Eastern’, influenced by things like David Bowie’s Velvet Goldmine and Boney M’s Rasputin rather than anything more authentic – pop oompah.

More honestly, we probably didn’t try hard enough. We sent tapes to the usual people, but weren’t good at following them up. We also probably thought that being on a record label would sort out all ‘that kind of thing’, but of course it doesn’t work that way.

++ So when did you start as a band? Who were the members and what instruments did each of you play? Where were you based?

We started in 1982, at the Works rehearsal studios near Old St, the edge of London’s East End. (The area is now very trendy, but then it was old warehouses and railway arches, scruffy pubs and intermittent public transport.) Dirk Higgins, who ran the studio, liked what I was doing, and became the bass player. He recruited the drummer, Chris Blawat. My brother Frank played viola. We played with this lineup for a while, then got a violinist in, Jenny Benwell, who’d trained at the Guildhall School of Music.

++ Were you involved in previous bands before The Ringing?

I was in a band called Exile Views (a line from one of my songs – we wanted to be just plain Exiles, but the day I printed up cassette covers for our demos I heard a band on the radio called Exiles). We did 5 or 6 gigs the year we were in existence. We sent tapes out to everywhere and everybody, but were not very proactive in the face of indifference. That was from 1979-80. I brought some of the songs to the Ringing.

++ Where does the name The Ringing comes from?

I think it was just from a stray comment that a band ought to be loud enough to leave your ears ringing. It was slagged off (as a crap band name) by Tony Parsons when he gave our single a bad review in the NME. I agreed with him about the name.

++ You only released one 7″ on the Pink Label. How did you end up working with them? How was the relationship between band and label?

We met Simon Down through my brother Frank, and after his interest in the June Brides. I liked Simon and his partner and got on well with them until they lost interest in us – fair enough – and then we hardly saw them. I probably didn’t think about how businesslike they were, just trusted them to ‘do stuff’.

++ On this 7″ there were two songs, “Caprice” and “Doctor”. Am I crazy to say that there is some sort of Monochrome Set influence? What would you say were the main influences of the band then?

I LOVED and still love The Monochrome Set. I saw most of their London gigs between 1978 and 1985, had all the albums, singles, rarities, posters, etc, worked out all their songs on the guitar, scribed their lyrics as much as I could make them out. I’ve now seen, and like, the revived TMS, a rare thing for me, as I prefer to remember bands as they were.

I liked Dexys’ Too-Rye-Ay tunes, and also liked the Pogues, though both did their thing to death eventually. I’d liked punk (as early as seeing the Pistols in 1976) but thought it had run its course by the end of 1977. I loved early Adam and the Ants and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and, from 77-79 followed them as obsessively as TMS, going to all the gigs, etc, and even auditioning with the Ants. (See my blog here, for further details.) I was, and still am, a fan of all Bowie’s stuff from Man Who Sold the World to Lodger. I began being disappointed in him with 1980’s Scary Monsters. I liked Joy Division and New Order, Young Marble Giants, Kraftwerk, Telex, somewhat humourless European pop, for want of a better phrase, or anything (like the Monochrome Set) that sounded convincingly European. I also loved Devo, who were more comic than they were given credit for. I liked stuff like James White and the Blacks, and The Birthday Party, too (which I now find unlistenable). I’d been a regular at Billy’s, the Beat Route and Le Kilt, all Soho clubs, from 1980-82, and the Blitz scene, so some of that (mostly crap) New Romantic stuff, like early Spandau Ballet, rang a bell with me. I also liked the Skids, who I thought successfully outgrew punk, The Fire Engines (who didn’t fit in to any niche, I thought), people like Paul Haig (but not Josef K). I still loved things I’d been listening to since the mid-70s, like Roxy Music (up to Manifesto in, I think, 1978) and Iggy Pop. And far too many more to mention. Having said all that, I’m not sure I can claim these as influences on the band, though I was the only songwriter. There was no concerted attempt, as far as my vanity and faulty memory can pull up, to sound like anybody else. And I don’t think we ever did, which may have been our downfall.

++ So do tell me, what is the story behind these two songs?

Caprice is fake jazz. I can’t say I remember it being directly TMS-influenced, though I’m sure it was – by The Ruling Class (from Eligible Bachelors) and The Man With the Black Moustache (from Love Zombies). I’ve only learnt jazz guitar properly over the last 10 years, so the guitar is not ‘strictly’ jazzy at all. Nor is the drumming, but I think on the whole we pulled off the impossible to make it give off a jazzy feel that I was happy with. It wasn’t as if I ever liked jazz that much – I still have a hard time listening to anything but Gypsy Jazz.

Doctor was probably influenced a bit by another band I loved, Bow Wow Wow, and as such is ‘kind of’ jungly, albeit with violas imitating bagpipes at the end.

The lyrics to both are throwaway. I’m not much into lyrics, though of course I have a few favourite tunes where the lyrics do stand out, notably some of Bowie’s (Station to Station, Star and Drive in Saturday in particular), Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street, the Eurythmics’ Love is a Stranger, Paul Simon’s American Tune. What I really like is just sound, especially the human voice. That’s what attracted me to Eastern European music; I couldn’t understand the words (though I can now, often) so it was all part of the sound.

I can’t remember the impetus for writing these particular songs; I rarely do, I just get a tune in my head, match it with a lyric and get a feel of how it should sound. I often think of basslines at the same time, and how drums might sound, etc – at least that’s how it works now, with tunes I write for the band I’m in. I can write music now – in those days I had to grab a cassette recorder and just play them in case I forgot them.

++ And were these the only two songs you recorded as The Ringing? Are there any more? Maybe some in tapes hiding in someone’s cupboard?

We made several recordings as The Ringing. I remember the first attempt at a session: we took a day off work and turned up at the recording studio only to find there’d been a flood or a fire or something, so we went to a pub and spent the day blowing the money we’d brought for the studio, and got wasted. We recorded 6 more tracks with that line up, and 2 more with a later version of the band, which I’ll mention later. They’re all on cassettes somewhere. They’re not great, in general – done on a low budget in a great hurry by people not used to recording techniques. And, in one case, by an engineer who hated us after Chris banged his reverb sheet absent-mindedly with a drumstick, and hated us more after Dirk slagged off some keyboard there, which got the engineer declaiming sniffily that it was ‘his baby, Mantovani in a box’.

++ About the 7″, how come there are no credits in it? And would you have wanted a different sleeve instead of the Pink standard ones?

