(This was originally published in WE, a weekly Vancouver newspaper, in 2008, and the London-based fanzine Twee as Fuck, in January 2009.)
Rose Melberg is 36. But when she sits down to be interviewed in a Vancouver restaurant, she looks as though she might have just come from one of the city’s college campuses after finishing the first semester of her freshman year. So youthful and unassuming is her appearance, in fact, that nothing betrays her actual history: more than 15 years of music-making that, despite several extended gaps of inactivity, is renowned in indie-pop circles around the world for its bounty of bravery, beauty, and considerable influence.
Yet here Melberg sits, in the neighbourhood she has called home for over two years, in a city where she remains all but anonymous. Not that she seems to mind — after all, this is an artist who has seemingly fashioned an anti-career, intended to defy expectations and short-circuit forward momentum. The truth, of course, is somewhat more complicated.
The California native became known in 1992 with her first band, Tiger Trap. The all-female quartet, formed when she was barely out of her teens, rode the crest of the then-nascent Riot Grrrl movement of feminist-minded pop-punk bands. But unlike peers such as Bikini Kill or Huggy Bear, Tiger Trap’s sound was principally shaped by Melberg’s love of melodic British indie-pop and the girl groups of the ’60s, strained through a decidedly punk-like filter of amateurism. Their most obvious influence would seem to have been Talulah Gosh, but Melberg swears none of the band had heard them yet.
“It was really important to me, at 20, to feel like I was a part of something bigger, and I really drew from other women musicians,” Melberg says. “And yet I never saw what we were doing as political. I just wanted to be in a noisy pop band. I thought just by virtue of being women in a band — that, in itself, was political, just enough for me. The sound we ended up with… it really came together in a pretty organic way; there wasn’t a lot of specific intention to the sound we were making because we just weren’t skilled enough for that.”
Tiger Trap’s self-titled debut album was hugely acclaimed, but when major labels began courting the band in the midst of the post-grunge-era gold rush (a development that thrilled Melberg’s bandmates), she elected to break the group up rather than become subject to corporate grooming.
Remaining with Tiger Trap’s label, Olympia, Washington’s K Records, Melberg moved to nearby Portland in ’94 and effected the sonic equivalent of a 180-degree turn: a duo called the Softies. Formed with friend Jen Sbragia, the Softies featured only the two women’s voices and their electric guitars. Their songs, while not all having to do with heartbreak or despair (although most of them do), sound inconsolably sad; their debut album, It’s Love, has become a generational touchstone of sorts, the soundtrack to an underground culture’s post-adolescent malaise. (Go Sailor, a trio closer in spirit to Tiger Trap, ran concurrently, but lasted little more than a year.)
“The Softies forced the music into a situation where only people who wanted to hear it were hearing it,” says Melberg. “I set out to do something that was inaccessible, that was slightly more difficult on the ear and required slightly more effort. And yet, because of that, I felt the safety to really pour my heart out.
“I think one thing that kind of upset people was that it wasn’t acoustic — they expected it to be. But I didn’t want to be the Indigo Girls. Not to bash the Indigo Girls, but I didn’t want to be an acoustic duo. I wanted to be a pop band with no drums. And I knew that would definitely be something no major label was going to come looking for, which was awesome. I could fall in love with music again.”
Yet while the Softies became no more than the cult success Melberg had envisioned, the devotion of that cult was more personal and of a far greater intensity than Tiger Trap’s. To this day, Melberg says, when fans approach her to compliment her music, the Softies usually claims the lion’s share of praise. “It’s difficult for me sometimes to properly express my gratitude; not ‘Thank you for being affected by my music,’ but ‘Thank you for telling me that,’ because I’ve been affected by music so much and have tried to express that to other artists, and I never know if I’m being weird or creepy.”
Geography and increasingly complicated lives brought an end to the Softies in 2001. Melberg had become a Canadian, moving to Summerland, British Columbia, in ’98 to marry and start a family. Before the duo made their final album in 2000, she played drums in short-lived Vancouver band Gaze, and released a collection of solo material called Portola.
Motherhood took precedence in Melberg’s life during the next several years, so when she finally began writing again in 2004, setting aside a block of time each Sunday, she was concerned about what her efforts would produce — if anything at all. “It was difficult, and I was really afraid of what I would find,” she says, “and I remember one thing that [K Records founder and Beat Happening frontman] Calvin Johnson said to me when I was having difficulty writing. He said, ‘Rose, it’s a river; it’s not a well. It’s not going to run dry. It’s always there.’”
Recorded in Vancouver in 2005 with members of local band p:ano, Cast Away the Clouds was Melberg’s first full-fledged solo album. Autumnal, reflective, and containing what may be lyrical hints of her failing marriage, it evidences an inevitably matured worldview, but retains the charm and youthful wonder of her earlier work. It also contains the instrument Melberg had so successfully resisted in the Softies: the acoustic guitar. “That was a big deal,” she acknowledges. “It was time to do that, because when I play by myself I usually play on my acoustic. Therefore, this was a record of just me and how I play when it’s just me.”
A return to single life, ongoing motherhood, and the necessity of making a livelihood for both herself and her son again brought Melberg’s musical activities to a standstill, as did a computer full of works in progress, lost for a time to a dead hard drive. But she happily reveals that she’s begun work on her next album. (Note: Melberg announced, shortly before this went to press, that the album has been completed. A release date hasn’t been determined.) She also reveals, happier still, that a new love has done as much for her productivity as terminal melancholy did for her in the Softies.
