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more photos from SheBu june 3rd by Nick Wright

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‘schedule’ - obsolete by the time of this photo... what can you do?

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The Island of the Hopeful Monsters: lost Shriekback demos from the 80′s & 90′s

TRACKLIST from Big Night Music Black Light Trap demo Death, Sex and Money Fine Minds (soon to be Running on the Rocks) Pretty Little Things demo Guiness Despair

from Oil & Gold Faded Flowers (excerpt)

from Go Bang New Man demo Got Heat Over the Wire demo Purified

from Naked Apes & Pond Life (and also the aborted Lunar Seas album) Seething (Sinus Aestuum) Juice (Mare Nectarum) Sea of Vapours (Mare Vaporum)

and introducing THE FLESH BEACONS (Andrews, Barker, Lu Edmonds and Marvin Black) Shake the Big Tree Goodbye My Monkey

We adapted our title from a fictitious book by Kilgore Trout - Kurt Vonnegut’s alter ego - in which, after an ecological cataclysm, the forces of evolution create mutations which might stand a better chance of survival in the new conditions:

‘..the humanoids found themselves the parents of children with wings or antlers or fins, with a hundred eyes, with no eyes, with huge brains, with no brains, and on and on. These were Nature’s experiments with creatures which might, as a matter of luck, be better planetary citizens than the humanoids. Most died, or had to be shot or whatever, but a few were really quite promsing and they intermarried and had young like themselves.’ (’Galapagos’)

The tunes on this album of demos (from roughly ’86 to ’96) are all of them experiments; all in development. Some, like Black Light Trap and Over the Wire have gone on to have successful futures upon internationally released albums: here you can hear them three-quarters formed as we groped towards their ideal shape. Others were immediately abandoned and have languished for years on cassette tapes to eventually emerge, still-born, in the museum of this collection. Some of them, in our opinion, were perfectly acceptable but fell victims to adverse circumstance. There is a lot of luck in Natural Selection, after all. To all of them, though, we owe our parental allegiance. They all must have seemed like a good idea at the time Once they were all Hopeful.

(All the tracks are taken from cassettes, hyped by technology as much as we dared. Hiss and holes are deliberate - being the lesser of evils)

FURTHER REFLECTIONS on ‘HOPEFUL MONSTERS’

On this, our next self-released album, we move ever deeper into the area of archaeology. There was, after all, a reason that each of these tunes never got released. Actually, a whole lot of reasons. Some were on their way to becoming something more honed and developed (the ones you know already), some were out of a dressing-up box of musical styles which, in the case of the Big Night Music band, was a response to our newly discovered musical chops. The spectral forms of the Punks and Eno, however, were wafting around shaking their admonitory fingers and intoning the mantra: ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you should’. We heard their ghostly warnings in time, luckily. Death Sex and Money is having a crack at Tom Waits, Guiness maybe Enya? (Partridge Senior here making a good fist of the melody the non-breathing, range-indifferent keyboard player has written, the bastard).

There was also an Astrid Gilberto cover which we have omitted for copyright reasons. Boy, we were game for owt.

Faded Flowers was a fragment on the end of a cassette which contained the BNM material. Taped Over.  

Sorry.  At times like this, we could well wish that we’d been a bit more archivally minded but, alas, that would have been incredibly Un-funky, you know? It’s interesting, I think, to hear even this - which is a fraction of the overdubbage which choked poor old FF. See:(http://shriekbackmusic.tumblr.com/post/113952818582/faded-flowers). 

You can hear how this treatment might have seemed justified, even. It is, however, a whole other beast. And a far less interesting one. Someone once said that you could so easily make FF into a big-ass Simple Minds type anthem. It’s true and I’m so glad we never did.

The Go Bang demos are conceptually stranger yet. They are the Monsters we produced without the influence of A&R man and Producer; on the rest of Go Bang these external influences were, of course, very much to the fore. In Over the Wire and Newman which made it as far as the album you can see how they would have turned out if they had come via the usual in-house method tubes (better, I venture). 

Both Sids (Wendy & Sarah) appear on ‘Purified’ as, maybe, psychiatric nurses (funky, soulful ones, though) to my tormented paranoiac. A little psychodrama right there.

We had a good laugh, the Sids and I (and the engineer Rick Kenton), drunkenly improv’ing all mannner of nonsense over our backing tracks. The crystallising moment coming with Wendy and Sarah beautifully doo-wopping the words ‘Rat Wee’ and ‘Knob Cheese’. All written on the wind and gone now forever, alas..