I think there might have been an insert slip with credits. The people on it were as above. The songs were recorded at London’s Alaska Studios and the engineer was called Ian O’Higgins (I think). He was from Dublin, and I was intrigued that he was reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book I later became utterly obsessed with. I think Joe Foster was around, but don’t remember him having any input – I may be wrong. The June Brides were in right after us, for the midnight session, so Frank had a double shift. I designed a sleeve (can’t remember the design), but it was abandoned as it would be too expensive to produce. The decision made sense, and I didn’t mind the standard sleeve.

++ Tell me about gigs! Did you play many? Any favourites? Anecdotes you could share?

I think we played about 40 gigs. We were often on the bill with people called the Greenwich Performance Collective. They were mostly local (SE London) affairs, and sometimes the only people in the audience were the other bands. There was a lot of talent in the GPC, some quirky, adventurous music, now lost forever. As we got to know other bands, we hitched onto their gigs. We often played with a band called The Big Combo, who had a sort of jazz feel – we even did one of their songs, called Drums in the Night, which had apparently been influenced by one of my songs, a tune called Baby is a Millionaire. Incestuous or what…

I think my favourite gig was one of the many we did in the infamously dank Cellar Bar at Thames Polytechnic in SE London’s Woolwich. We played there often as I studied there from 1984-1987, and was able to blag spots on the bill regularly. I enjoyed this particular gig maybe because the whole crowd was off its face (and half the band… actually, at least two fifths of the band) and really into it and the place was heaving and everything was just right. I remember we played an encore of cowboy tune Ring of Fire, for the only time, probably.

We also played on a bill with the June Brides and The Jesus and Mary Chain, at a venue called The Ambulance Station in SE London, and again, everything just worked, the crowd and bands on a roll.

We were on at the Living Room (put on by Alan McGee) one night and well after we’d played Alan McGee told me some mad guy was trying to get in, that he was one of my friends, and could I go sort him out before there was trouble. I didn’t know him at all: he’d been brought by a casual acquaintance of mine, an American guy, who’d just bumped into him in the street in a drunken camerarderie; he’d been released from jail that day and was still angsty. But not charmingly or wittily. In the end I got sick of being diplomatic and just told him to piss off, and urged my American pal to take him away, which he did, but not before the other guy told me I’d ‘never play the fucking violin again’ when he’d finished with me. It’s funny now, but was scary at the time. At that same gig, I was told that a couple of people came up the stairs, took one look at us, said, “Violins? Fuck that!” and walked out.

++ How do you remember the scene back then? So many talented bands, right? What were your favourite places to hang out? Your favourite bands? The worst bands? Any fanzines you loved?

I used to go to mid-size venues a lot, colleges and pubs, small clubs. I saw any gigs featuring The Triffids, the Band of Holy Joy, an early version of the Auteurs… or maybe it was the Auteurs, and the band that has really influenced me a lot, the 3 Mustaphas 3. I really loved Big Audio Dynamite, too. I wasn’t so into the bands on ‘our’ scene – ie signed by Pink, Alan McGee, etc, like Biff Bang Pow and the Jasmine Minks, the Loft, etc. I wasn’t mad about the Jesus and Mary Chain, either, saw them as enjoyable hype if you were in the exact right mood. They were kind of Dada, I thought, taking the piss until somebody was unafraid to tell them to stop it. Maybe I just saw these bands too often when we played on the same bill. I really liked Jamie Wednesday, another act on Pink, whose members went on to form Carter USM and Abdoujaparov. They tended to be dismissed as being ‘lightweight’, but there was a music-hall feel to them that grabbed me a lot.

I was also into clubbing again, after a few years’ break from it, so went to the Wag Club (where I rediscovered ska, the music I’d liked as a teenager) in Soho and the Mud Club on the edge of the West End, with DJs like Jay Strongman and Mark Moore. I got into the start of house music, and listened to that a lot rather than conventional rock stuff – I loved the electronics, and realised that black music plus electronics was a brilliant combination. I hadn’t listened to black music since my early teens. (I hated all that disco stuff in the 70s.) I also went to straight night at (gay nightclub) Heaven – Thursdays – and to warehouse parties where a whole new mix of music was played: country, but with sound effects in the background, funk/metal like the Beastie Boys, dub and early hip-hop and rap, and the start (I think) of DJs (like Don Letts) mixing comedy and movie soundbites into the music. I was just really into staying up all night, and I guess regular gigs didn’t do it for me in that respect.

I can’t really name any ‘worst’ bands – I think if I didn’t like them I had such a short attention span (and there was so much good stuff out there) they’d vanish from my radar. I saw a lot of bands I’d liked take it a step too far, in the interests of commercialism, mainly – and who can blame them? – and was just amused by and dismissive of the careers of Adam Ant, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club and anybody, I guess, I’d been aware of when they weren’t mega-famous – a bit snotty of me, of course.

I really wasn’t into fanzines – Frank used to buy Sniffin Glue in 76 and 77. I think I’d even stopped reading the music press by then.

++ So then what happened? When and why did you split?

We didn’t exactly split, I suppose – mutated, more like. Now time to mention the sixth member of the Ringing, Eddy Walsh, who was in The Big Combo. An excellent bassist, he’d played with me in Exile Views. He depped a lot with the Ringing because our bassist Dirk was a further education teacher, and worked some evenings, so couldn’t do midweek gigs. It probably wasn’t exactly true, but our drummer Chris remarked that one of his friends had been to more of our gigs than Dirk. One of Dirk’s teaching slots was in Pentonville Prison, which had to be interesting. At the same time, and this was around mid-1985, the June Brides were taking off, so Frank was able to spend less time in the Ringing. In fact, to his credit, he did once give up a gig with the JBs, probably playing to masses of people, to do one with the Ringing, probably playing to a bored barman and a dog. Frank was happy to leave, Dirk less so, but he wasn’t murderous about it, and we stayed friends. We decided it’d be a cleaner sound anyway if we just had the violin. We’d been joined at that point by Jackie Robson (also the sixth member of the band, I guess), who shared vocals with me. We got a new bass player, a guy called Joe Nevin, who I’d met on some awful job on a building site. He had a very slick style. We renamed ourselves The Etcetera School. “Three words that don’t go together,” as several people commented. The name was partly influenced by a Monochrome Set song called The Etcetera Stroll. I liked it, and kind of still do. You can hear one of our recordings here, Pact, which gives you an idea of the kind of thing I wanted to develop.

Dirk Higgins played cello on it. He is very important to me in my musical development, as it was at his place once that he played me an LP of folk music from around the world called The Nonesuch Explorer, with a lot of stuff from Eastern Europe on it: I discovered that it wasn’t all ‘Ra-Ra-Rasputin’.