“Right now, for whatever reason — I guess maybe it’s because I’m happy — I’m writing like crazy,” she enthuses. “At first I thought that I could only write when I was sad, but I finally realized: No! I can write about anything!”
(This was originally published in the London-based fanzine Twee as Fuck, January 2009.)
Whatever your personal definition of indie-pop, it should accommodate mention of Marine Girls. Alongside the Postcard Records stable of artists and the likes of the Raincoats and Delta 5, the teenage quartet’s music was both an extension of punk and a path beyond it — gentle but assured, alternately humourous and romantic, and unashamedly feminine. Although the band (from Hertfordshire county, near London) lasted little more than two years, from 1981-’83, its influence has spanned the globe and endured for more than 25 years, thanks largely to the songs’ unique charms but also to the ongoing success of Tracey Thorn, who played guitar and shared vocals with Alice Fox. Gina Davidson is perhaps among the most obscure aspects of the Marine Girls biography, despite having co-founded the band with Tracey and sung on their debut cassette, A Day by the Sea, and official debut album, Beach Party. She unceremoniously departed soon after the latter’s release (for reasons finally revealed below), after which a reconfigured trio recorded the album Lazy Ways and landed on the cover of Melody Maker. Happy and healthy and still making music, Gina graciously agreed to this all-too-rare interview.
Marine Girls’ music seemed diametrically opposed to punk, but it couldn’t have existed without it. What did punk mean to you and Tracey when you started the band? Were you at all reluctant to make music that sounded so vulnerable and innocent?
Gina Davidson: Punk was really important to me and Tracey. We bonded over that music. We would never have formed the band without that DIY/Rough Trade ethic — it was so encouraging. I think that between us we bought nearly all of the early Rough Trade singles; we liked the Raincoats, Delta 5, Swell Maps, Kleenex/Liliput, also the Mo-dettes — all those post-punk bands. We loved the old punk bands like Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex, early Sex Pistols and the Clash, but that music seemed like a long time before, even though it was only a couple of years previous. We didn’t think about our music being vulnerable; we thought that it was as strong as the music we loved, but in a different form. Quiet can be strong, too. Our music was innocent because I suppose we were!
Punk brought about unprecedented involvement of women in music. What effect did that have on the band? Which female musicians did you particularly admire?
The majority of the bands we liked were female bands or had female singers. Me and Tracey liked Pauline Murray from Penetration a lot, and, of course, Poly Styrene. The Raincoats were so important, and I think they made us think that we could be a girl band and put out our own music and fanzine.
One aspect of Marine Girls I think is extraordinary is that the worldview of the lyrics is unashamedly teenage and romantic and — I hope it’s not an insult to say — female and suburban. Was this unconscious, or was it a deliberate gesture to be honest about your everyday lives, as opposed to many other bands at the time who affected a very urban, nihilistic outlook? Was it inspired at all by girl groups from the ’60s?
Tracey wrote about the things that affected us in everyday life. We were quite skeptical teenage girls and had a bit of a low opinion and expectations of boys. The everyday was interesting to us; it seemed perfectly sensible to sing about things that were real and that affected you, as opposed to some rock ’n’ roll cliché. Yes, we loved those ’60s girl groups — they were an inspiration: "Remember, walking in the sand…"
I’ve never read any accounts about the making of A Day by the Sea and Beach Party. What can you share about it?
A Day by the Sea was recorded mainly at Jane’s house in her front room after school, on a reel-to-reel tape recorder from my mum's work. It was soooo DIY— no wonder it sounds like it was actually recorded under water! We had fun doing that; I remember it involved eating a lot of boil-in-the-bag cod in butter sauce, and raw flapjack mixture! Jane’s and Alice’s [house] was good to record at, because they lived with their dad and he wasn’t in that much after school, and we could walk to her house easily.
Beach Party was a different affair. That was recorded by Pat Bermingham, who ran the label that Beach Party was first released on. He had his own recording studio at the bottom of his mum’s garden in Ilford. It was in his shed! We went round at weekends and he did all the work. We loved Pat so much, and his mum used to make us cups of tea. Tracey recorded her first solo LP [A Distant Shore] in there, too. Pat was pretty good, actually — did a few other bands. He liked dub sounds, and I think that’s reflected in the spacey sound.
I’ve only heard one live recording of Marine Girls, and it’s from after your departure (March ’83 at the Lyceum). The audience is hugely supportive despite the apparent nerves of the girls and the ramshackleness of their playing. Were audiences always willing to accept the music on its own terms? Mike Alway from Cherry Red said he first saw the band in a suburban youth club. Did the band often play in unconventional venues like that?
We played a lot of youth clubs and village halls, and we got heckled a lot! But we could give as good as we got. Mainly, audiences were supportive, and a lot of the times filled with friends.
There are differing accounts about why you left the band. Most say it was to pursue other musical projects, but All Music Guide says you “kept missing rehearsals” and were replaced by Jane. Which is the true story, and what did you do afterward? Was it unpleasant to subsequently listen to Lazy Ways and observe the success that followed it?
Oh, that! Well, actually, it was such a silly thing. Alice had a friend that used to come to rehearsals and sort of wanted to be in the band. I thought I was gonna be pushed out to make way for her. Also, I had trouble actually physically getting to some rehearsals because I lived in a different town. Later I found out that none of the others realized this and really had no thought of replacing me. Simple lack of communication — how silly!
