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.

Have You Heard The News?

When you devour as much past and present music press as I do, you get very used to cliché. 'We're just making this album for ourselves, and if anyone else likes it, that's a bonus.' 'Success, it's a double-edged sword.' 'You'll either love it or hate it.' The first two may very well be true, but that last one, generally speaking, isn't. It's just dramatic and/or self-aggrandising sloganeering. Most people get by well enough on a 'meh' for (e.g.) the latest My Morning Jacket album.

Yet there are a few exceptions. Talk Talk are very, very, very loved, almost to the point of obsession, by a small coterie. That’s not hard to understand. They have many qualities that inspire devotion: enigma, innovation, rebelliousness, meticulousness.

But hate?

That’s from the NME. (They eventually mitigated that somewhat and gave it a (7), but still called the album ‘painful’ and ‘pathetic’. It was almost disgustingly disingenuous. It basically said the same as the (0) review did, but through a panicked mist of ‘what if we’re wrong and this is actually pretty good?’).

What did the paper think about Laughing Stock? ‘Unutterably pretentious and looks over its shoulder hoping that someone will remark on its “moody brilliance” or some such. It’s horrible.’ The Colour Of Spring? ‘Either Hollis is possessed with an unbearable naïveté or an overpowering intensity, either he’s laughably misguided or studiously determined, but there’s really no need for this cumbersome, allegedly “impressionistic” waffle.’

Yes, the NME hated Talk Talk with a venom usually reserved for war criminals.

 

Mark Hollis wasn’t patient with journalists, including – but not limited to – those from the NME. For instance, I feel for Dave Rimmer, of Smash Hits; in a very early interview (August 1982), he gets the sharp end of Hollis’ tongue after he poses a question about Duran Duran. Reasonable for Rimmer to ask this: not only were Duran Duran ridiculously massive for the Smash Hits readership at that point (as irritating as that fact might have been for a young Hollis), but Talk Talk had just been on tour with them. Rimmer, rather charitably I feel, noted Hollis to be ‘an abrasive character’ and then amiably gave him space to talk about who he would like to be compared to: Otis Redding, Bacharach & David, John Coltrane.

Smash Hits got over the Hollis disdain soon enough, albeit in a very Smash Hits way (‘just because Talk Talk look a complete shambles, [it] doesn’t alter the fact that they have some truly excellent songs’). It was the same story in Q and Vox: largely uncomfortable interviews, while the albums were reviewed intelligently and positively. And as for Melody Maker, they loved them so much they closed their eyes and rolled over on their tummy at every release. ‘If music can ever be said to be confessional and questing, this is it,’ they said of Spirit Of Eden; and ‘Talk Talk are certainly the most individual, possibly the most important group we have’ closed out their Laughing Stock review.

For a flavour of how Hollis was on (probably) a good day, consider these two extracts. The first, from Music Box and with director Tim Pope, is a discussion on Talk Talk videos, with the pair making some very hardcore honest points (in between the weapons-grade piss-taking). The second is a candid talking head, from 1998, that suggests perhaps Hollis mellowed a bit with age, and was – when he didn’t have to do it all the time – keen on exploring serious points about his music.

All that said, let’s go back to the NME. This is from the 22^nd February 1986, around The Colour Of Spring.

 

Unlike with ol’ Dave Rimmer, and your be-mulleted Music Box host, I have absolutely no sympathy with Neil Taylor, who conducted this NME interview. He wastes what – in hindsight – was a rare opportunity. Reading carefully, Hollis was perhaps in talkative mood, because he's volunteering information about his literary influences and song structures. But bully anyone about their work like this, and they will react accordingly. I'd imagine this interview was at least partly responsible for Hollis being wary and reticent with journalists in the future, and eventually withdrawing altogether.

The empire of the powerful inkies is long over, of course. NME went free earlier this year, and Melody Maker – remembered by my interviewees as ‘the better one’, where you might see The Young Gods or AR Kane on the cover – folded in 2000. Melody Maker became sneering and virtually unreadable towards the end and, interestingly, one of their parting shots was to review Kid A in a very similar way to how the NME received Spirit Of Eden.

Of course, criticising the work – and calling Hollis, or Yorke, or whoever, out for acting like a dickhead – is essential. It’s no good to have a bland mush where ‘they tried their best, so let’s be nice’. But if you are prejudiced toward an artist to such an extent that you compromise the entire structure of an interview or fill up a lengthy review with unsubstantiated bile, then you are in the wrong job, and time is unlikely to look kindly upon you.

Take It With A Grain Of Salt

One of the major structural decisions I made over the summer AND YES THESE ARE ALL AGREED WITH MY EDITOR WHO SAYS THEY AREN’T is to end my book in 2001. There are a few reasons for this (and I’ll reveal some at a later date) but my resolution also tallies well with the seismic changes in the consumption of music and the democratization of recording that occurred in the noughties. It’s always nice to neatly sidestep a squirming and squealing can of worms.