The Etcetera School carried on for another year or so, but when the recording failed to generate any interest we called it a day. There is a film of our second-last gig (at Dingwalls) somewhere, which I may try to edit and stick on YouTube sometime.

++ What did the members of The Ringing do right after?

Frank went on to be a full-time June Bride until they broke up, but plays now in the revived June Brides and in a country/American folk duo with his wife. I’m not sure what Jackie or Joe did. I may have got this wrong, but I think Chris played drums at some early Phil Wilson solo gigs, before concentrating on running his engineering business – a little corner of industrial Poland in Tooting, SW London. I’ve remained friends with him. I’m also friends still with Eddy, who has played in the odd punk band in recent years. I see them often. I lost touch with Dirk in the late 80s. I think he carried on teaching, and composing music for TV. Violinist Jenny played with Gothmeister Paul Roland, and with various duos, and now plays with a folk band called The Moors. I played, for about a year, in a soca/salsa band called Johnny Love Muscle, which was fun, my first experience of big, crowded gigs. I then did teacher training, and lived abroad for most of the 90s, teaching in Turkey and Poland and, in Poland, also working for a translation agency. I taught for a few years in London after that, but have been an editor and writer since 2006. I didn’t get back into music until 2006 – a 20-year gap – when I joined the London Gypsy Orchestra, playing a range of music from the Balkans and Eastern Europe. From my long stint in Eastern Europe, I knew more about the music, and was better equipped to play it. From there I joined the Trans-Siberian March Band, described by Time Out as ‘the Sex Pistols of Balkan Brass’. Playing with decent musicians has made me raise my own game a lot.

++ Looking back in time, what would you say was the highlight of The Ringing?

Getting the single out was a unique moment one that nobody should be so cool they’re blasé about it, and reviews of the single, and gigs, in mags like Sounds, the NME and Melody Maker were great to have. A lot of the gigs were really great to play, too, and we met some very interesting and feiendly people. We worked hard at the music but also had a laugh. I also loved hearing the ideas from my head given a tangible form.

++ And today, I hear you have a different band. Care to tell us a bit about it?

The Trans-Siberian March Band plays Russian, Turkish, Balkan and Klezmer music. We have a line up of 2 clarinets, 3 trumpets, two trombones, 2 tubas, 2 drummers, 1 sax, and me on guitar, which is relatively unorthodox, though we’re totally unorthodox anyway. We’re not purist about the music at all – very burlesque – and mix it up with some Salt n Pepa, the Inspector Gadget theme, the Tetris theme (a Russian tune anyway). We have a kind of Soviet vibe, but it’s irreverent and tongue-in-cheek, with men in dresses and girls with moustaches. Our best gigs are packed late-night venues with everybody dancing, but we’ve also played children’s festivals, shopping centres, Liverpool St railway station, the bridge in Mostar in Bosnia and a museum in Mtskheta in Georgia. We play on London’s Balkan scene, but are not tied to it. We’ve also done Glastonbury, WOMAD, Secret Garden, Lovebox and loads of other festivals, plus 2 tours of Eastern Europe and one of Georgia. We have an ongoing collaboration with DJ Yoda, a sort of hip-hop/brass band mash-up – it works! It’s enormous fun, and the complete opposite of my ‘day job’ as a writer, sitting in a room on my own looking at a computer.

++ And aside from music, do you have any other hobbies?

Yes, too many. Walking, as aimlessly as possible, especially in London, but anywhere, cycling (as a pastime and as a spectator sport, despite all the drugs – it’s sometimes more rock n roll than rock n roll…), travelling, especially in Eastern Europe, where I go a lot in my own time as well as the band’s, films, plays, art in general, and books in general. I especially like (or am obsessed with) Byzantine art, architecture and history (comes from having lived in Istanbul), and the writing of and about Irish author James Joyce. I think it’s good to have a mixture of solitary hobbies and those, like cycling and travelling, you can do with others. I also like linguistics in general, and, a hobby that is demonstrably useful, language study.

++ Thanks again Nick! Anything else you’d like to add?

I’m the author of numerous published short stories and one novel, Laikonik Express, which is about 2 American slackers haring round Poland in the snow in search of a woman one of them has met on the train of the title. It’s a comic novel, quite rock n roll (I think) and can be sampled here, with extracts and reviews here.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
The Ringing – Caprice

Thanks so much to Jim Bishop for this interview! K-State was always a mystery to me until earlier this week I found two of their songs on Jim’s Youtube channel. Upon listening to “Lies” I was reminded why I searched for them in the first place, because they were making great jangly pop in those late 80s! As many obscure bands of the period there is not much written about them on the internet, but it’s time for that to change. Now sit back and discover K-State!

++ Hi Jim! Thanks a lot for for being up for this interview. As you might know there’s absolutely no information about K-State on the internet. Why do you think was that? Were you THAT obscure back in the day?

Good question. I’m surprised there’s absolutely nothing at all except for the posts I’ve put up on YouTube. In a way I was seeing if someone from the band would get in contact. At least you contacted me ABOUT the band so it does work ! But why nothing else..? Maybe.

1) The band was very popular locally in suburban North West London – Harrow, Wembley – but that’s still quite provincial. It’s away from the main live scene, so there’s no record of the band playing at well known venues like Dingwalls or The Dublin Castle. The Roxborough in Harrow for example was well known and popular but not on the live radar so far as London was concerned. Probably the nearest was The Clarendon, in Hammersmith.

2) As a wider answer, the unsigned bands from the eighties and nineties fall into a kind of internet black hole. Budget filming methods barely existed, so decent footage is thin on the ground and very basic quality by today’s standards. So material to put on YouTube is limited. Let alone posting the gig onto your Facebook page the day after. And audio-wise, If you weren’t signed it cost quite a lot of money to go into a recording studio then press the record yourself, so there were only a couple of ‘proper’ recordings made. I’ve posted one track from each vinyl record.

3) Time-wise most people of our era will have got on with their lives & copies of everything may have been lost in the intervening years with moving house, etc. I for one can’t find the early recordings made before I joined, I’m hoping someone somewhere has them.

++ You were telling me that you joined the band when they were already going, right? When did the band start and when did you join? And how did you know them?

I’d say they got going in 81/82. I met them in 83, and we became friends & me a fan.

I played in a guest spot on the first record in 86, and was asked to join after that.

Because I wasn’t there when they formed I’ll do my best to remember what the story was.