I was a bit sad when Lazy Ways came out, but I was busy with other things by then. The only time it really jarred was when Marine Girls were on the front cover of Melody Maker and I saw it for sale on a newsstand in Piccadilly Circus. But other than that, not really. Musically, it was just Sindy Arthur and Doof after, and I was really involved with a boyfriend’s band, Portion Control, on the same record label as us.
Marine Girls has had a subtle but enduring influence on other bands that continues to this day — from Beat Happening to Nirvana, and Riot Grrrl bands to Twee as Fuck’s cover stars, Vivian Girls. Have you always maintained an awareness of younger artists referencing the band? What is it about the music that you think has given it such unexpected endurance?
Yes, I’m proud of our influence. I recently found out that Hole did live covers on “In Love” [from Beach Party]. Tobi Vail told me that her and Kurt [Cobain] used to lie awake all night listening to Beach Party. I’ve only really been aware of other bands referencing us in the past 10 years or so. I think it’s probably the simplicity of our music that makes it timeless. Also, emotions don’t change with time.
Do you still see Tracey, Jane and Alice? Musically, what are you working on now?
Yes, I'm still in touch with all the others — mainly Jane and Tracey, but obviously I hear of Alice through Jane. I like the music that Tracey is making at the moment; I love her voice, and feel proud of her achievements.
I’m currently making music in the Fenestration with Mark Flunder, who I’ve known since the beginning of Marine Girls. He’s been in lots of bands: TV Personalities, Cee Bee Beaumont, Sportique, etc. We’re making music with traditional instruments, but with Game Boy/8-bit backing beats, and me singing. It sounds really different, and I’m really enjoying myself doing it.
Archive Interview - Tracey Thorn (or "20 Nerve-Wracking Minutes Talking to My All-Time Favourite Singer")
(This was originally published in WE, a weekly Vancouver newspaper, in December 2010.)
It sold only modestly and generated few headlines, but Tracey Thorn’s Love and Its Opposite is, in its quiet way, among the more distinctive and remarkable albums of 2010 — not only for its sound but for what it says.
Thorn is best known as the voice of Everything But the Girl (EBTG), the duo she formed with partner Ben Watt in 1982. After more than a decade of ebb-and-flow popularity in Europe and Japan, EBTG unexpectedly experienced worldwide chart-topping success with 1995’s “Missing,” both in its original pop-ballad form and as a remix that made it over into one of the saddest dance songs of all time. Thorn stepped away from music at the turn of the millenium to raise her and Watt’s children, reemerging in 2007 with Out of the Woods, a solo album that further justified her reputation as the queen of “bedsit disco” — a self-coined, self-deprecating reference to EBTG’s late-career fusing of personal, melancholy lyrics with euphoric dancefloor melodies and beats.
But Love and Its Opposite is a wholesale retreat from the nightclubs where Thorn found fame and fortune. As well as being stripped down to piano, guitar, drums, and not much else, throughout the album the 48-year-old Thorn acts very much her age, singing with unashamed candour about subjects rarely acknowledged in pop music: divorce, fear of mortality and loneliness, even menopause. It’s made for a very specific audience — that is, Thorn’s generational peers — and she herself knows it’s unlikely to speak to people who aren’t equipped to understand it.
“I've always been aware that the kind of perspective I write from is always going to be an under-represented one,” says Thorn, calling from her home in London. “I'm writing as a very non-rock 'n' roll woman, for a start, who takes quite a domestic view of things. I'm quite localized in my frame of reference; I don't often address very broad, global themes, [and] I'm aware that that's never going to be the mainstream of pop or rock. I'm quite determined that I'm going to carry on writing like this and fight my corner for it being a worthwhile perspective.”
A side effect of writing about matters so specific and unglamorous — and singing about them in a voice that, although one of the loveliest in modern music, naturally sounds moments away from emotional exhaustion — is that Thorn has long been mistaken for a woman beset by turmoil. Love and Its Opposites’ tales of romantic upset have shifted that perception into overdrive.
“People often come to the conclusion that everything I write is entirely autobiographical,” she says good-naturedly. “That's led to interviews I've been doing where people start off by making assumptions, saying, 'Oh, clearly you're in trouble!' (laughs), and then I set them straight. And then they're just puzzled, and [they] think, 'Well, why are you writing this stuff if it's not you?' I find that bewildering, because I'm intensely interested in anything that happens to people around me, and also” — she pauses — “I do have an imagination! (laughs) You know, I don't just have to plunder what happened to me that morning in order to have any ideas. And things are most interesting, usually, when there's some kind of conflict and tension and trouble going on — that gives you a plotline and a starting point. It strikes me as an obvious thing to do, really, but I'm surprised that people find that strange.”
***
(EXTRA! The following question-and-answer wasn't included with the original published piece.)
You stopped performing live after Everything But the Girl's last tour and you have no intention of doing so again. Is one of the advantages of that — because you don't sing your older songs anymore, you're no longer required to revisit these former incarnations of yourself and you can live fully in the present?