Now the ‘aborted Lunar Seas album definitely needs some backstory. It was post Go Bang, Island had dropped us, Dave had gone to the US to be part of the Grunge Revolution and Sacred City had gone down indifferently - it was evidently a Grunge-free zone. After a fairly ropey US tour in ’92, it was me and Mart hanging on to the World Domination deal by an - as it turned out - illusory thread. Some Vast Behaviour was called for, clearly. So it was, fired up by the alien, scruffy but deeply techie, possibly toxic music I was picking up on pirate radio staions in London (it was ‘Hardcore’, apparently, which was kinda morphing into Jungle* - that was what my girlfriend’s teenage son told me anyway), and the Concept of Concept Albums (Sacred City was a blast and so easy to write, when there’s an armature to hang ideas on) that I came up with the Lunar Seas idea. Which was - ahem - the moon’s craters and mountains etc were mostly named by people who knew very little about the real nature of these landscape features (there’s no water in the ’Seas of Tranquility’, for instance, who knew?). Thus the moon is another place where humans can indulge their innate desire to project meaning onto inert, indifferent things. Taking that a step further, I wondered, what if we were to repeat the exercise at one more remove, so to say? Thus, the Sea of Nectar (Mare Nectarum) was to take the idea of Important Fluids (oil, blood, semen) and create another layer of projection onto these lifeless rocks (it should be noted that AIDS was still a major killer at this time and the 1st Gulf War (‘No Blood for Oil’) was not long over.  Also, the new Coppola Dracula movie had just come out. Zeitgeisty, right? Yeah, and that very subject was what ‘Sea of Vapours’ was to address: ‘the data-bank of dreams’. I am, believe it or not, channelling a Japanese girl on the vocal (until a real one came along). I was thinking of the girl on the billboard video ad in Blade Runner but that’s no excuse, obviously. 

Fun is had with the idea of Zeitgeist in it’s literal translation: ’Time Ghost’, as well an associated French term: ‘le rap culturel’. Civilisation talking to itself, basically. Salman Rushdie gets a name check which carbon dates the tune reliably (Rushdie’s fatwah, of course). Half way through all this balls-out techy, po-mo, alien-pop adventure, of course, along came the Acoustic Band and ideas and technology had to be forcibly mated - with varying results. ‘Seething’ (lunar correpondance: Sinus Aestuum - ‘Seething Bay’ (!)) works rather well, I think, ‘Juice’ rather less so. Are there, as producer Markus Dravs, insisted: ‘too many bongos’?  I think perhaps there are.

‘The Flesh Beacons’ is a rare anomaly. An attempt, after the chasteningly muzbiz album ‘Go Bang’, to return to our arty, weirdshit roots and to open the gates to a bit more collaborative action with no constrictions. Thus Mart and I involved Lu (this is pre the Acoustic Band, of course, come on keep up) and, uniquely, our mate Marvin who was a guitarist, engineer and film music person (he and his colleague Nigel Holland were the infamous ’Sound Marines’ unit (with actual US helmets stencilled: ’Sgt. Kitsch’ and ‘Col. Sync’ geddit?) and who (crucially - for so many things) introduced me to ms. Vivienne Kent of Charrington Street. Marv had great ideas for band names: ‘Sad Lions’ was one and ‘The Flesh Beacons’ was another and he distinguishes himself here, I think, with ‘Goodbye my Monkey’ a poignant break up and, apparently, termination song. Some nice lyrics ’sleeping vigilantes’ being not quite ‘sleeping policemen’ (aka speed bumps). ‘All my pale faint swans return as cygnets’ is an extrapolation of a Shakespeare line (King John). We went to Bath where Dave’s old mate Simon Mackereth had a little home studio and did our thing. It all fizzling out, as I recall, with Lu pronouncing all computer recording equipment unfit for purpose for the foreseeable future and Marv feeling a bit unacknowledged. Just then, curiously, Richard Burgess (producer of Go Bang on £10k a track) rang up absolutely dying to do another Shriekback album, so he said. Odd, since he knew we didn’t have a deal anymore so what was his angle? I never found out. If doing Go Bang with us was really his idea of a good time then my heart goes out to the guy.   My attempts to crowbar the Flesh Beacons into this non-existent scenario were met with diplomatic sidling, as I knew they would be.

* the first tune we wrote which evidenced this influence was ‘Terribly Swollen’ https://youtu.be/G5MMngsAIjM

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Barry Andrews Interview

Throwback Thursday finds us posting a 14-year-old interview.

Some time ago, we were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves in contact with Barry Andrews via the Internet. He further astonished us by agreeing to an Interview! So, with an abundance of fan input, we put together a "small collection" of the most pertinent questions and fairly alarmed him with a Lengthy Interrogation. Undaunted, Mr. Andrews expressed himself as he most usually does: with eloquence and not a small amount of wit.

