Sean McGhee and I studied at the same university in Liverpool, LIPA.
At that time, I didn't know him very well but did a lot of work with one of his friends, Duncan Speakman. When both me and Sean ended up living in London Duncan told us to meet up and do some music together and that's what we did.
We started writing some songs together, then I started working with Guy Sigsworth and recommended him to get Sean as his engineer, he did and they worked together for years and years, and still sometimes, then Sean started producing for himself and wanted to start new projects, he got in touch with Richard through friends connections. I remember he was very excited to meet Richard and start writing together, at that time he had no idea they would start a band together. But when they started to get to know eachother and writing plenty of great songs they formed ArtMagic. I kept bumping into Richard at Sean's place where we were all working on songs.
*Were you a Suede fan prior?
I have always loved Suede, ever since I was a teenager. I was into a lot of British bands and Suede was one of the best ones! They have great tunes. So yes, definitely.
*What was it like collaborating with Richard?
I have only collaborated with Richard for live gigs, we did a gig with ArtMagic, me and a few other bands which was one big collaboration, we all played on each others songs and did backing vocals for each other.
Richard and Sean have also backed me up on an acoustic gig in London at The Regal Room, I premiered some new songs and it was great to have the guys with me.
Richard is wonderful to work with! He is not only an extremely gifted guitar player and musician, but also a gentle and lovely person. He will always listen to what you have to say, he is patient and then he comes up with great parts on the guitar.
*Do you share any favourite musicians?
I'm sure we do, but we have never really discussed it. We tend to talk about all kinds of other things to do with life and love and travel.
*What did you learn from working with someone like Richard?
I guess I learned that even though you are in a famous rock band you can be a gentle, calm lovely guy! We are all musicians and automatically speak the same language.
I also get very inspired by his guitar playing and how he comes up with parts, they just so naturally flow with whatever is going on. I also think he has a special sound to his guitar, I'm not sure how he gets it to sound like that, I guess he has some trade-secrets... As a teenager I was mainly a guitar player myself and if I didn't sing, that's probably what I would have focussed on.
*Was it easy to work with him?
Richard is very easy to work with.
Very considerate and brings a lot of ideas and experience to the table. He is just a great musician.
*Any awkward moments?
Not really, but plenty of fun moments talking about old aquaintances and also about Finland and Norway. He has a good sense of humour and it's just fun to joke and talk.
*Also, you mentioned once that Sean McGhee is a person with many hidden talents. Can you tell us more about that please?
Oooh, Sean is so wonderful. He is also interested in a lot of things and has a lot of knowledge about a lot of things. I always thought if I ever participated in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Sean would be my Call-A-Friend-lifeline.
I am also very impressed by his cooking and his passion for going for walks in nature. He also collects pipes and has the best selection of DVD's ever, you will never get bored when you visit Sean. And if you are really lucky he will pull out his dancing polar bear...!
*Does Richard have any hidden talents?
I am sure he does, I have not been able to explore them close up though. I will keep an eye out next time...
1.Please tell us more about your folk experience/ history and how’s it going now?
When I was at university in the 1990s I made friends with a couple of people who were folk musicians, and it was the first time I was aware of the folk scene. I knew a little about Irish folk music but it didn’t really do too much for me - I find the dance music a bit too jolly, really! Back then I was also trying to learn to play piano accordion - I’d started as a child and picked it up again in my twenties, but I was struggling with what music I wanted to play on it so I dropped it. I bought the odd folk record from time to time and carried on with my life.
Years later, I was still buying the occasional folk album, but I gradually started getting more interested. I started buying more English folk music, discovered I particularly liked the dance music - it’s kind of shufflier and more grinding than its Irish cousin - and bought a D/G melodeon after trying out a mate’s. Then I discovered an artist called Chris Wood, completely fell in love with his work and that was the catalyst to start really exploring the music in depth, and that’s led to me going to loads of gigs, buying loads of records and working hard on trying to get my melodeon playing up to the standard where I could play at sessions etc.
So, really, it’s become a musical hobby. It’s good for me to have something to do that’s still musical but has nothing to do with my day job. I practice the melodeon every day and whilst I’m not very good, it’s very rewarding.
2.In the interview with Nicky Lee-Delisle you said the reason you started artmagic was “A Desire to carve out a space to call my own”, does that mean no solowork of yours in the foreseeable future? Please tell us more on your own music writing!
I really don’t enjoy working alone, to be honest. I feel like I need people to show off to! I have occasionally worked alone but those have been very specific commissions. Those tend to work because I love nothing more than a deadline - give me a task, give me a deadline and I’ll deliver something on time. But I can’t imagine ever working up a solo album. Then again, who knows? Anything could happen.