Thorn: Yes. Totally. It's one of the things that contributes to me not wanting to tour. There are lots of reasons why I don't. Not madly enjoying being on a stage is probably the biggest reason of all. But if I could overcome that, I would still be left with the dilemma of what the actual show I'd perform to people would be. Some people have said, 'Well, surely with [Love and Its Opposite], it would be lovely to just go out and perform these 10 songs. They're very acoustic; it could be very simple.' And I said, 'Do you think an audience would really let me do that?' (laughs) They'd be screaming for 'Missing' after about five minutes! There'd be another whole faction down the front who'd just be wanting me to sing songs off Eden or A Distant Shore. And understandably! I'm not criticizing those people. If people buy a ticket to a show of someone who's been around for this long, understandably they want to hear their favourite songs. But I would just be insane with boredom after about a week, I think. I wouldn't mind singing any of those songs once or twice, but then after that point I would just be going out of my mind, and then that would show: I'd be standing up there — a miserable, bored person — not giving anything very much. I like thinking, 'What's the song I'm writing now? That's the one I want to go sing.'
Interview - Alasdair MacLean (The Clientele / Amor de Dias)
The Holidaymakers, a 2005 fan documentary about the Clientele, begins with home-video footage from the early ’90s of the nascent London band — probably just out of their teens at the time — rehearsing in a suburban backyard while the light of a stunning summer’s day begins to fade. Thanks to a combination of outdated technology, a worn and possibly oft-copied videotape, and the perfectly imperfect shadows and sunspots that only nature can provide, the footage is unintentionally, unbearably poignant: a surviving materialization of the blurred memory of lost youth, still tangible but beginning to erode, and all the more beautiful for its apparent fragility.
The Clientele, who announced their possibly permanent hiatus last year, evolved gradually but impressively during almost two decades together. Yet virtually everything the band was about — its mood; its sense of place; its tightrope walk between reality and dream state, elation and melancholy — is represented in that minute of video. Singer-guitarist Alasdair MacLean’s songs, supported by the understated but exceptionally intuitive playing of bassist James Hornsey and drummer Mark Keen (and, from 2006 onward, multi-instrumentalist Mel Draisey), consistently projected a poetic and sonic worldview that sought to sustain those rare moments when life achieves a sort of magic, all the while resigned to the knowledge that those moments become nothing more than memories virtually as soon as we recognize them happening.
That footage in The Holidaymakers is accompanied by the recorded version of “An Hour Before the Light,” one of the Clientele’s early — and, arguably, one of their best — songs. It’s the first song of theirs I heard. A friend and I marvelled at how a prominent curtain of hiss accompanied MacLean’s vocal, abruptly cutting out whenever he stopped singing. Interviews later revealed that the cash-strapped band, wanting to create a distinctive atmosphere that made a virtue of technological limitations, fed the vocals through a guitar amp and turned the reverb up high. On that song and others, MacLean sang about rain, empty streets, the beginning and end of daytime, and the inherent oddness of strangers and environments. His guitar-playing — bell-like tumbles of notes, so clean and mindful of melody they could have been written for piano or a trained singer — avoided rock cliché. The result was vaguely psychedelic, but not in the 1960s, paisley-and-rainbows sense of the term; it was otherworldly and unsettled, but also earthbound, even kitchen-sink-esque, as if to suggest that nothing is so potentially disorienting as what happens in everyday life. Appropriately, the band titled their first album, a compilation of out-of-print singles, Suburban Light.
The Clientele’s singular low-budget sound became an unintentional calling card, but the trio realized, after proper debut album The Violet Hour (2003), that it was becoming an artistic cul-de-sac. And so each subsequent album marked a modest but assured step forward, from 2005’s Strange Geometry, which features string arrangements from Louis Phillipe and comparatively modern production, to 2007’s God Save the Clientele, recorded in Nashville with over half a dozen guest musicians and the newly-arrived Draisey’s violin and keyboards. (The band also began exploring its own urbane version of four-on-the-floor groove, beginning with what may forever be their most popular song, “Bookshop Casanova.”) In the U.S., the Clientele’s audience and critical praise grew and grew; in their native U.K., virtually no one knew who they were and the press was indifferent, if not sniffily dismissive.
That began to change with 2009’s Bonfires on the Heath. An admitted minor retreat from the relative grandeur of God Save, it was recorded during "that really quiet period between Christmas and the New Year," said MacLean, in an interview with Pitchfork, “because we wanted to capture a deadening, spectral ambiance.” He also described the album as “very spooky and tremendously sad at times,” influenced in part by a frightening, unintentional acid trip in Spain (a mischievous acquaintance dosed his drink). Featuring some of the band’s most beautiful songs and also some of their strangest, Bonfires somehow began to exact an upturn of fortune on their home turf; they headlined sizeable venues there for the first time, and journalists suddenly were onboard. (The Guardian awarded the album four stars; the BBC described the band as “one of Britain’s most unheralded but genuine musical treasures.”)
Nevertheless, MacLean secretly contemplated that it might be time to put the band to rest. Amor de Dias (pictured below), a side-project with singer and fellow Londoner Lupe Núñez-Fernández, of the duo Pipas, was casually recording material of its own, and it seemed a more attractive way forward than another Clientele album and another incremental step toward who-knows-what. In May of 2011, a week before the release of Amor de Dias’s first album, Street of the Love of Days, MacLean wrote of the Clientele on his blog: “Maybe one day we'll make another record. I hope so. But for now we are resting, an ageing actor, a monstre sacré killing time at the Cadogan Hotel, ignoring the cards left by the young acolytes in the Beatles wigs.”
