Papa Sprain, Butterfly Child, and H.ark!

An Oral History

 

Gary McKendry (Papa Sprain): I grew up in the suburbs outside Belfast. Early music in the house was stuff like Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain and Bitches Brew, also Buddy Rich, and Max Roach. I discovered the hi-fi pretty early as a child, and used to sit in the living room with headphones on listening to any cassettes close to hand, stuff like The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper and Yellow Submarine; Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, or it might have been Greatest Hits. Dvořák’s ‘New World Symphony’; and the Jacques Loussier Trio Play Bach or some such… whilst the rest of my family sat nearby eating dinner and watching the television.

Joe Cassidy (Butterfly Child): There’s a very silly story behind Butterfly Child. When I was about six years old, we moved into this old house that everybody in the neighbourhood thought was haunted. It had very long grass. Literally, way higher than I was, as a kid. It was a weird imaginary place for a few months, until my mum and dad got it cleared up. But I would go out into the garden and write these little stories as a kid. And one of the stories I wrote was called ‘Butterfly Child’.

GM: I was in bands with schoolfriends, practicing mostly Joy Division covers.

JC: I was absolutely obsessed with Peter Hook and New Order, and Joy Division. So for a birthday present my mum and dad bought me a bass guitar. And I started working and writing, and I’d save up all my money, and I’d rent out a four-track recorder.

GM: It wasn’t until I met Joe Cassidy, when I was around 16 or so, that I really even considered writing my own material.

JC: I was working a lot with Gary McKendry, because we were very close friends.

GM: It finally must have been, age 17, [when I] formed a band with myself as singer/guitarist, Richard Reynolds on guitar, and Cregan Black playing bass. We did the odd gig in Belfast but the process was more around solo four-track demo recording, so we would only rehearse if a gig was about to happen.

JC: I weirdly met some people who were part of the Manchester scene, but who were over in Belfast. And I got pulled into their band, and they ended up getting signed to a major record label deal. I asked my mum if I should do it and she said, ‘son, you can do it if you want to, but maybe what you should do is finish school and then write your own stuff and be your own boss.’ So I quit that band.

GM: There were no opportunities really in Belfast. No scenes, or at least not when I was growing up. No record companies really, no nothing.

JC: By the time I got into my teens, there was no question that there was a very foreboding quality to Belfast. It was lovely, it was full of lovely people, but there was a dichotomy. It was a very poetic, lovely lifestyle but also very dangerous and violent. And I think music was a really good escape from that.

GM: After my A-Levels, I went to London to do a degree in joint English and History at the only college that would take me, because I had spent much too much more time teaching myself guitar and listening to records than properly studying like I should have been.

JC: I finished school, and I’d been doing a lot of demos. Probably around the time I was 16 or 17, I started going ‘I’m gonna do some shows’. I was very shy and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I said, ‘it’s got to have a band name’. All my friends at the time were complete intellectual snobs. And they had bands like The Freudian Complex, just ridiculous names. So I thought, screw all that. [I wanted to name it] the most innocent, naïve thing; something from my childhood, even though it’s the worst band name of all time. I thought, ‘I’ll call it Butterfly Child’.

GM: I was a very big A.R.Kane fan. I actually thought they were the coolest band in the universe.

JC: I was in this weird space, where I was like, ‘I don’t want to work with anybody unless it’s A.R. Kane or The Cocteau Twins or whatever’.

Rudy Tambala (A.R. Kane): We were sick of the whole fucking industry after the second album. [A.R. Kane] had all happened so quickly, and we just kept doing it, and doing it. And it got to the point where we just weren’t enjoying it very much anymore.

Melody Maker, A.R. Kane “i" review: Truth is, we’d run out of words for A.R. Kane. Their ecstatic hails of sculpted, bittersweet feedback, their oceanic drift, their Madonna-in-a-blizzard songs prompted a sandstorm of adjectives.