Shriek Questions

The Band

How did you meet Dave Allen, Carl Marsh, and Martyn Barker? How did the band come together?  Errr, met Dave thru Sara Lee –(Bassist w. League of Gentlemen –Leeds connection) He rang me on leaving Go4, Carl wrote him a letter (ever the literary one) and I brought Mart in when we needed a proper drummer –I knew him from Clare Hirst, the sax –player who I was going out with and who played in The Emotional Spies w. Mart. ( I think that’s right ??)

Did Shriekback try to create an image with your music and visuals? If so, were you successful? Sure we tried, I think we had our moments.

Were you surprised with the positive response to last year’s album, "Naked Apes and Pond Life"?  Very much so. I’d disowned the whole project and was off bashing bits of metal (rather than other band members). Had it not been for Lu and Martyn it would never have come out. The fact that it was sonically the least user-friendly of all our work made it doubly suprising that it was getting good reviews (the old ‘fuck em if they can’t take a joke’ ethic again I guess)

Is that what got you to thinking of the possibility of a new Shriekback project sometime in the future? There’s rumour that both Carl and Dave are involved with the new Shriek project. Would you care to comment? Dave was in London with a big expense account to abuse, so the Shrieks (class of 85) duly obliged. It was a heady mixture of lurid cocktails, free money and that ineluctable chemistry of 4 old pervs with something still to prove. It looks very likely that we will do Another One. With D & C.

What are the Seven Pillars of Shriekback? They were a series of principles by which we intended to focus our, at the time, dissipated and addled energies in order to create a rock band.  Have totally forgotten what they were, though..

Tell us about the Shriek logo. Whose idea was it and does it have a particular meaning. If so, what? It was Al Macdowell’s design –our sympatico Art Person (last seen being head of production design on the Fight Club film –howabouthat?).   I think it was to do with cyclical energy (otherwise known as going round in circles –hmm, be careful what you visualise).

Do you still have contact with Sarah and Wendy? What are they doing these days? Oh yes, very much so. Seeing them this Friday, actually. Wendy’s a homeopathic practitioner (with 2 kids) about to Move to The Country. And Sarah manages recording engineers and producers.

Are you enthusiastic about the resurgence of Shriekback’s popularity? Now there’s a leading question, with a certain ambiguity. I certainly like the idea of making some more music both with, and without, the Chaps. A Shriek-Renaissance would be handy. Is it happening? Maybe. You tell me… I don’t get out much.

Shriek Works

Why do so many Shriek songs resonate with a subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) spiritual energy, both sacred and profane?​ Aww, get outta here. Do they? Cheers. Nice one.  Like Jah Wobble (whom God Preserve) said: 'You either make music to see God, or to make money, and if it’s making money then you end up like a million other people all trying to get lucky with a beat.' That’s not exactly relevant really though, is it? I love the idea of touching people in That Place. That’s the main idea, of course.

Looking back on the albums the Shrieks have made, do you have a personal favourite and, if so, why? Do you have any favourite Shriekback songs? Any you dislike? Care, because we really had no idea what we were doing but we couldn’t help doing it. It was discovering a place where we / I could legitimately and comfortably express ourselves. Finding a Voice, all that.. The end of a hard, messy road of adolescent angst and it was Going To Be Alright after all. Still does sound like that to me, as it goes.

SONGS:

Evaporation because it was the first time I got the underwater, Lee Perry, ‘it’s dark but don’t be afraid’ thing to happen. Nice ‘tune’ (meaning melody).

Black Light Trap because it’s so ..Large. Lots going on. Architectural vibe. Big creaky Gormenghast thing with disco. Sounds like Shriekback and absolutely noone else.

This Big Hush - A big scary fantastic Love affair in the snows of 85 and everything impossibly vivid. Well that’s what I was doing. Add your own recollections, of course.

DISLIKED:

Get Down Tonight (what were we thinking of? oh yeah, making money , that’s right)

Mercy Dash the single (the intoxication of trying to sound like someone else - don’t do it, kids, especially not with machines that you don’t understand.)  Still, that’s it, not bad over 8 albums, is it?

What songs were made into videos? Nemesis, Get Down Tonight, Lined Up...

Any hope of a video compilation? Speaking of videos, who conceptualised the ‘Nemesis’ video? Probably not, who could possibly have the ‘masters’? and they were all dodgy apart from Nemesis.  I did all the ‘conceptualising’, Al McDowell did the visualising, Tony VandenEnde (the ostensible director) made it happen.

Projects

There is word of a new compilation album of obscure and unreleased material coming out sometime in March entitled "Aberrations 81-4". In what countries will this be available? Is there anything further you would care to offer to your listeners regarding this album? The territories are down to who wants it –where we can get licensing deals. The States will be covered by Nail Records, we think…  It will be available from Mauve Records mail order if all else fails.  It’s an interesting car-boot sale of weirdness, 9 never before released songs also remixes, live bits etc. Copious sleeve-notes by Marsh and I. We’re going to include ‘Naked Apes’ in the package, so it’s cracking good value for anyone who never got the latter.