The 2 guitar players & bassist were – I think – all at the same school in Wembley, north west London. They definitely all lived in the same area. But the drummer went to school in Acton, where I lived. I was in a band myself and 3 of my band were at this school too, so the two bands were introduced to each other through that. We were playing in a similar style.

As a bizarre side-story, 3 members of The Who went to the same Acton school as the K-State drummer, whereas The Who’s drummer went to the same Wembley school as the other 3 members of K-State ! Also, I think three members of each band had learned to play the trumpet as well. Strange.

++ Talking of “them”, who were K-State and what instruments did each one of you played?

Original line-up:

Richard Elderfield – lead vocals, guitar, principal songwriter.
Graham Hodson – Rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Wade Chandler – Bass
Robert Weaver – Drums
Rachel Weaver – saxaphone (from 85)
Jim Bishop – Keyboards, some guitar, backing vocals (from 86)

++ Any clues why they named the band K-State?

Yes. Good answer, this, which is important for a band name. Robert’s Dad Bernie was a retired sound technician who’d worked for The Rank Organisation. As a result he somehow had access to the closed-down Kilburn State ballroom, which I understand was still being used as a BBC soundstage then (the guys told me there was a piano crashed halfway through the actual stage stuck there permanently.) Bernie managed to get the band in there to rehearse and even make some straight-to-tape recordings, which were really good quality. Anyway, someone was cleverly inspired to shorten Kilburn State to K-State. And there you have it. Some more educated scientific folk used to guess that it was referring to the k-state of an electron !

Because the building is listed they’ve kept it intact and you can still see it clearly from the tube with the huge letters ‘State’ on the top, so on the rare occasions I travel out that way it brings a smile to my face as it reminds me of the story. Not a bad landmark to choose ! It became a bingo hall afterwards, it’s even on Wiki – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilburn_State

++ And, yes, very important question. Whereabouts in the UK were you based? And what were the places in your town that you usually like hanging out at?

Nearly everyone lived in Wembley, or nearby. A pretty unremarkable part of London – except for having the most famous stadium in the world. At the time, especially after Live Aid in 85, lots more gigs went on there & the guys lived so close they could hear them from their houses – U2, Simple Minds, etc. I lived in Acton/Ealing, which is a couple of miles the other side of a huge hill & a big main road out of London from Wembley. Nice looking place, but hardly any live music.

++ What about gigs? Did K-State gig much? Any favourite gigs that you remember?

They/we did a regular gig at a pub originally called The Chequered Flag, in North Wembley. That was the ‘home gig’ if you like. Pretty much all the fans would turn up to those & they were good nights.  There are 3 videotaped shows from there, very basic quality. The pub changed its name to The Dog & Duck (yuck).

(The promoters who put that night on were big Gary Numan fans so how K-State ended up playing at those nights is still a bit weird. Apparently they put on a regular Numan disco & the man himself would turn up.)

The Roxborough in Harrow was good in an old-fashioned rowdy beer-drenched boozer sense; downstairs at The Clarendon and most other places like it you felt a bit more pressure. It was right at the height of pay-to-play so the pressure was on to get as many of your mates down to the gig to impress the promoters.

But the first K-State gig I went to (this is before I joined of course) left me speechless. I had no idea what I was in for – they blew the roof off. It was in one of those social clubs which have almost all disappeared now, North Harrow something-or-other.

++ Any other bands from that period that you liked and would recommend?

I’d gotten into the mod scene without becoming a full-on mod, so I used to see The Truth, The Prisoners, Making Time, The Moment, The Rage, The Way Out, to name a few. But that scene was short-lived and eventually splintered, the main result being Acid Jazz. I liked to see rhythm’n’blues bands, preferably with pub rock legends like Gypie Mayo or Mick Green. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There were a load of bands I liked at the time. I could go on and on and that’s not even asking everyone else in the band.

++ So, from what I gather, there were two releases, a 12″ and a 7″. Is that right? Or was there anything else? Compilation appearances perhaps?

That’s it I’m afraid, both self-made. No record label so no real release as such. Just sold at gigs.

++ The 12″ that had “Promise” in it came in 1986 and it was self-released by the band. What other songs were in this release?  And did your own label had a name?

The A-side was We’ll Find A Way (which Richard sometimes called We’ll Find THE Way, he kept switching.) The other track was Endless Struggle. No label.

++ Then, in 1987 there was the “Lies” 7″. I’ve only heard the A-side for this one. The B-side being “The Connoisseur”. But “Lies” to me sounds a bit different than the previous release, it’s just pure jangle bliss! Who would you say were the influences of K-State? And do you happen to know the story behind this song?

First and foremost, we had all met because we loved The Jam, but sadly they split up just as we’d started.

I was surprised when Richard brought Lies in, it’s so different from anything else he came up with. They way he sings it sounds like he really means what he’s singing, but I have no idea what influenced it. I can say for sure that we all knew the writing was on the wall for angry-young-men-doing-power-pop, which was the thing we’d been into. Once Paul Weller ditched The Jam and stopped being the king of making sharp aggressive music, there was no-one to take his place and tastes shifted away from it, as they always do.

Indie bands were getting more exposure & heading for mainstream popularity, especially The Cure and The Smiths; The Fall started to sound more chart-friendly, That Petrol Emotion were on the rise, Roddy Frame hit with Aztec Camera. So we had to change & although there were a few directions we could’ve gone, the popular thing at the time – and you have to remember all bands wanted to sign a record contract – was slick-sounding white soul, like The Blow Monkeys or Swing Out Sister. If you remember the late eighties you’ll know what I mean. And Richard was going for something like that that still suited the band. He did great I think.

I’ll get around to putting The Connoisseur up. It was a very popular live favourite, the K-State theme song for a while. It’s the first one to add saxophone & go for a smoother sound, but really catchy too.

++ On the sleeve artwork for this 7″ there are some portrait drawings. Who are they?

That’s us, as sketched by a friend of the band, from photos taken at the recording session.

++ By any chance do you know how many copies were pressed of these records? Perhaps it’s because they are not very well known, but I don’t think I’ve even seen them pop on eBay!

My best memory is that there were 200 of the 12” and 500 of the 7”. I know for a fact that 50 of the 7” got totalled because like a prat I drove away from the pressing plant with one box still on the roof of my car! Oops. I seem to remember we put the sleeves together Buzzcocks-style, sitting round with scissors and glue.

++ And what happened between the 7″ and the time you left the band? Are there any recordings from that period?