Whatever their future, the Clientele have left behind some of the most beautiful and distinctive music of the 2000s — my favourite discography of any recording act from that entire decade. Much thanks to Alasdair for participating in the following email interview, answered from his home in London.
You once commented in an interview about the importance of suburban boredom not only to the Clientele having come into existence, but to the very sound of the band. The suburbs have mostly been absent as a subject — and as an acknowledged influence — in pop and rock. Was it a conscious decision to be honest as a songwriter about where you came from, whether that was communicated through lyrics or interviews or simply the mood of a song? The early Clientele songs, whether deliberately or accidentally, sound very un-urban.
Alasdair MacLean: We lived in the suburbs and we rehearsed in the countryside. My friend Innes [Phillips, who left the band in the mid-'90s] lived in an old village just out of town, and we played in his bedroom, which was above his parents’ garage. So as 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds, we had lots of five-mile walks back home in the dead of night: plenty of time trudging through lonely country lanes —with cars speeding past you at 80 miles per hour — then back to the town, which would be completely dead, everybody asleep. I think that fed quite naturally into our early songs. Like all adolescents, we looked for the mystery around us, and things were so boring that we had to find mystery in that. I saw the famous Erik Satie quote later [“Boredom is mysterious and profound”] and it perfectly articulates how I felt in those days.
Galaxie 500 was an early influence of yours. Although I don't think they and the Clientele sound particularly similar, both bands seemed to have an interest in capturing — in words and sound — the potential for surreality in mundane, everyday existence. Their song “Strange” is one of the most interesting lyrics I've ever heard, in that it makes the act of going to a convenience store for junk food sound like the end of the world. Have you always felt attuned to an undertow of strangeness in even the most seemingly "normal" places?
When I was about eight, my sister and I and our next-door neighbours formed a ghost-hunting society; we used to slip out of our houses carrying kitchen knives and meet in the woods late at night. We’d walk down the path a few steps, and then a rustle in the bushes would send us all screaming home. I outgrew that and started to listen to records — not everyone did, though; I heard recently that my old next-door neighbour dresses in black and has a pentagram necklace. But as a kid, I had a strong feeling that something magical was just out of reach, something you could almost see in the corner of your eye. I feel as if I’ve needed to describe this feeling all my life, and I’ve simply changed languages, from ghost-hunting to music to art to prose and back again.
From the beginning, there seemed to me to be a profound melancholy about the Clientele's sound, and that melancholy has been alluded to in your lyrics as well — memory seems to be more prevalent than the present. Given that the band began in earnest toward the end of your teenage years, do you look back on your early songs as having been a method of mourning for the adolescence you knew was coming to an end? Do you think memory still plays as much a role in your songwriting now as it did then?
Yes, it does. Another thing I read much later, the books by Proust — I love the way he obsessively describes his old town and the people he remembers, and then as the books go on you slowly begin to realize every single person is now dead and every detail of that landscape has been obliterated by the gun barrages of World War I. How do you react to that? For me, quite honestly, it was the death of my mother; she died quite suddenly just after I began to work seriously with the band. For a long time, that death made me want to preserve a time before the awful thing happened, build a sort of musical world that reflected it. It’s a melancholy thing, but I suppose it’s a common human response. It's a way of surviving, definitely. As time’s gone on, I’ve become less precious about this kind of thing, although sometimes it’s just as much of an inspiration. But it’s strange how some experiences can mark you for life — a few days or months can be revisited for years and years and years.
As the band's geography shifted — from the suburbs, to urban London, to travelling the world as a touring band — do you think those environmental changes have been reflected in your music?
I don’t know. I’ve been lucky to visit a lot of places, but touring isn’t generally a great way to widen your horizons. As I get older, I respond more to the remote countryside, the idea of the earth, the chthonic. I like the desert. But there are a lot of charlatans in that area nowadays — career academics, newspaper columnists, phonies of all stripes — and you have to steer clear of their taint, even if it means you don’t make any art out of what you experience. You just experience it, which is perfectly satisfying and fine. And it’s nice sometimes not to have to try to make sense to the world.
The Clientele seemed to me to be the sort of act — like, say, the High Llamas or Louis Philippe or, stepping further back, Felt — that were ostensibly identified as indie yet never seemed to belong there, largely because the band's abilities as musicians were too great, and their ideas too ambitious, to be aligned with the aesthetic of deliberate underachievement that tends to characterize indie. Did you ever feel as though the band had a peer group or lineage to which it could align itself, and if so, who did it include?
I’ve never been conscious of us having peers, really, in the sense of rivals or co-conspirators who we meet each week at an appointed time for drinks or whatever. I wish we did. There are a handful of bands currently making music that I really admire — Plush, Destroyer, Boards of Canada — but none of them have any peers either; they’re all one-offs. When we first started playing, we were horrified to be identified as indie-pop. It was the first indication that people weren’t automatically going to accept us on our own terms. I like imperfection and chance in music, but I don’t understand the ironic, deliberate underachievement thing. I hated it then and I still hate it now.
You were asked throughout the Clientele's existence to comment about the band being more appreciated outside the U.K. than within, yet that situation seemed to finally be changing just as the band was coming to an end, playing in larger venues and getting more press. Did that cause you to reconsider your decision, or had your mind been made up?