Will we ever see the BBC recordings released? Hope so, we’re looking into the Legalities (not the name of a soul band).

Michael Mann used the Shrieks’ music extensively in ‘Miami Vice’ and in the movie ‘Manhunter’. Did you ever meet him and do you foresee any future collaborations? No and No. Shame: I especially liked it when they were chasing the Miami coke-baron round the harbour in speed-boats, white 80’s trousers flapping and Shrieks are singing some weirdshit in Sanskrit (Running on the Rocks). Obviously made sense to Mike.

Personal Questions

Music

Tell us about your Illuminati project. Doomed doomed, emotionally overwrought Guitar driven rock, Humungous female vocal, ravishing melodies. Me trying to be ‘non-ironic’ and ‘not weird’. Don’t fight your nature, that’s what I learnt. Still have the album in the can. Maybe release it someday.

What music do you listen to? What do you think of today’s pop music scene?

ANDREWS PLAYLIST 2001

Beethoven ‘Creatures of Prometheus’

Planxty (Irish trad) ‘The Woman I loved so well’ ‘After the Break’

Nick Cave ‘The Boatman’s Song’ ‘Murder Ballads’

Arvo Part 'Cantus for Benjamin Britten' 'Festina Lente'

John Cooper Clarke ‘Snap Crackle and Bop’

Slade ‘Greatest Hits’

Underworld ‘Everything Everything’

Mouse on Mars ‘niun niggung’

Will we ever see a collection of your solo work? Dunno, it’s nearly all only on cassette so it would be a hissy kind of a thang.

Will we see anymore from The Caretakers, the Refugees, or some other project yet to come to light? Caretakers are Bruce Mcrae and Carlo Asciutti, both of whom are complicated men to get hold of. Bruce is in Canada and Carlo’s in East Dulwich – which might as well be Canada. Come on guys, the World needs you… sigh, what can you do with ‘em?

What prompted the song ‘Win a Night out with a Well-Known Paranoiac’ The Adolescent angst of which I spoke and my snotty scruffy persona, (at 22-23) & resistance to authority which wound up all the right people sufficiently to support a – that’s right - paranoid world view. I liked the idea of a spoken song like Patti Smith’s 'Piss Factory'. It’s funnier though-especially the bit about the 'Underwater Toilet.'

History

When did you develop an interest in music? The parent’s collection of 78’s on the wind-up record player (fuck-I’m old) me alone in the attic playing ‘Shifting Whispering Sands’ and 'Indian Love call'. The rest is history.

Most of what we’ve heard about your departure from XTC has been from sources in relation to that band. In fact, in the liner notes of the recent XTC box set, Andy Partridge laments your leaving the band. To balance things out, would you like to let your side be heard? Well, as I’ve said probably more times than I should – I always regarded XTC as a stepping stone –we came from the the same town, were all working class pissheads and were all talented, it was never really a meeting of minds. Thus, as soon as we had some breathing space from touring and getting a deal it was obvious that this combination had run it’s course. You don’t need a degree in Workplace Dynamics to see that both an Andrews and a Partridge is one egomaniac only-child too many. For me that was – as they say in Swindon – ‘it and all about it’. It was great fun for a while though. And loads of shagging.