RT: We were going around with lots and lots of different ideas [on “i"], and not wanting to be contained. I think that in retrospect – which is great, isn’t it? – we probably could have done with a manager. Someone to say, ‘stop’. Someone stop us, because we’re spending all the money, and we’re just having a laugh.

Melody Maker, A.R. Kane “i" review: And it’s at least 90 per cent brilliant.

Alex Ayuli, the other half of A.R. Kane, moved to America following the release of “i".

RT: Because Alex went away, I had lots of time on my hands. So I built a studio. In an old building in Stratford we hired a unit and we built a studio inside that unit. It had a drum room, a vocal booth. A proper studio. Really beautiful.

GM: Joe got in touch to tell me H.ark! [the name of Rudy's new studio and, eventually, record label] had put an advert in NME or Melody Maker saying they were looking for bands to produce, so it was decided I would go along with our demos to play to them.

JC: Gary, he was very forthright in those days, and very confident. He met up with Rudy, and played him basically a bunch of that genius pop music that Gary was making back in those days.

GM: I went to Stratford. Rudy was there and I had to wait for a bit for the coin to drop that this was the Rudy from the A.R. Kane, and he was actually gonna listen to my little demos I had recorded in the suburbs outside Belfast between times spent trying to comprehend what made HIS BAND and HIS RECORDS so cool. So he listened whilst I sat trying to look nonchalant and I guess he must have heard the A.R. Kane influences straight away. I mean, one song, ‘I Got Loose’, was made up from a sample of ‘In A Circle’ from their “i" album!

JC: I think Rudy was floored.

RT: [Gary] knew what he was doing. He was really quietly spoken, beautiful, a delicate young man. Byronesque or something. And on the edge.

GM: The name was created for H.ark!, as a necessity for putting a band name onto records to identify them as my stuff! When I told Rudy the name of the band he replied in rhyming tones, ‘PA-PA-SPRAIN === A-R-KANE’. He probably figured not only had I ripped him off musically, but I was now trying to usurp his band name too!

JC: And then, I guess Gary said, ‘oh my friend Joe’s got a band as well’. And he played that to Rudy and Rudy was like, ‘oh I’ve got two bands here to get started’. It was around 1990 and we jumped in with Rudy, and very quickly knocked out a couple of EPs. And that’s where Butterfly Child started.

GM: The first Papa Sprain EP [Flying To Vegas] took about two weeks to record and mix. The first week was recording, second was mixing. Every track apart from the title track was new. I was getting more into a sort of ‘let it happen’ attitude to recording. Maybe, gradually, I was becoming more confident with what I figured worked. I think this pleased Rudy, and everything flowed pretty easy. I had started ‘Fizz’ with the guitar alone, but it was difficult for me to see where to take it. It was sounding quite listless and wimpy, and then Rudy said I should ‘put a big dirty distorted fuck off bass on top’ so I recorded the noise bass probably first or second take. Improvised noise bass. Ended up as if the whole song was built around a bass solo; I was happy with that.

JC: Those first EPs came out and obviously you had the classic Melody Maker prose. Everything’s gorgeous. There was definitely some attention around that.

Melody Maker, Papa Sprain: Flying To Vegas review: The most astonishing debut of the year has me ransacking my cache of synonyms for ‘iridescent’ and grievously failing to do the bugger justice.

Melody Maker, Butterfly Child: Tooth Fairy review: A purely sensuous pleasure, beauty for its own sake. For those who want to unshackle the surly fetters of reality and take an awayday from mundanity, it can’t be bettered.

In the NME ‘On’ [New Bands] section on 14 September 1991, both Butterfly Child and Papa Sprain were featured, discussing their respective debut H.Ark! EPs.

GM (1991): When I wrote the lyrics, it was just anything in my head, letting things come out. And if the rhythms seemed OK and if it wasn’t too pretentious, then I was happy enough.

JC (1991): [The songs] have a dark side to them. Just mess them up a bit and make them colder: no harder to listen to, just give them more substance.

GM (1991): Playing live and recording are totally separate. So many people in bands don’t realise that recording is an artificial process, they just want a recording of themselves playing live, and I don’t think it’s about that at all.