3.Music festival or One-off gigs? Why?
Well, festivals are a bit more stressful because you don’t get much of a soundcheck, and you’re not in control of the overall situation. But that’s also the reason they’re good to do - to go on stage and make it work like that is quite exciting, too. Plus you can get to play to an audience that’s never heard of you, and maybe win them over. When Artmagic played Tramlines festival in Sheffield that was one of our best shows - a performance in a cathedral and an audience who didn’t really know us, but who seemed to really get it.
When Artmagic put on shows in London, we worked out quite quickly that most of the promoters we worked with were useless, and didn’t do any actual promotion. From that point on we started hiring the venues ourselves, booking the supports and running the whole thing. That was good because you were able to curate what you were doing and make it a more satisfying musical experience for the audience.
Touring is great too, though - it’s more of an adventure and you get to refine and improve as you do the shows.
4.So far you have worked with so many musicians: Kate Havnevik, Andrew Montgomery, Richard Oakes and Alison Moyet, etc. Richard Oakes has took part in the production of Montgomery’s album making. Any collaborative work in the future?
Various things are bubbling away but nothing much I can talk about at the moment. Richard and I are discussing when we can go into the studio to start recording the second album and we’re hoping it’ll be sooner rather than later.
5.As fan of artmagic, I really miss singing the backing vocals of The glass arcade and the poetry sharing session. Will there be more chances like this?
Hard to know; they were great fun to do but they were both pretty off the cuff and unplanned - we just took the idea and ran with it. Until we’ve got another album to promote it’s hard to think of things like this. The next record will be a bit more “internal” so we might promote it differently. I’d like to push the album right to the front and us right to the back next time around.
6.Could you tell us the reason you fall in love with Doctor Who? Was it because it is a story about adventures in time and space?
I don’t know, really! Why do you fall in love with anything? It just really appeals to me. Here are some possible reasons:
- I like the Doctor a lot. He’s heroic without being showy. He’s funny. He’s very clever. And he’s (mostly) compassionate, too. And he always wins!
- I like it when the monsters are humans who’ve been taken over and then speak with a dramatic voice through a pitch shifter. The audio plays are particularly good for this.
- The old series manages to make exciting family adventure serials on the same resources as a sitcom and I love that ambition.
- I like the fact that it exists as a TV show, as a comic strip, as novels and as audios. All have radically different approaches to the source material and yet all of them bring something new to it. Some of my very favourite Doctor Who stories are 1990s novels from when it wasn’t even on telly.
- Bowties are cool.
7. Do you go out and drink for happy hour?
Is happy hour even a thing anymore? I do enjoy a drink but I don’t go to the pub all that often.
8. What’s your favourite accent on English?
The Birmingham accent is much underappreciated, although I would say that since I was born there. Not to mention hard to imitate (I’m looking at you, cast of Peaky Blinders.) Handsome men with West Country accents make me blush.
9. Can you recall what kind of food you had during the China tour?
OH YES. The food was my favourite part! Steamed fragrant wheatgerm bread. Black fungus on ice with rice vinegar & soy sauce. And a stir-fry from a food court in a Shanghai mall - pickled vegetables, lotus root, bean curd sticks, broccoli fried in a spicy sauce with coriander and a fried rice cake, washed down with milk tea which was mixed with a kind of sweet sticky rice. My god, that was good. Oh, and finally getting to eat stinky tofu in Xi’an! Oh, and the vegetable congee at the hotel in Xi’an was brilliant too.
10. Do you write any poetry? If so, do you think poetry is similar to how you write song lyrics?
I only write lyrics. I feel that, whilst on the surface they seem like similar disciplines, they’re very, very different. A poet can play around with meter and stress in a way that a lyricist can’t so easily. And a lyricist has to always remember to keep the words “singable”. You need to know what consonants can go next to each other or which vowel sounds work well with the tune. Plus, you can have an incredibly simple set of words that can be brought to life by a good melody. Poets don’t have that luxury - it has to work on the page. Most rock and pop lyrics sound a bit crap when you see them written down.
11.Do you have any favorite poets? Any other literature you love?
My favourite poets are Philip Larkin, A.E. Housman, Clare Pollard. I don’t read a huge amount of literature but I never, ever miss a book by David Leavitt. I love his writing and his insight into gay life and love really helped me when I was younger. Big fan of comics, too - Seth, Joe Sacco, Guy Delisle, Chris Ware all fantastic writers / artists.