Many articles and XTC book passages indicate that you’ve seemingly resented the intellectual labels attributed to you and, later, Shriekback. Have your feelings changed on this issue or do you still wish to stress the physical aspect of your music? I don’t know why you say this. Anyone who calls me an intellectual will have me purring on the floor and buying them drinks. Oh, you probably mean that ‘what do your lyrics mean?’ type thing. It’s really that what I’ve always tried to do with music – specifically SONGS- which are a brilliant art-form and still nowhere near exhausted - is create new places - funny little aquariums where the rules of the outside world no longer apply. Bear in mind that this is not sheet music it’s recorded music so all sorts of subtleties and inflections are possible – the ambient sound in the room, the slapback echo all have different things to say (ambient sound says ‘fly on the wall documentary,’ slap-back can mean Elvis or, add a few repeats and it’s Nuremberg). What I mean is that Songs are perceived sonically, primarily - then we add the strata of meaning. But, as with all good art-forms the most fun is in the grey areas. Where the Delicious Frissons of Ambiguity live. So when you can’t quite hear what Strummer’s singing on Janie Jones, you hallucinate your own visions into the gap between what you can understand and what you can’t. As one does as a child listening to the grown ups talk. It’s an interesting place to be. When I finally saw those lyrics written down the song was over for me. Not that they were bad lyrics, just that they were only what they were, no longer all the things they might possibly be. So the lyrics are one part of this tense interdependent little biosphere. Another example: Marvin Gaye's ‘Grapevine’ –it’s dark, the bass and congas sound jungly (like a Rousseau jungle in purples) the song’s about jealousy - there are loads of different ways of saying ‘people are saying that you’re seeing someone else’ but he picks vines – big strangly creepy things with round sweet purple grapes on them and the jungly groove and the sweet sad voice and the minor key all support each other – organically, you’d have to say - the medium and the message all beautifully shmershed together. The lyrics as written don’t tell you any of this, like the sheet music doesn’t tell you how sexy that bass line is. The experience is to be had in front of a speaker and that’s it. SO - even if you use words like ‘parthenogenesis’ and ‘historesis’ you’re still playing the same game. I used ‘parthenogenesis’ mainly because it sounded good and almost rhymed with Nemesis. The meaning was secondary (but relevant). So if you were to apply the ‘Grapevine’ treatment to that chorus - my intention was to get a laugh - or at least an internal smirk - from the big-almost football crowd-chorus, the long ungainly scientific word, the huge daft power chords, and everything within this barmy context of ‘let’s examine the nature of morality’ – like some philosophy professor who went to Vietnam and listened to a lot of Gary Glitter. Still makes me laugh. Another way to see it is like you ‘get’ a joke, which, if you want, you can explain, and you can even analyse why it’s funny. But the point of the joke is really only in the ‘getting’ of it. If you don’t experience that then all the rest is pointless. Thus, when people make a big deal of 'explaining the lyrics', it very often (experience has shown) means that they never really ‘got’ the idea of the song. It’s turned into some gnarly little Eng. Lit puzzle. Blimey, value-for-money-question. 

The Individual

We know that you are a consummate musician, that you’ve dabbled in filmmaking, and that you’re also an artist, having studied 3-D design. It would seem that you’re quite the Renaissance man. Is that a fair description? How would you describe yourself? Naah, the trouble with doing lots of things is that you meet lots of people who only do one thing and are therefore extremely good at them. Bad comparisons are inevitable. ‘Jack of all trades’ says it . Still, it seems to be my nature to apply a similar aesthetic to lots of different things and this is as close to a mission statement as I can get: ‘try everything, make up as many things as possible; remember to take notes.’

There have also been many comments from folks who’ve met you that you exude an otherworldly air. Would you care to address that? I have been known to drift, somewhat. Oh yes..

We’ve heard many stories from fans whom have attended Shriek concerts and, afterwards, were thrilled to find you dancing, drinking, and generally making merry with them after the show. Why are you so prone to mingle with the fans when artists, including other members of the band, don’t generally engage in such activity? Human fucking Beings, man. What else is there?

In what other projects are you currently involved? The ongoing exegesis of Parc Stic (a metaphysical theme park) and amassing material for a solo album. And keeping an eye on Finn (the lad) who’s starting his own musical career (which is spooky).

Being the primary lyricist for Shriekback, it’s obvious you have a gift with words. Do you write prose as well or have you considered doing so? Saving that for when I’m Really old and can’t do anything else.

Who or what would you say is your greatest influence? Alex Harvey, Lee Perry, Patti Smith, the Constructed World (not a band either).

The dance that you and the Sids perform to ‘The Reptiles and I’ in the ‘Jungle of the Senses’ concert video exhibits a variety of Kung Fu movements. That, combined with the fact that you’ve been spotted many times wearing Tabi, lead us to ask if you’re a Martial Artist as well. If so, what form or forms have you studied? Mark Raudva – who plays on ‘Naked Apes’ - is a qualified Tai Chi teacher and would piss himself if he read that. I studied with him for about six months and gave up. I did Aikido for about three weeks – way too upsetting.

What do you think of the world today? Oh the easy ones at the end eh?

Final Thoughts

What would you like see happen at Shriekback.com? The hub of a new Renaissance, a centre for Excellence, a source of psychic nourishment and high quality gas-masks.

Is there anything you’d like to say to the fans of both you and Shriekback? ‘Hold fast to that which gives the deepest jollies.’

7 February, 2001

Help us make more memories by purchasing our new album, Without Real String or Fish, along with our burgeoning catalogue, all available at Shriekback.com.  And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter at the website, “like” us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.

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Throwback Thursday - Big Electric Energy

Shriekback - Big Electric Energy         by Lesley Sly

They are tired of being cult heroes – Shriekback, the weird studio band, the unpredictable performers. Their new line-up, tour and album were the firt lap in a drive for wider acceptance. Head shrieker, Barry Andrews, maps out the course.

The Shriekback of old was, by their own admission, chaotic and experimental. They were machine-men, dabbling with drum computers and Fairlights, every song a loose sketch from backing track to overdub. And live, it was jam science.