GM: Pretty early on I had started thinking about the difference between improvisation versus structure, and how the two complimented each other. [I wanted to investigate] what could be done within that framework, how to explore that space, and how it worked in itself.

JC: I don’t think any of us were trying to say anything narratively speaking, with lyrics, for example. It was a very stream of consciousness writing, because I thought that was even more truthful than writing something down and then trying to make it all make sense. Whatever came out, came out, and that was the song.

The next two EPs on H.Ark! were May [Papa Sprain] and Eucalyptus [Butterfly Child], both released in 1992.

GM: I thought Vegas was too uptempo, and wanted the second EP to be more sombre. The May EP again took probably about a fortnight. I vaguely remember arguing with Rudy because he wanted to put a breakbeat on ‘U Swell’, though only for a bar or two. But I wanted the sound to be more ‘pure’.

RT: [Gary] just made the studio work. He made a beautiful sound.

GM: I think a lot of other bands hadn’t given much thought about the studio really as an instrument itself. Maybe other bands had somehow limited themselves in that regard.

JC: We weren’t trying to become pop stars. We were just trying to make our music, and we didn’t do a lot of live shows. So there was definitely a wee bit of mystery going on, and people were very fascinated by what we were doing.

Melody Maker, Butterfly Child/Papa Sprain @ Camden Falcon, live review 1991: You wait three years for a band to take up and renew the dreampop mantle and two arrive at once. […] Papa Sprain and Butterfly Child have opened up so many vistas you don’t know where to turn. Their point of no return has already faded into the distance.

JC: [Live] it was basically Gary, myself, and our other collaborator, friend, Tony McKeown. We played as Papa Sprain and then we played as Butterfly Child. Which really freaked out the audience. They were like, ‘what’s going on here? It’s the same three guys! They’ve just switched microphones!’

GM: I grew to really hate [touring] more and more. I just wanted to record really, do what I had always done up to then. Read, listen and write, record.

RT: I don’t know what it’s like in Stratford now, but I know what it was like in Stratford then, and basically I had to have weapons in the studio to protect myself. Really scary. In the building over the road, it was like hooligans doing all the pirate stations. They all had gear, they all had equipment, there were a lot of heavy drug people, heavy football fans doing this stuff all around us and I knew a lot of them, because I grew up in Stratford, and that’s where most of them were from. But I did get a phone call from an old mate from school one day, saying ‘they’re coming to get you, they want all your gear.’ And I thought, this is the time to get out of there.

GM: Geoff Travis [of Rough Trade] was invited to a ’92 gig at The Borderline. God knows what Geoff Travis was thinking if he thought Papa Sprain were gonna be any sort of success at that time from that gig!

JC: I think we just sat down with Geoff, who is one of the most lovely, educated, coolest guys. He said 'listen, we don’t have a ton of money, but we’ll give you this amount of money to make a record'. Gary and I talked, and we thought, ‘well we’ve got a nice sizeable chunk of money here for the kind of music we want to make, we’ll just go and buy an 8-track, reel-to-reel machine, buy a couple of extra things like a mic and a DAT player, we’ll set up a studio in Belfast and we’ll knock out our records at the studio.’

Butterfly Child and Papa Sprain both signed with Travis to Rough Trade.

GM: I think from pretty early on [Rough Trade] started to see me as a liability. Not necessarily in a bad way, but think they were aware that I was gradually going off the rails.

RT: I think all of that time when I was working with other bands, I wasn’t working on my own stuff. [I was] working with different people, working with people constantly, for about two years. I’d had enough, and California seemed like a really good prospect.

GM: With most bands, they start off experimental and end up more commercial. Papa Sprain ended up working the other way around.

Rudy Tambala went out to California to join Alex Ayuli; H.Ark! wound up, and the third A.R. Kane album, New Clear Child, was released in 1994. Both Papa Sprain and Butterfly Child remained at Rough Trade. Albums were recorded; and one was never released. But those are other stories for other days.