We did tape some rehearsals – which as I said unfortunately I’ve lost – but no more studio stuff. We were doing a good job forging ahead trying a new direction, but everything seems to have its own lifespan and I’d say ours had run its course.

++ When did the band split? And what happened after? Were you guys still involved with music?

I went travelling at the end of 88 and although I contacted the guys when I got back I really lost proper touch with them not long after; the band came to a halt in 89 and I think everybody splintered a little, as happens. People wanted to start families, spend more time doing other things. Being in a band can be very time absorbing. But I’ve been banging away ever since! I tried to stop when I was going through a hard time in the nineties, but it keeps drawing me back like a siren. I play in a band called, would you believe, King Salami and The Cumberland Three, which has a decent fanbase on the independent garage punk scene. I’m also in a 60’s all-male dance troupe called The Action Men; it’s easier to just watch the YouTube clips than explain. I’ve been in quite a few other band along the way, most recently Luxury Condo.

I record my own stuff under the name The Sayme, a lot of which I’ve put up on Soundcloud under the name Clark Commando (I’ve ended up with pseudonyms all over the place). In fact I pressed a 7” single in 2006 of a song I originally wrote for K-State, with new title & lyrics, called Ebabe. I was hoping to hawk it to Ebay to see if they’d use it in an ad, but that company are impenetrable! I thought of flogging some t-shirts with the ebabe logo on, but that seemed like too much hassle. And I could’ve gotten sued into poverty.

++ You were telling me you haven’t heard from the other band members since then. That’s a long time! Is there anything you’d like to say to them?

Hey ! How’s it going?! Let’s meet up…

I hope everyone’s doing well. We were good friends and a good band, and as you go on through life you realise just how much good fortune it takes to make those things work. I’m sure at least a couple of them are still in touch with each other.

++ And what would you say was your biggest highlight as part of K-State?

Musically, the Lies single sounded great to me, a real epic. I confess I’ve been naughty and put the alternate mix on YouTube with everything on it, that’s the one I love.

Live, the first time I saw the band play – they opened with Heatwave and I couldn’t believe how powerful, tight and sharp they were. Then the first time I played live I got a cheer when my name was mentioned. Typical show-off you see.

Socially we had some great laughs, especially with our drummer Robert, he’s such a character. Lots of growing up lads stuff that would make us wince now, but really funny at the time. But when we recorded Lies we went up to a studio in the middle of nowhere, literally a converted farmhouse. We stayed at a local pub and the landlord took the rare chance (for him) to stay up drinking with us. It was very messy.

I got into Super-8 film; mainly collecting though I tried to make films as well to use as backdrops for gigs. Wasn’t really good at it though.But I now have an unrivaled Super-8 collection, mainly because there’s no rivalry in it.

I took up scuba diving which I’d wanted to do since I was a kid. I love it but time and money make it a rare treat these days.

I’m a general wildlife enthusiast, though I don’t think of it as a hobby as such.

Some time ago I wrote a small piece about an obscure 80s Swedish band from Karlstad called Victorian Tin. Happily Christian Gustafsson from the band got in touch not so long ago and was kind enough to do this interview and that way tell us more about Victorian Tin and learn their story! He shared with me 27 (!) Victorian Tin songs, and plenty of them are real jangle gems. Wonder why they only released one tape during their time. For those who understand Swedish here is a newspaper clipping that you might enjoy as well. And now, sit back, read, and enjoy!

++ Hi Christian! First of all thanks for getting in touch! Whereabouts in Sweden are you? Still in Karlstad? And are you still making music?

After a year studying, in Stockholm, I moved back to Karlstad and have lived here since. I still make music but not as much as I used to. I’m involved in my friend’s band The Wonder Boys. Event hough I’m not a real member of the group I write quite a lot of music for them. Both songs I really like myself, but also songs “on demand” that I imagine the singer David would like. But occasionally I manage to write songs that neither of us like 😉
Erik (the voice of Victorian Tin) has moved many times and we don’t see each other that often any more. The last time he moved back to Karlstad, we formed ephemeron. Then he moved again and we meet maybe once a year. At the moment we have just started working on a new fantastic ephemeron song called “And the story goes”. I really love that song even though it’s not finished yet.

++ So tell me about Victorian Tin? Was it just you by yourself? And had you been involved in bands before?

I was in a band with my cousin, called Recidius Catonium. We played quite dark and gloomy stuff influenced by The Sisters Of Mercy, Clan of Xymox etc. One day I wrote a song that was very different. Too different to be a Recidius Catonium song. I thought about recording it myself, but as I can’t sing I asked my friend Erik (who I knew had started writing songs and played guitar) if he would help me out with it. He wrote the lyrics and sang on the song that we called “1986” (I think we recorded it in 1989). We thought the song was so good that we decided to start a band together. And that was the birth of “Scapegoat Palace”. We wrote and recorded new songs practically everyday in the year to come. Sometime later we wrote a song called Septemberia, and we asked a friend of Eriks, named Lina, to sing backing vocals. Again we thought we had moved to something new that deserved a new bandname. So we asked Lina to join us as a member and we renamed “Scapegoat Palace” to “Victorian Tin”. We dreamed about playing live and recruited a guitarist in Ola Frödin. Ola wrote the song “In my rainy weather” for us, but left the band quite soon. Eriks friend Johan Skugge then joined us instead and was with us until the breakup.

++ Was Victorian Tin a bedroom band? Did you ever play live?

We were indeed a bedroom band. Writing, playing and recording everything in my bedroom on my 4-track cassette porta studio. Unfortunately we never managed to play live.

++ Where does the name Victorian Tin comes from?

In the end of the eighties, one of my favourite bands were “All About Eve”. In the song “December”, Julianne sings “-There’s a victorian tin, I keep my memories in”. I thought it sounded like a good bandname. (Maybe I was wrong… 😉

++ And what would you say were the main influences of the band?

Hard to tell… But I remember we listened to “The Church”, “Cocteau Twins”, New Order and “All About Eve” a lot.

++ You only released that one tape on Everlasting Records. How did this deal happened? Did you ever meet them in England?

We all were music-addicts in those days, and found an English mailorder company where we ordered records from, not available in Sweden. In one of their catalogues they said they were starting a recordlabel and wanted new bands. We sent them a couple of songs which they liked and they asked us to send them our favourite songs for them to release on cassette.
We never met them, or talked to them. All conversation was by mail.