But the Shriekback that stormed Australia with a high octane live set and the cruisy cocktail-style album, Big Night Music, in March was a different kettle of…fish. (Alas, little light was shed on their strange preoccupation with deep sea creatures in our post-gig interview).

They are now a band intent on cracking the mainstream, getting their powerful live sound onto vinyl and dispensing with as much machinery as possible in the process.

They’ve been streamlining the human element, too. When they hit the cultish London circuit in 1981 with the mini-album, Tench, they were six-piece. By the following year, they were three – Barry Andrews (vocals/keyboards; ex-XTC, Robert Fripp’s League of Gentlemen), David Allen (bass; ex-Gang of Four) and Carl Marsh (guitar).

Then came the albums Care and Jam Science and in 1984 they took on drummer, Martyn Barker, had their first chart single Hand On My Heart and followed up with the album, Oil And Gold, inn 1985.

In early 1986 they signed a new deal with Island and lost Carl Marsh. Another change was the approach to recording. The writing trio of Andrews, Allen and Barker decided to concentrate on the expansive, atmospheric elements of their music and go for an ‘all-played’ groove, augmented by their four-piece Big Live Band – Michael Cozzi (guitars), Steve Halliwell (keyboards) and backing singers, Wendy and Sarah Partridge.

For the Australian tour they added a percussionist and Barry left keyboard duties to Steve, bar the occasional solo.

The last time I saw the band live was at one of their first gigs in a seedy London pub. On stage this year, in the claustrophonic refectory hall at Sydney Uni, there was hardly a trace of the enfant terrible. Dynamic, controlled, structured rock’n’roll theatre, a new authority, no chaos.

In the dressing room later, Barry Andrews explained this new order…

Your live set is much more structured now. There are middle-eights, you all start and stop in the same places. You’re very tight and professional… I don’t know about very tight and professional, but certainly more than we used to be. We do all end at the same time.

Remember the Greyhound in Fulham (London), one of your first gigs? (Shudders) Christ Almighty. We have changed since then.

Do you think you’ve sacrificed spontaneity for structure? Not really. It used to be a fucking mess. There was a good, wild, out-of-control energy, you know all those AAARRRRGH, post-punk screams. But after a while…it’s unchannelled and ultimately not satisfying when you do seven gigs in a row and only one of them is any good.

I think we are channeling that energy more and there are still areas of improvisation…freedom within that structure.

What parts are improvised? All the solos. I never play the same solo twice on Feelers, I’m always mucking around with the vocals, doing little improvised rants and stuff.

I think it’s a popular misconception that you have to do completely improvised music in order to have freedom. Mike (guitarist) always plays the same solo but there’s a difference when he’s really putting his heart and soul into it. It has an authority and power to it.

You get quite close to recorded sounds live… I think we do considering how many overdubs and weird things we’re doing in the studio.

Were you using Fairlight much on Big Night Music? No. We’d decided it was going to be a low budget album and we weren’t going to use the Fairlight as much as we had on Oil And Gold. We also wanted to use more acoustic instruments, so that it sounded like a band in a room playing some music, all in time.

Towards the end of recording there was a particular sound on Underwaterboys that we couldn’t get on either the JP8 or the DSS1 and me and Gavin (MacKillop, co-producer) were tearing our hair out [er, figuratively speaking]. So we decided to chip inn out of our own money and get the Fairlight to do this sound. As it turned out we did do it within budget – we didn’t have to sell our cars or anything – and so we went round the tracks putting little touches of Fairlight on here and there.

You’ve always used machines to make music. Was the decision taken on this album not to do so due to budget or were you bored with that approach? No, it wasn’t because of the budget. It was the first record where Martyn (drummer) had really found his feet and he had loads and ideas bubbling over. It seemed a bit irrelevant to haul in a Fairlight or drums computer and put it through its paces.

We were bored with all that stuff after a four-year romance with technology too. Also, some of the rhythms are so subtle like, Running on the Rocks – there no drum computer in the world can do that.

How do you write your songs? Always from the rhythm. In the old day it was a drum machine and we’d build the songs in the studio a la Bowie and all that. But, that wasn’t a particularly cost-effective way of doing things and we also decided that we wanted the…thing to happen in music that you only get when you’ve played a song for a long time on stage.

On Oil and Gold there was only one track that was like that (Health And Knowledge) which, while it wasn’t a great groove or even a particularly great song, had this smoothness, a rotundity to it. We thought it would be nice to have a whole album with the edges worn off, with a nice ‘used’ quality to it.

Do you write together? Generally, Martyn will put down a rhythm and we’ll all – me, Dave and Martyn – improvise around that. If there’s an energy to the groove we’ll just tape the drums on cassette for two minutes.