12.What about some favorite song lyrics?
God, where do you start? Off the top of my head:
Chris Wood, “Thou Shalt” - “Thou shalt sit into the night / thou shalt stare into thy rage / thou shalt tell them you’re alright / let ‘em think it’s just your age / but your body will soften / at the turning of the year / oh, your body will soften / as you grin from ear to ear”.
Pet Shop Boys, “Twentieth Century” - “Well I bought a ticket to the revolution / and I cheered when the statues fell / everyone came to destroy what was wicked / but they killed off what was good as well / sometimes / the solution is part of the problem / let’s stay together”.
Paul Simon, “Train In The Distance” - “What is the point of this story? / What information pertains? / The thought that life could be better / is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains”.
John Grant, “It Doesn’t Matter To Him” - “ vulnerable feels like / a cold wet concrete room / lit with flourescent light / which, as you know, makes everything look bad”.
Kate Bush - “Running Up That Hill” - “You don’t want to hurt me / but see how deep the bullet lies / unaware I’m tearing you asunder / there is thunder in our hearts / is there so much hate for the ones we love? / Tell me we both matter, don’t we?”
Joni Mitchell - well, pretty much every word of The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter but especially “Amelia” - “I pulled into the Cactus Tree motel / to shower off the dust / and I slept on the strange pillows of my wanderlust / I dreamed of 747s over geometric farms / dreams, Amelia, dreams and false alarms.”
Sandy Denny, “John The Gun” - “I am the master of the games that you will hardly ever play / so I will teach your sons / and if they should die before the evening of their span of days / why, then, they will die young”.
Of course, I’ve gravitated to lyrics that look good on the page. So many work perfectly but don’t. I could go on forever, really. Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, Mark Eitzel, Everything Everything, George Michael, Gillian Welch - all fantastic lyricists. And also some artist I love (naming no names) write words that are nothing special, or occasionally embarrassing, but it’s all about the whole effect, isn’t it?
13.How did you come upon your current tweedy dressing style? What did you dress like back in the 90s? Did you follow fashion trends?
I always wanted to dress the way I do but I used to prefer to slip into the background so it was black t-shirts, black jeans, every day. I’ve never followed trends much, although I looked like your archetypal grunge kid in the early 90s - plaid shirt, band t-shirt, army boots. In some way trends have caught up with me because that hipster waistcoat look is definitely a “thing” now. So, of course, I stay away from that to a large extent now.
14.How is performing up front different from being a backing vocalist in terms of physical presence?
If you’re singing lead on stage, you’re a focal point, whether you want to be or not. So you have to push yourself forward and try and be worth watching. When I’m singing backing vocals, I prefer to concentrate on my performance and slip into the background.
15.I like the arm movements you do while singing on stage, is this something that comes naturally or did you catch yourself practicing stage-moves in the mirror?
It just comes naturally. To be honest, a bit more mirror practice wouldn’t hurt! Next time Artmagic play, I want to be more still, but that says more about the material we’re writing, I suppose. I need to act my age and remember that our work is about our music, and not us.
16.Do you have some favorite episodes of the Simpsons?
You can stick a pin in the first nine seasons and find someting I’ll love. “Itchy & Scratchy Land” might be my all time favourite - every line in that is perfect. “Bart Sells His Soul”, is amazing too. I could be here all day listing my favourite scenes.
In “Hurricane Neddy” there’s a bit where the wind blows through a harmonica store and the instruments all play tuneful music. It then blows into a harpsichord store - the harpsichords come flying out the window and crash to the pavement with a hugely discordant chord. I actually fell off the sofa I was laughing so hard the first time I saw that.
17.Were you a huge Suede fan before you met Richard and/or was he your favorite member of the band?
I was a fan. I wouldn’t say a huge fan; certainly, I’d drifted away by the time of A New Morning and I wasn’t mad keen on Head Music at the time. But someone lent me Sci Fi Lullabies in the mid 2000s and I really got back into them and started listening more closely - I’d never heard most of those songs before. As for him being my favourite member, I never really thought of it that way, I just liked what he was doing musically, which is why I wanted to work with him. I’ve only met the other band members very, very briefly.
18. Which place’s culture has influenced you most and why? Are you a fan of Deutschland?
I’m not sure - I love to travel but I’m not sure I could isolate an influence. Most of what drives me is music and there’s plenty of music from all over the world that’s touched me in some way.
I am a big fan of Germany, though. I love the language, I love the culture and I love the beer. I’ve travelled there many time and always enjoyed it.
2087
kianamaiart
prguitarman
gummygunk