++ You were telling me there’s a very funny story behind this tape? Care telling it? 🙂

They asked us to compile our favourite songs for the cassette release and I think we sent them 10 songs. Snow violet heaven, Septemberia, Kitten song etc. We sent the tape in a letter and the post took nearly two weeks to arrive in England in those days. During the wait for the cassette to arrive we made them another tape with some other songs we thought they should hear. After a while we received a letter from them asking where the cassette was. A couple of days later we received another letter saying, “nevermind the last letter, the cassette has arrived now”. We waited for some very long weeks until the pressed cassette with cover arrived in our mailbox from Everlasting. We opened the package and realized that they had pressed the wrong cassette!!! It was the second cassette with “the rest of the songs we wanted them to hear” that had been pressed and released!!! The right cassette with our favourite songs, Snow violet heaven etc must have disappeared in the mail somewhere between Sweden and England! They didn’t know that we had sent them two cassettes, so of course, when the second cassette arrived, they thought it was the one we wanted to release. We were devastated. Imagine that your band was finally going to release something on a real recordlabel, and then the wrong songs is released. It took quite some time for us to get over that.

++ And from the 7 songs included on the tape, which would be your favourite? And why?

Silvery mouths, no doubt. We have been talking about re-recording our favourite Scapegoat Palace/Victorian Tin songs and Silvery Mouths is one of the songs that both myself and Erik like very much. I love the long intro (even though my “mandoline” playing is horrible), the melody, and the stolen drumbeat from The Cures fantastic song “Sinking”.

++ Mine is “The Days of Youth”. Mind telling the story behind this song?

I honestly don’t know much about it.  It’s all Eriks song, but I know that he wrote it in 1987 when he was “Exchange student” in Georgia, USA. My guess it’s about loneliness, far away from home, but I have to ask Erik before you quote me on that.

++ And are there any more songs from Victorian Tin that weren’t included on this tape? And did you ever participated on compilations or this tape is really your full discography?

There are lots of songs that’s not on the tape. Many, in my opinion better songs. Snow violet heaven that I mentioned before, Valentine Voices is a favourite, Kitten song, The Inconvenient Season and Salient which is a strange song that I like anyway. We wanted to make a song like Simple Minds would have done on “New Gold Dream”, but even though we failed that task, it ended up in a strange but interesting song I think.

++ When and why did you decide it was time to call it quits with Victorian Tin?

I’m not sure, but I think it was 1993. We grew apart musically. Erik and the “new” guitarist Johan started writing songs together and to be honest, I didn’t like them all that much so I quit. Typically enough, Everlasting was preparing a new cd compilation and wanted Victorian Tin to contribute to. But Erik & Johan formed a new band called “Phone a fish” and contributed with a song called “Sex”. I Formed a new band called “Emelies Garden” and contributed with the song “The shore”. But I don’t think the compilation cd was finished before Everlasting too called the quits.

++ After this band you were involved in many different bands. If you can, can you name each one of them and give a little description of them?

–Searching For Beatrice. A band which we had parallel with Victorian Tin. It was Erik on voice and guitar, myself on bass & drumprogramming and our friend Stefan on keyboards. A more synth oriented sound influenced by New Order, Depeche Mode, Clan of Xymox etc. We are still close friends, the three of us, and meet once in a while to record new songs.
–Emelies Garden. My first band after Victorian Tin. Myself on guitar, various female vocalists, Olof Hertting on bass, and Åsa Lundgren on keyboards. I wanted us to sound like All About Eve…We failed, but I still like the songs “The shore” and “This Summer Place”.
–Attic Drive/Springlee. When we recorded the Emelies Garden song “This summer place”, Olofs friend Carl helped us with guitar. After Emelies Garden I joined Carl in forming the band Attic Drive together with drummer Jakob and guitarist Mikael. This was the first band I played live with. 1996 I changed from bass to guitar. We got a new bassplayer named Ulf and the old guitarist quit. We changed name to “Springlee” and did a couple of gigs. We were big fans of guitarbased music like Suede, Pulp, Popsicle.
–Recidius Catonium. My cousin Anders and myself played music influenced på The Sisters Of Mercy, New Order, Fields Of The Nephilim, Clan Of Xymox among others. Anders was with us in Emelies Garden for a while, while Olof was abroad for a couple of months.
–Baren Med Vin & Josefin. I was in love with a girl called Hanna and wrote her a song which I gave her on a cassette. The song was dark, slow and in my opinion quite beautiful. The night after I gave her the tape, I had a dream that her father had listened to the song and thought it was “too fucking depressive”. So when I woke up I wrote her a new happy song on my mandolin instead. I played the song for my cousin Anders who wrote some crazy lyrics to it about a cowboy who lost his leg in a war. We decided it was time to start a band. We asked my friend from school Henric to join on guitar, Olof (from Emelies Garden) on bass, Anders on vocals, myself on mandolin. Later on David (The Wonder Boys) joined on saxophone, Åsa Lundgren (Emelies Garden) played Trombone, Åsa Bjureus (who had made the Victorian Tin logo on the cassette) played the flute. Mine and Henrics friend from school, Patrik Strand joined us on bass for the very last gig (when Olof once again was abroad). We were influenced by Irish folk music and especially The Pogues and Swedish versions like Persons Pack and Traste Lindens Kvintett. It was a lot of fun…but we were not good in any way. We did sound terrible! 😀
–Popetree. Erik and Stefan from Searching For Beatrice moved from Karlstad to Gothenburg and started a new band called Popetree. They had a drummer named Bengt and a bassplayer I don’t know the name of. The bassplayer left and they phoned me asking if I could play bass for a couple of gigs. We played a gig in Gothenburg (which was filmed) and one gig in Karlstad. We also recorded 4 songs in a studio in Gothenburg.
– In Losters Blue. Anders & myself played keyboard and my girlfriend of the time being, Karin sang on a couple of songs under the name In Losters Blue. The only band I’ve played in that only used keyboards.
–The Wonder Boys. David from Baren Med Vin & Josefin started a band together with another guy named Christian (Kastén in lastname) when he moved to Lund in the south of Sweden. They played mostly on acoustic guitars and David also played saxophone. When David was turning 30 I recorded an instrumental version of one of their songs called “Bad Luck Charm”, with drums and heavy guitarsound. David liked the version, recorded vocals on it and from that day I have written quite a lot of songs for them. Listen to “A Gift I Never Had”, “If We Get Through This”, “A Bat In The House (featuring my wife on backingvocals!), and “The Girl From Tory Story” from http://www.thewonderboys.se. Songs I wrote the music to which I really like.

Well that’s all I think…

++ Seems there was an interview with you on a zine called “Billig Underhållning”. Do you remember anything about that? And how do you remember the Swedish scene during those years? Were there any other bands or at least like-minded fans of jangle pop?