Then, I take that home and put it on my cassette machine which has a loop function and just sit there singing to it, record that on another machine and listen to it. I find that quite often good things come out when you’re just burbling off the top of your head whereas if you sat down and tried to write it, that critical part of the brain might be brought to bear on it and crush the idea before it grows. I then go through and make notes, wander round, have a cup of tea, read a few books, find a few weird words (laughs).  Then I do the whole process again until the thing starts to bed down into a structure, verse, chorus, etc.  Then, I take it back to Dave and Martyn and we work on chords and details.

Atmosphere is crucial in your music. Is sound important in the writing process? I tend to find that the rhythm will suggest a certain kind of atmosphere. It will all be encapsulated in that rhythm. Once you’ve got the initial crystalisation of the song, it’s all police work from there on. Like, Shining Path…it was obvious from that rhythm and the title that it was going to be this huge, swirly, exotic druggie-opium vision. From there on we knew it was going to need bells, big chords, wind gong, etc.

No home studios? Martyn’s making moves in that direction. Sometimes I think it would be a good idea but then…I used to do that with XTC. I used to sit in my bedroom with an Akai two-track machine, a Wurlitzer piano and microphone and write the whole thing. Then I’d go along with a song and try to impose it on the band and tell the bass player and drummer what to play.It had a kind of awkwardness to it because they were playing something which wasn’t quite natural for them. Sometimes it worked but now it works every time because we don’t add things to songs unless they do work.

So, when you record now you take complete songs in? Yeah and we’re going to work that way on the next album. There’s a couple of new ones we’re playing already.

How long does it take to get a song together? Maybe a day per song. But, once I take the verse and chorus along we just put a bit of intense energy into it, maybe an hour, and then I take it home and work on it again. Then we bring in the other players.

You use the Jupiter 8 for rehearsals? Yes.

What’s happened to that battered old organ you used for years? It’s in my ex-wife’s cupboard. I go round every now and then and dust it off (the organ, that is). It’s a sweet little thing, and I can’t bring myself to throw it away but I can’t find any use for it anymore.

Was recording Big Night Music standard procedure? Yes…I haven’t worked in that way since the Robert Fripp album. Gavin is a very traditional producer and I really left it to him. It’s nice, there’s something very organic about recording that way [as a band]. You don’t have to go through the endless…well, there’s a drum rhythm and I haven’t got a clue what to do next, maybe go blurgh on the first beat of every bar and then try to find some chords, and lay three tracks of percussion that we’ll never use.

It was exciting to work like that and if money was no object I probably still would…

Because there’s always the element of surprise when you’re actually creating the song track-by-track? Yeah…the only track we did like that was Sticky Jazz and I think you can hear the difference…the textures change suddenly.

What about vocal treatment? On Big Night Music I was getting into big whispering but the process of recording was mostly traditional. Occasionally I fed my voice through an AC30 amp wound up like fuck and recorded in a live room. On the end of Black Light Trap I fed it though Mike’s pedalboard with the distortion wound right up…and all these other knobs. I don’t really know what they do.

It’s your fifth album and seems like a summary of the rest. Do you agree? No, I think there are areas left out…mainly the big noisy stuff. It’s like taking one of the themes of Shriekback, which is the big, dark, quiet cocktail band thing with more of the reggae influence. We’ve taken that and really explored it.

On the next album we’ll get into the big racket.

Using players and no machines? Yes, I think so. It usually becomes apparent after you’ve been on the road a while what sort of album you want to make next. On this tour it’s become clear that everyone is excited about taking the atmosphere we get live and trying to record that and mess with it and see what happens.

Back to the whispering…you’ve said you’ll do more shouting next time. Isn’t the whisper part of Shriekback’s charm, a hallmark almost? Well, for the sake of making an homogenous record…it always irritated me, about Oil And Gold especially, that you’re listening to a noisy track, you’re in party mode and then suddenly it goes all quiet and mushy and you have to leap for the turntable and get that track off.

When I want to listen to a piece of music I want an atmosphere and I think most people do. So, I would say…yeah, we’ll have a whispering-free, high-noise album. (laughs).

Why are you so popular here and often dismissed as an arty band in the UK? There’s two things…if you’re not getting played on radio in the UK there isn’t really the gig circuit to establish yourself anymore. Also, the British psyche finds it a bit disgusting seeing this person up there on stage going ‘waaaah, look at me’. They like records and nightclubs and keeping it all under control.

For a long time in England we were making experimental, reflective, not grab-you-by-the-throat sort of records and people got a bit bored waiting for Shriekback to do something that would be devastating. And live, it was a shambles. We couldn’t take an audience like we did tonight. Now, we can take a cool audience and have them in a frenzy by the end because we’ve learnt the art of rock’n’roll theatre.