It was changing just as we split up, yes. But we released so many records that [detractors] had been content to ignore. If those people had had their way, no one would ever have heard Strange Geometry or The Violet Hour. So the fact that they had started to like us made me all the more convinced it was time to quit: “If these people think it’s good, then there must be something wrong.” But that was only one of several reasons.
Amor de Dias was in gestation — or, at least, there was talk of it — long before the Clientele came to an end. Did the experience of making music for that project play a part in deciding to wrap up the Clientele? Is the gratification it provides different from the gratification of the Clientele?
Louis Philippe first suggested doing a record just for the hell of it, to have fun. If no one released it or bought it, then so what? He introduced me to Ken Brake, who owns the studio the first Amor de Dias record was made in. It was like a collaboration between three friends: Lupe, me and Ken. The Clientele had got to be pretty rock and roll, and this was a great way to step back from that and just drop in and have a nice cup of tea and try some ideas out. I think I felt at the time that the Clientele had seriously run out of steam; I felt we’d lost our intensity and our weirdness and were turning into just another band. It made me unhappy, but I knew there was this little project I could escape to which was full of potential.
Amor de Dias sounds to me like a retreat from the darker aspects of the Clientele's sound, although that could be an illusion — or an inevitable byproduct — of Lupe's voice and the prominent use of nylon-string guitar. It sounds more contented, as though whatever aspects of youthful angst and existentialism that played a part in the Clientele had been let go. Was Amor de Dias a deliberate attempt to "step into the light"?
I guess, from my point of view, it was an attempt to show a more vulnerable, childlike side [and] see what happened from that angle. We often said those songs could be children’s songs; they’re tender and simple in that way. As it happens, we’ve just finished making a new Amor de Dias record and it’s ended up in much more bleak and poetic territory. There are some strange, hypnotic tunes stored up!
It seems inconceivable now that there was a time, not very long ago, when a slew of new bands claimed to be influenced by, and sought to match the beauty and ambition of, the likes of Burt Bacharach, the Beach Boys, the Free Design, and other well-known and obscure practitioners of orchestral pop and easy listening from the 1960s and early ’70s.
The movement — often referred to at the time as “orch-pop” — was a fleeting one, and it ultimately produced little of worth. Most of the participating bands had neither the technical skills nor the songwriting talent to be of use to a style of music whose success is exceptionally dependent on both. Their hearts were undoubtedly in the right place: It was the late ’90s, and something needed to be done to redress the increasingly diminished horizons of indie-rock and the dregs of grunge, wherein seeming to not try very hard — and being palpably miserable doing so — was worn as a badge of honour. Here was an opportunity to hark back to a time when popular music had yet to be saturated with irony, when a sincere belief in the transformative power of pretty music was nothing to be ashamed of. That so much of the results sounded like Sebadoh and a seasick woodwind section covering “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” didn’t diminish the value of the bands’ intentions, but neither did it redeem the painful experience of listening to them.
Some bands got it right, primarily because they shunned slavish replication and instead sought to create a modern notion of their influences that combined the old-fashioned with the newfangled. Sean O’Hagan, linchpin of the High Llamas, spent a few years making full use of windfall major-label budgets, producing albums that are like aural travelogues of 20th-century non-rock music. (Less attentive ears insisted he was making nothing more than one Brian Wilson pastiche after another. That argument can wait for another time.) Stereolab (in which O’Hagan was sometimes an auxiliary member) were virtually infallible throughout the second half of the decade; always using traditional melody as a jumping-off point, their simultaneously academic and gleefully childlike experiments with technology — from Moog synthesizers to digital editing — and song structure reached dizzying heights of sophistication.
Chicago’s the Aluminum Group, though, arguably made the single greatest recordings to come from that somewhat nebulous cluster of artists: the albums Plano (1998) and Pedals (’99). (A promising self-financed debut, Wonder Boy, came out in ’95; it was later reissued with extra tracks as Wonder Boy Plus.) Made up of brothers John and Frank Navin and an ever-changing cast of supporting players, the Aluminum Group answered the never-posed question of what sort of music Bacharach and Hal David might’ve made if they had been uncommonly close gay siblings who came of age in the ’80s. Plano, especially, is a masterpiece: a collection of concise, economically orchestrated pop songs that harbour innovative — and, in their own modest way, subversive — flourishes beneath their classicist surfaces.
Those surfaces alone are enough to recommend Plano. Featuring a dozen players — including horns and strings — and impeccably produced by David Trumfio, the album’s sound is as elegant and purposeful as the Eames furniture line from which the Navins took their band name. The songs “Chocolates” and “The Mattachine Society” are especially lavish, recalling the period in the late ’60s when A&M Records artists such as Bacharach, Claudine Longet and Brasil 66 gave the label an unofficial house sound that evoked cosmopolitan sophistication and jet-set leisure. Other tracks, including “Angel on a Trampoline” and “Steam,” evince the Navins’ ’80s roots, their programmed beats and percolating keyboards hinting at affection for electro-pop pioneers OMD and Soft Cell.
But if the Aluminum Group’s music is a summation of the Navins’ record collections, their lyrics are nigh on incomparable. Sung in a calm, unobtrusive croon (both brothers take turns at the mic), Plano presented something that had perhaps never been heard across the length of an entire album: observations about gay life that are presented as nothing more than matter-of-fact reports from the people living it — high and lows, triumphs and disappointments, exceptionality and mundanity. Unlike Rufus Wainwright, whose vocal dexterity and outsize personality tend to make him want to write about everything as though it were the end of the world, or Stephin Merritt, who over-relies on a pose of cynical detachment, the Navins are a recognizable tangle of contradictions, swings of mood and changes of heart — just like everyone, albeit with the power of poetry on their side.