There was a guy in Stockholm writing a blog, and like yourself he had heard “The Days Of Youth” and liked it. He did a short interview for a fanzine, but I don’t think it was ever released. There was a very good band from Karlstad in the end of the eighties called “All That Jazz”. The backing vocalist Mari sang on the recording of the Emelies Garden song “The Shore” meant for the Everlasting compilation. We liked them very much but apart from them I can’t remember any other band from Karlstad influenced by “English-guitarpop-music”.

++ Also I wonder, was there no interest of other labels to release your songs? I find it very strange that there are no more releases!

We sent our demo to both Swedish and English record labels but apart from Everlasting, no one was interested. Our dream was to be signed by 4AD. We were huge fans of many of their bands, Cocteau Twins, Clan Of Xymox, This Mortal Coil etc. They also had very good taste in artwork, that we liked. But sadly, they were not interested in our music.

++ And when you are not making music, what other hobbies do you have?

As a family-father the time for hobbies is quite minimal nowadays, but one thing I can practice is photography. I love taking pictures.

++ One last question, tell me about Karlstad! What are your favourite spots there? To sightsee, to eat, to drink? Even to record shop?!

Karlstad is a small town with a population of 90 000. The river Klarälven flows through the city and I think it’s a quite beautiful and nice town. Favourite spots…hmm…I love walking by the river in summertime. You can eat good food in “Munken”, the restaurant is quite beautiful as well. The building was built in 1700 century, with valves and was back then some kind of tomb/grave (I don’t know how to explain in English). There was a cemetery nearby back then, and the building that nowadays is a restaurant was used for storing coffins. A nice place to sit and eat, don´t you think? 😉 The days of record shopping is sadly over in Karlstad. In the eighties and nineties we had a great record store called “Riff Raff”. Much independent music and rare bootlegs. They were even a recordlabel and released their own band “Hollywood Indians”. One of my first jobs was at Åhléns record store, by the way!

++ Thanks again a lot! Anything else you’d like to add?

Now it’s time for you to tell your story, and let me know when and how you found out about Victorian Tin! And thank you very much for showing interest in our music! 😀

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
Victorian Tin – Snow Violet Heaven

Thanks so very much to Chris Brady for this great interview! Surreal Madrid were a late 80s English band that made fantastic jangly pop as you can tell and listen at their soundcloud account. They only released one 12″ EP, but what an EP it is. Now it’s time to rediscover this band, especially as it seems they will be playing gigs very soon again!

++ Hi Chris! Thanks so much for the interview. How are you? I hear there is some sort of Surreal Madrid comeback, is that so?

Hi Roque, I’m fine thanks and thanks for inviting us to be interviewed. There is indeed a reunion going on at long last. Loads of other bands from the late 80s early 90s are doing it so why not ? I think the fact that we are having another go is down to our continued love of music.

++ That’s so cool. So how did you track down the other members from the band? And when do you think you’ll be playing your reunion gig?

I found the guys via LinkedIn. First up was Shaun (drummer) who was already on there in his professional guise as Head Vet at Battersea Dog’s Home. I got in touch with him and we went for a beer. Rob (bass guitar) is his best friend from when they were about 8 years old so that was two of them snared ! I LinkedIn to some old university mates and got John’s (singer) details . We all met up in London for a beer and talked music all afternoon and evening and decided it would be fun to book a rehearsal room and see if we could still play. 

We found a great studio in Little Venice and have now been there 4 or 5 times working on getting the old songs back up to speed. We’re all scattered round the country now so can’t get together as much as we’d like to but we should be ready to gig early next year.

++ So yeah, how come  a band from the UK calls themselves Surreal Madrid? What’s the story behind the name? I assume you’ve been to Madrid?

The name comes from a pathetic football joke …. “Heard the latest scores from Europe ? ….. Real Madrid 2, Surreal Madrid Fish ” We called one of our demo tapes Fish. The late, great John Peel was a huge football fan and he apparently chose to play “Sorry Sir” on his Radio 1 show because he liked the football gag . Madrid’s a cool place. Been there a few times on business

++ Where were you based, in Biggleswade or in London? I’m a bit confused there!

We were and it’s fair to say we still are based in London. Biggleswade is a sleepy little town famous only for being the birthplace of the tractor and there is no music scene other than covers bands playing in pubs. Nice place to live and a 40 minute train ride into London.

++ And you were telling me that there was another Surreal Madrid after you, from Liverpool, right? Are they any good?

Yeah, they came along with the Madchester / Liverpool baggy scene. Not my cup of tea ! They show up on Google searches so we considered changing our name to PerryComa …… but have now decided to stick to our guns as we had the name first

++ So let’s talk about the past. When did Surreal Madrid start as a band? how did you all knew each other?

John and I were mates at university and started a band doing covers of Joy Division, Cure, Cramps, Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus etc with an epic Goth bass player. We started writing a couple of songs of our own to slip into the set and played a few low key student gigs. The best of the names we used was “He’s Dead Jim”

After university John and most of our friends moved down to London to start work and I was living a short train ride from the capital in a shared house with a couple of mates from work, one of whom was a drummer. We started messing around with a few songs & covers, then Andy (the drummer) decided he needed to concentrate on his career. Fortunately one of John’s colleagues from the day job (Lol) was a drummer so we signed him up and John brought his mate (Johnny B) in on keyboards. John & Lol worked for a courier firm at Heathrow airport and we used to use their office out by Terminal 4 to rehearse on Saturdays. Great place to play as you can make a lot of noise !

This was the start of Surreal Madrid proper. We played a few gigs in London then decided it would sound better sans keyboards and then Lol got married and fled to France. We stuck an advert in Melody Maker for a drummer and Shaun responded. At the time John was playing bass & singing so when Shaun asked if he could bring his bass playing mate Rob along it seemed like a good plan.

It worked really well and this is the line up that made the record and played regularly around London.

++ Where you all in bands before Surreal Madrid?

Rob & Shaun had been in bands but I’m not sure what they were called, John and I did some stuff at university and there was an interim period after university and starting up with John and my housemate Andy where I was in a local band called Code 7 Victim 5. This one sounded a bit like the Cocteau Twins with guitar, bass, drum machine, and clarinet.

++ What about after?

After we split up I joined up with some guys in the town I was living in and tried to kickstart them but it was never going anywhere. We had a singer that looked like a blond Jim Morrison ….. but totally choked when we did our one & only gig and a bass player who couldn’t stay out of  jail.