The soundtrack you’ve done for the movie, Slamdance… It’s not a soundtrack, it’s just the song at the end. I’m looking at doing a soundtrack though…I’ve done a film music demo to a whole bunch of image from wildlife documentaries and films like Conan the Barbarian and Passage to India. So we’re going to go to LA and throw a few video tapes at a few moguls there.

Shriekback has its own sovereignty – it’s not something that each of us independently would do. I found doing the film music demo it was more one dimensional.

You’ve talked about having a magic power live that you don’t understand. Is that created because of the audience? I think it’s there in rehearsal too, it’s just a smaller audience! It’s partly that with the band the sum is greater than the parts. I like working on my own but I prefer having other people around to bounce off and crash into.

What about your preoccupation with fish? (Laughs)…What can I tell you?

Other projects? Yeah…Martyn is writing his own songs which sound fabulously commercial, Dave is talking about doing an album with Jorgensen of Ministry and I’m making Super 8 movies at the moment.

Film seems to be quite a strong direction for me…I’m just assembling images and playing around with scripts.

Solo albums? No. Shriekback is not entirely my vision but at least I can involve all my musical interests which is great.

In XTC I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, only that it wasn’t XTC. It was only after that that I started to look at my musical language…finding out why I liked certain kinds of music, and what moves me.

Do you listen to music for pleasure? Yes…not pop. I used to have a clock radio which drove me mad because it would come on in the morning with this pop music and I’d wake up going ‘oh, the bass is good, drums are okay, what about the chorus’ and you go into all that.

I listen to old church music, nice gentle things.

This need for wider appeal…does Shriekback need more commercial success to reach full potential? I think it’s a popular misconception that you achieve commercial success and then you do what you want to do…I don’t know anyone who has done that.

We are doing what we want to do, it wouldn’t be different if I had loads of money.

What is there left for Shriekback to do? The next album – translating the live thing. And, getting our music to a wider audience. I don’t think there is anything hopelessly archane about what we do and I don’t see why it shouldn’t appeal to a lot of people. I think it’s a case of appropriate presentation.

And…I’m tired of being a cult figure.

THE BACKLINE Martyn Barker (drums): I’m using a hired Yamaha 900 Series kit – 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 toms, 22" bass drum, 14" x 10" deep snare and Zildjian cymbals (16, 17, 18 crashes, Chinaboy and Swish both 16"; hi-hats are K Series (top) and Dynobeat (bottom); Camco chain bass drum pedal.

I’ve been using this kit on the American and Australian tours. In England I’ve been using a Gretch kit but I’m changing to Yamaha because I like the depth of the sound of this kit. You get a good natural sound, it’s very good live and as an all-round kit.

I’ve been using very thin crashes because Shriekback is a dynamic band so you don’t need any ride cymbals. The music needs good splash sounds…plenty of that.

The difficulty for me with cymbals is trying to change the sound all the time…in Underwaterboys I used coins to rub against Chinese cymbals which makes that off-beat sound. And in Nemesis the chorus has to be very dynamic so I use lots of splashes, lots of crash cymbals.

No electronic drums? I used to use bits of Simmons gear and I use the Linn 9000 for writing. But for Big Night Music I used a real drum kit with percussion because it was easier and that was the direction the music was going in.

(Live percussion is: LP congas and cowbells. Cymbals in Zildjian (16" thin crash), and 20" Chinese wind gong.)

Mike Cozzi (guitar): I’ve been experimenting a lot lately and have just changed all my gear. At the moment I’m using a Gallien-Krueger amp as a preamp sending it though a Carver power amp. The main effects I use are a volume pedal, which I think is well under-used these days, and three different distortions, Big Muff, Boss overdrive, and the other is the distortion on the Krueger. I use various rack delays…everything is rackmounted.

I still use a Strat which I’ve had customised (added a Kahler tremolo and humbucker pickups). On the acoustic numbers I use a Hohner semi-acoustic 12-string.

Bass equipment: Music Man bass guitar through Trace Elliot gear, using 4 x 10 and 1 x 15 speakers.

Martyn: Dave has a custom-built bass which he uses for the slower moodier numbers which makes a deep, warm sound. But the Music Man is his main instrument.

Keyboards: Jupiter 8 and Korg DSS1 which wins heaps of praise from Barry Andrews: "We seem to be getting sounds which are as good as a Fairlight Series II. It’s helpful having the synthesizing part as a well as the sampler because you can really fuck around with those samples and make them sound interesting.

Sonic (July/August 1987) ___________________________________

Shriekback recently released our 13th studio album, Without Real String or Fish. It is available on our website. Please pay us a visit:  http://shriekback.com/store