Following the more expansive Pedals — home to their single most ambitious song, the almost 10-minute “Rrose Selavy’s Valise” — the Aluminum Group moved toward a predominantly electronic sound with 2000's Pelo, whose clean, retro-futurist tone showed that, together with friends and neighbours Jim O’Rourke, Tortoise, and the Sea and Cake (and frequent visitors Stereolab and the High Llamas), Chicago had become the home base of a new, indefinable experimental pop.
Throughout the following decade, the Aluminum Group perfected that sound on their “Happyness trilogy”: the albums Happyness (2002), More Happyness (2003) and Little Happyness (2008). The Navins’ retreat from the ornate, large-scale productions of Plano and Pedals is understandable: as expensive to make as it is difficult to sell, it became a particularly unsustainable forte once everyone had stopped paying for music. Although the Happyness trilogy isn’t as immediately seductive to the ears as Plano’s epic landscapes of melody, repeat listening proves it to be their best work — compact and linear where its predecessors are expansive and painterly, but full of stealth complexity that rewards the use of headphones. And, as always, there’s the Navins’ extraordinary way with words.
John Navin, who will celebrate his 53rd birthday later this month, answered the following questions by email from his home in Chicago. Wisely, he didn't take any of it nearly as seriously as I did.
There was a fleeting moment in the late '90s when easy listening and orchestral pop became popular influences in indie music, and Plano seemed perfectly timed to that moment. But the Aluminum Group seemed to be the one of the only acts whose demonstrable interest in those genres predated the trend. I'm always interested in how musicians who hadn't jumped the bandwagon became interested in that music, since it was considered archaic for so long. What was the case for you and Frank?
John Navin: I don’t know about bandwagons except I love to be on them, especially at hayrides with cotton candy and caramel apples — it’s sticky. I think people collectively gravitate to things they like; it’s a way of identifying ourselves. It’s our red flag or personal marker: “Look! This is me. This is who I am."
Frankie and I have loved music our whole lives, all kinds of music. It’s well documented. Our tastes change; our interests widen, deepen. For instance, the last 10 years or so I’ve devoted to classical music, learning as much as I can. I even bought a piano and started taking lessons. I raced to every opera I could. Thankfully, we live in a city with a wonderful lyric opera company.
I love all kinds of things, genres in music. Sometimes these interests are juxtaposed and collide, like punk and pretty music, like the Clash and Claudine Longet. You never know where inspiration comes from; it just does from so many human endeavours — especially, but not exclusively, in the arena of the arts.
Your interests in music, design and fashion seem to be of a piece, in that they represent old-fashioned notions of "the good life," and conjure up a time and place where people were more polite and took greater care in how they presented themselves. Does your music provide a sort of wish fulfillment — a soundtrack for a world you wish existed?
Life — existence, or what I perceive it to be — is the starting point. Then it’s scrounging around and seeing all that we accomplish in life. I’m inspired by so many things. Also I’m saddened, but that can be fuel for inspiration and dreams. For instance, I’m blown away to the core of my being by a person as humble and fascinating as [New York Times street-fashion photographer] Bill Cunningham and one as garish and outlandish as [multimedia artist] Matthew Barney.
I try to be as good as I can in this life. You never know what’s after this…. I hope something is, but all our human baggage will be gone. That’s an inspiring thought: free of art, beauty, things around us, but not the souls we care about. No, those molecules will be combined with our own in the hereafter — or so I would hope. Our soundtrack, if we have one, is to be good to one another, be humble, smart, open to things, and try, try, try to be happy, because it’s not so easy. The world is a strange place. It’s like that children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are: We could almost be zombies, if you think about it — the crimes we commit, the things we do. The good life is paying your bills, being debt-free, not buying into the Man, keeping some element of yourself free, free from what I’ve just listed. Oh… my new theory: Pay yourself first, because you’re the most important. It took me 53 years to figure that out. I always paid everyone else first and little was left for me.
As far as design and art go, I couldn’t survive a day if I didn’t think about them. I just couldn’t. They aren’t beyond bread and water, but they are almost a “host”; they are for me. I love so many buildings and things man has made and is making. I want to keep every old building standing; I hate when things are torn down, I love when new things are put up. My [architectural] interests are too broad to go into here; suffice it to say they include classical, Renaissance, Victorian, Edwardian, art nouveau, deco, modern, brute, ultra-modern — you name it. If there is a building, I want to go see it with you. Let’s go, Michael, shall we?
In a previous interview, you said of your music, "It never overwhelms the listener, but you can take what you like or leave it if your attention is elsewhere." That used to be a guiding principle for scores of pop artists and was nothing to be ashamed of. Why do you think that utilitarian aspect of music is so much less valued now?
I rarely, if ever, listen to our stuff. I did when we were recording it. I love to clean my apartment to music — that’s what I meant. Or at a party, it’s on and you can still have a conversation with somebody. Never overwhelm anybody on the surface, but sub-consciously, on a spiritual level, it’s wonderful to destroy a person or move them to new heights. That’s what I meant: not kill them spiritually but move them beyond words. Speechless.