Rob & Shaun started a new band called Two Robs which got about as far as Surreal Madrid.

John has spent the last year or so writing solo material and playing acoustic guitar and is all over Youtube as Johnkneem. He’s got an album’s worth of material more or less ready to record

++ Who would you say were your main influences back then?

All  the obvious ones, mainly the Smiths with a bit of Joy Division and the Cure thrown in. On the later songs Braver, Belt and a Better Time you can hear the Stone Roses creeping in too.

++ You released just one fabulous single. It included four songs “In Dreams You Stay Mine”, “Now It’s You”, “Sorry Sir” and “Blood on the hand”. I think my favourite is “In Dreams You Stay Mine”, though it’s very hard to pick. Care telling me the story behind these songs?

John and myself wrote these usually based on a riff or fragment of a vocal melody. We’d introduce new material at rehearsals and develop it into complete songs as a band. The subject material is fairly dark and focuses on relationships going pear-shaped.

Blood on the Hand is about being accused of doing evil when you didn’t actually do it but have no way of defending yourself.

Sorry Sir concentrates on being in a good relationship ….. but making a mess of it by doing bad things and getting away with it. This segues neatly into

Now it’s You which is about the point where you stop getting away with it and the relationship ends leading neatly into

In Dreams which is all about regret and yearning.

You can sense a theme going on here ! One day we’ll consider doing a happy one about puppies or kittens.

++ And which would you say was your favourite? And why?

In general when listening to music I listen to the overall sound rather than trying to make sense of the words or whatever and my favourite on the record would have to be Sorry Sir. Plus it’s a blast to play live. A lot of people reckon that the best songs are the ones that come together quickest and Sorry Sir was one of those.

++ Rottweiler Records? Was that your own label or who were them?

We made the record back in the days where everybody made demo tapes on cassette and posted them to record companies thinking that if we sent them finished product it would stand out from the crowd. To make it look good we used the name Rottweiler Records. It wasn’t really a serious label.

++ You were telling me you had a  total of 20 songs, but only got round to recording 7. So that’s 3 that weren’t included in the single. Were these 3 supposed to be released in a new single? “Belt” is fantastic, could have definitely been one!

We sent the record to all of the record companies and got really strong interest from Stephen Street (produced early Smiths and went on to work with Blur). He came to see us live and commented that the record, which we’d recorded one instrument at a time, sounded sterile compared to the live sound. So we booked another studio with a big live room and recorded Belt, Braver & a Better Time in 2 overnight sessions. These were done live with a couple of guitar overdubs.

++ But yeah, 20 songs, seems like you had enough to make an album even. Or two!  What happened? Why didnt you get to release any more records?

Stephen liked the sound of the new demo and we kept ourselves busy gigging hoping something good would happen but at the time he was busy with Spin (who evolved into Gene) and early Blur. The recording process was different back then and more expensive and at the time we couldn’t afford the studio time to do justice to a whole album’s worth of songs. The plan was for somebody else to fund that ….”

++ And did you ever had any sort of big label interest in your band?

Oddly enough we did ! The head of A&R at Virgin came to see us at the Robey in North London and the guy who allegedly signed Madonna to WEA came along to a gig in Hampstead. They both liked the music but nothing ever came of it.

++ Tell me about gigs! Did you play a lot? Are there any particular gigs, favourite gigs, that you remember? Any anecdotes you could share? 

I think we did about 30 gigs in total. Places like the Robey, Bull & Gate, Rock Garden, New Merlin’s Cave, Camden Falcon ….. all London venues. My personal favourite place to play was the Robey as they had a good sound system, 3 or 4 bands a night followed by Indie disco until 2am and it was next to the Tube station so easy to get to. It was a lively scene back then with most venues putting on 3 or 4 bands a night. The Rock Garden used to host great gigs on Holidays where they would put 10 bands on between 2pm and 2am.

The best gig was in a pub in Islington where we supported the Boo Radleys just after their first album came out. It was a hot summer evening, the pub was full of people in for the music and cheering on Cameroon in the World Cup which was on the TV, everybody was in a good mood and the music flowed nicely

++ What about radioplay? Did that work alright for you guys? Press? fanzines? I ask because it’s so strange that with the songs you had more people don’t know about you!

The record got played a handful of times on GLR, a Cambridge station and most notably on John Peel’s show on Radio 1 which at the time was the go-to station to listen to interesting new music. Our record got reviewed in NME the week they started a new feature where they invited celebrities in to do the reviews. Comedian Vic Reeves reviewed ours and wasn’t complementary claiming we sounded “probably overqualified”. Given that we are basically a doctor, vet, chemist & physicist he was probably right. NME reassured us that even getting reviewed was a good result as they get sent so many records a week

++ And then what happened to you guys? Why did you split?

We did a gig at the Robey with a good crowd in, played really well and everybody enjoyed it. On the way out I said to John something like “Great gig mate see you next week at practice”. He told me he didn’t think there would be another practice and that was it

When we met up again earlier this year the recurring topic of conversation was “Why did we split up ? ” and nobody actually knew.

++ When you are not making music, what do you do? Do you have any other hobbies?

My wife & I bought a fixer-upper Victorian house about 17 years ago and have been working on it ever since. It was a mess when we first saw it but instant love for me as it had a basement converted into a recording studio.  John goes to gigs all over the country and when he’s not doing that is an avid plane-spotter & twitcher. Rob has taken up running and completed the London marathon. Shaun works strange hours but fits in a busy social life.

++ One last question, in retrospect, what would you say was the biggest highlight of Surreal Madrid?

It has to be hearing our record on the radio for the first time. GLR was a London station and the DJ told us he’d slip it on between 6:30 – 7:00am on the breakfast show. It got to 06:50 and he put the Rolling Stones on and I thought there was no chance ….. but then he played In Dreams You Stay Mine. Celebration ensued !

++ And bonus one question, as I’ traveling to London again, what do you recommend visiting? eating? drinking?

Tough question as there are so many choices. Camden is the obvious Indie hangout with the market, music venues & interesting places to eat. Let me know when you’re coming over and we’ll help plan your visit. As far as food and drink are concerned you’ll have to have a night out with us !

++ Thanks a lot again Chris!! Anything else you’d like to add?

Thanks Roque, great questions. We’re really enjoying playing music again and the difference this time is the Internet. It is so much easier these days to get your music out there and opens up opportunities that just weren’t there 20 years ago. Hopefully a few more people will hear us this time round.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Listen
Surreal Madrid – In Dreams You Stay Mine