Protorat

We’re building something here, detective. We’re building it from scratch. All the pieces matter.

(Lester Freamon, The Wire)

When I interviewed Dave Callahan from Moonshake, he asked me if I’d heard of Chorchazade. Who? I said, straining to catch the quixotic band name over the background pub natter. He spelled it into my Dictaphone, and the following day sent me a link to this track.

 

With all due respect to Socrates, when it comes to music writing, wisdom is not knowing that you know nothing. Wisdom is knowing that certain other people will always know more than you.

Enter Harvey. Harvey Williams is a brilliant singer-songwriter (solo and as part of many Sarah Records ‘outfits’) and my friend. He’s also an authority on Cornwall's musical history, with a glorious blog enriched by personal anecdote and rare soundclips. Harvey knew all about Chorchazade, as some of its members originated from the area; he had already blogged on a pre-Chorchazade act, An Alarm. Harvey is one of the most generous people I know and, true to form, he sent me a digital version of this tape.

 

Goodness me. This certainly was proto [post-rock], but in a far different way to Cocteau Twins or AR Kane, and even to Dif Juz or Glenn Branca. This anticipated Slint. It utilised a similar painstaking but punishing guitar deconstruction (which in itself had forbears in the Sonic Youth of Evol and Bad Moon Rising), balanced with a dour jazzy syncopation, and punctuated by whispery introspection.

 

Chorchazade released a 12”, ‘Crackle And Corkette’ (1985), and an album, Made To Be Devoured (1987). They had one play on John Peel, who bellyached about them having an awkward name (it’s pronounced cork-arr-zade, should you be wondering), they had a perceptive review in the NME...

Made To Be Devoured has no close blood relatives [...] Blurred vocals distort the view, enticing you to peer further into the dimly perceived core. [It] never grins in welcome when it can stand with folded arms and invite you to make the move.

...and that was about it. A thousand copies of the LP were pressed; two-thirds of them ended up in a skip.

They were alone in time and space, were Chorchazade, peerless in both senses. Information was sparse. Although Noel Lane, the songwriter, singer, and bassist of the band had an internet presence a few years back (with some excellent songs on MySpace, as Bunny Dees), he had pretty much disappeared since then. I had no obvious way of getting hold of him. My only leads were only a couple of scraps of information about where Noel lived and the kind of work he did. I fired out a very speculative email based solely on this, and a couple of days later got an astonished reply from the man himself.

Lesson here: however unlikely, always give it a go. Since then, Noel has written me an in-depth, insightful, and very funny, history of the band.

We were all white, thin, physically unattractive and unfashionable, too young to have really taken part in the punk thing. Our audiences were almost totally made up of ugly, short, socially inept, bespectacled young men.

I was far too big-headed (immature and unconfident... paranoid?) to display any interest in what my peers were doing. Perhaps I’m utterly wrong about it all, but that’s the way it seemed.

A troop of wandering Benedictine lepers probably had more fun than we did. It was all, of course, quite wonderful.

(Noel Lane, Chorchazade)

Noel also contacted Julian Hunt, guitarist, who I spoke to on the phone. Julian talked about their musical tastes, which Noel did less of (understandably so: as Julian said, Noel ‘didn’t buy any records. I’d never met anyone who was so outside the bubble, so formed in his own musical world.’) Most interestingly, Julian discussed the influence of soundtracks such as The Man With The Golden Arm, On The Waterfront, Zorba The Greek, and the work of Ennio Morricone.

  

This, this, feels very special. Although I’m by no means the first music writer to cover Chorchazade (Jakob Battick in Perfect Sound Forever, and Andrew Male, who wrote an excellent ‘Buried Treasure’ piece about them for Mojo in 2008), they are still extraordinarily obscure. Although it would be a stretch – at best – to claim that Chorchazade directly influenced anyone else I’ll be including in my book, who knows how unseen ripples disrupt still water? Pure conjecture, of course, but Chorchazade gigged a fair bit. Even in front of small audiences, a band as singular as they would surely have stuck in people’s minds, especially if there were fellow musicians among the crowd.

We played with Pulp in 1986. After the gig Jarvis told me I was a genius to make music like that with guitarists who couldn’t play.

(Noel Lane, Chorchazade)

There’s even an unsubstantiated story that Steve Albini owned and loved Made To Be Devoured, and played it at his studio, Electrical Audio, during a recording session. This would have been way later than Made To Be Devoured’s release (Electrical Audio was founded in 1997) but who knows how long he’d had it? Albini produced Tweez, the debut Slint album (released 1989), and it’s a charming image to think of the Slint boys nodding their heads to Uncle Steve’s latest favourite album.

 

Fun though this speculation is, in the end, it matters little. What does matter is that Chorchazade created a certain sound several years ahead of others, and that said sound would prove hugely significant in [post-rock], even if they themselves were not. Understanding how they came to do so (and why the world wasn’t ready for Chorchazade in the way it was for Spiderland) is the next task at hand. 

It’s kind of fun, figuring shit out.

(Roland ‘Prez’ Pryzbylewski, The Wire)