I have a theory as to why the “orch-pop” revival was so short-lived. Firstly, I think many of the bands involved realized they didn't have the abilities, as musicians or as songwriters, to pull off what they were aiming for. But possibly more than that, I think they discovered that making that kind of music isn't economically sustainable. I wonder if the latter was an incentive, post-Pedals, to move toward more electronic instruments and programming that can be recorded at home by yourselves.
The only lucky people who make money from music are the superstars and those rare indie superstars. We never fell into either category. I don’t know what motivates artists. I hope it’s not money. I mean, money is nice — it’s a calling card, it gets you into everything — but I never thought for an instant about it because it wasn’t in the cards for us. We made some, [and] still do with royalties. But mostly, like Blanche Dubois in Streetcar, we rely on the kindness of strangers, who had bigger bucks than we did. Frankie and I have been blessed knowing [and] loving people who are far more generous financially than we could ever be, and so they helped us many times. Many of our records would never have been completed had it not been for their generosity. They know who they and we are forever in their debt. The incentive for Frank and I was making something we loved — that’s about it. The rest is an afterthought.
We’ve also been blessed to work with so many talented and wonderful musicians and artists across the board. No money in the world can buy taste, refinement, character, talent. That’s the beauty: All this and more was ours, has always been — at least with regards to our work.
I love that your lyrics occasionally deal with the specificity of life as a gay man without being ostentatious about it — it's very matter-of-fact, as it should be, but seems brave for that reason, because so few songwriters do it. When the two of you began writing songs, was there very much discussion about how you would do this?
Not really. We’re gay so we write gay or come at it from that perspective. It’s what we know, you know? It’s an outlet for expression.
Was the Happyness trilogy fully conceptualized from the beginning, or did you simply agree it would be a trilogy and then make it up as you went?
It was pretty much mapped out ahead of time. We love big, colossal projects and commitment. We didn’t have all the songs written, but we knew we would come up with them.
Is the Aluminum Group still active?
Yes, we’re very active — not musically as much these days. We’ve ventured into interior design: my apartment; Schwa [a restaurant in Chicago]. Frank is returning to his roots of producing fine art in sculpture, mixed media, conceptual art, et cetera. He’s brilliant and one of the most gifted artists I know. I don’t know where I am at this exact moment in time. I just took a Valium. Just one. I needed to; it’s been a stressful week. I feel wonderful but I can’t tell you exactly what I’m doing right now except Instagramming, thinking about the summer. We’ve been invited to sail around Sardinia, and so I’m super-psyched with anticipation to be with friends. Fun stuff. But Frankie keeps hounding me, reminding me we need to make music again. I think we will. It’s a lot of fun.
At some point — I don't know what may have been said to trigger it — I stepped out of myself for a moment and recognized the wonderful strangeness of the situation in which I found myself.
I was sitting having tea with Gregory Webster, who, as one-half of the band Razorcuts, sang and co-wrote some of my favourite music of the 1980s. Gregory had become a semi-regular visitor to my former home of Vancouver from his home in Oxford, England, so the infrequent correspondence we'd been maintaining for several years had suddenly granted me, on two occasions thus far, the opportunity to have lunch with the man. It was strange not because I felt like a fan holding court with his hero; I'm too old, and have met far too many musicians, to be swept up in adulatory awe (although I can still clearly remember listening almost daily to Razorcuts' Storyteller album as a 19-year-old, which is as good a teenage memory as any I have). It was strange because their music, like the music of so many bands I listened to then, was created in — and received with — what felt like such obscurity that it never occured to me it would still have resonance in my (or anyone else's) life almost 20 years later. Their gentle, romantic, exceedingly hopeful-sounding music seemed to me to come from another planet, and seemed so unpopular (although I later found that was not the case) that I expected it to disappear as quickly and mysteriously as it had arrived. Perhaps its makers didn't actually exist.
But, of course, Gregory very much exists, and is still occasionally making great music (in the early 2000s with Sportique, and most recently under his own name), and was very kind to listen to me talk incessantly, like I do whenever I have an indulgent audience. And it was during that largely one-way conversation that I told him I don't write very much anymore, partly because my job as an editor means I spend too much of my time honing other people's writing, but more because the nature of the music press nowadays means no one wants to publish features — or even reviews — about the bands I'm most interested in. I plan to start a blog, I told him, because no one else is going to give me a decent forum, and as well as wanting to share my enthusiasm with others, I want the opportunity to actually talk to the people who make the music that excites me. I assume them to be nice, interesting people who know how to give good conversation, and there are few things I love more than good conversation.
Hence, the Music is Love blog. Yes, I'm probably setting myself up for some ridicule with that name, or at least some misunderstanding. Yes, it's the name of a David Crosby song (a good one), but I didn't choose it for that reason. More than the song itself, I've always loved the sentiment of the title: it's earnest and baldly romantic and, thus, very unfashionable. But while so many other music journalists (and a good deal of the bands they champion) tie themselves in knots to not seem deeply emotionally invested in the art form from which they strive to make a living, I prefer to project total devotion. I am completely, hopelessly, slavishly in love with music, and if my purpose as a journalist isn't to communicate the depth and breadth and complexity of that love, I don't know what reason there is for doing this.
So, yes: Music is Love. And off we go.
(A confession: This was written in 2008, for a blog that never came to fruition. I've recycled it here because I still agree with all of it. And because it's lunchtime.)
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