The 90s were boom years for physical product, and for the independently-minded (in [post-rock], that’s pretty much everyone), this often meant insisting on a firm link between aesthetics and music. Many designed their own iconic covers; some went even further. I had a very agreeable chat with Jeff Mueller (Rodan, June Of 44, Shipping News) the other week and, among the music natter, I also found out that he was a letterpress practitioner, something dating from the first June Of 44 album.

 

I was looking for ways to package my music that were interesting, and less plastic-y, I guess. I liked the idea of a paper, or cardboard, package, on recycled stuff. […] I felt that when you got that first Tortoise record, when you got Shellac’s At Action Park, or when you got the first Rachel’s record, it was packaged in something that was so careful, and so conceived, and so realised, I felt that might inform how you might open it up and listen to it.

 

This set me off thinking about formatting more generally and, in particular, about the sequence of Tortoise 12”s released in 1996. Anyone who frequented independent record shops that year is sure to remember their die-cut yellow splendour. Interestingly, prior to then, most of the Tortoise singles had been 7”s and the first two, especially, fit in with the US underground aesthetic of the time – coloured vinyl, wraparound poly-bagged sleeves, retro-tinged artwork. The difference between their first single, and the Djed/Tjed 12”, is acute.

Each of these 12”s offered subtle-to-radical reworkings of tracks on Millions Now Living Will Never Die, or new explorations, often in collaboration with more electronica-identified artists whom they strongly admired. Putting this material only on a 12” – there were none of the usual accompanying CD singles – seemed to be making a statement about the group’s current ambition and, perhaps more pertinently, what they didn’t want to be identified with.

In my efforts to understand the 12” in this context, I recalled listening to this somewhat rambling documentary on the 12” single. Yes, it’s got everyone’s favourite rent-a-bitter-quote Paul Morley ‘presenting’ and self-aggrandizing, but the standard of punditry is high – Tom Moulton, Lucy O’Brien, some bloke who presses 12”s – and Morley generally lets them witter on nicely. One line from it, early on, really remained with me: Morley says to a somewhat piqued New Order that they’ve made a single (1983’s ‘Blue Monday’, natch) with ‘a prog rock length…’ *pregnant pause, as Sumner et al seethe through the radio silence* ‘…which is also the perfect length for a disco track.’ 

I don’t think Ver Order really forgave him, judging by how swiftly they moved on to talking about the record sleeve, but Morley made a good point, and I found it floating up in my head when thinking about Tortoise, and the associations of the 12” single. The links with prog are for another time, but many of the tracks are long, and unless an artist is particularly keen on the James Brown-ish ‘Part One’ / ‘Part Two’ of a 7” (and happy to put up with the inferior sound quality), or has a track that’s even too long for one 12” (Four Tet’s ‘Thirtysixtwentyfive’, Insides’ ‘Clear Skin’), it’s the obvious route. The 12” single, with its rich history in mixing, scratching, disco, dub, and 80s pop remixes offered – above all else – space. Quite literally. Grooves were wider: tracks could not only be lengthier, but bigger in sound, offering greater scope for extremes and subtleties of antagonism, fragility, tension and bliss. And let’s not forget that the visual canvas of the 12", whether busy or stark, offered way more impact.

  

I got excited by my emergent little theory, and I probably expected Ian Crause to say something fitting it when I asked him why Disco Inferno released a series of 12" EPs in the early 1990s. After all, they have (albeit retrospectively) been afforded a consistency similar to those Tortoise 12”s: collated as The 5 EPs and the subject of a Pitchfork oral history.

In fact, Crause told me, yes artwork was extremely important to DI, but the formatting was largely practical. Because the band had amassed a lot of material during the period late ’91–early ’92 (when DI regrouped, and drastically changed their sound), EPs were a good way to keep the momentum flowing and increase anticipation for the forthcoming album. But after DI Go Pop, it was a different story. Crause says

Everyone expected DI Go Pop to be a critical hit and get us an audience, which it didn't, so Geoff [Travis, of Rough Trade] suggested holding off on the next album and making more singles for a year or so. […] Of course from the point of view of record labels, an EP is far cheaper to make and promote than an album, which is a far larger undertaking.

The lesson with [post-rock], again and again, and even with something as seemingly innocuous as formatting: enjoy constructing theories, but never, ever, make assumptions. I love writing this book.

Summer's Last Sound

I have a theory, concocted with my dear friend Nik, that how we are as a teenager is how we are. We might (might!) get better at moderating the outer excesses; we don’t feel things less floridly.

  

Hence this summer. The summer where I may as well have been that creature above again, watching Why Don’t You? and shoplifting, for all the work I’ve done. (I’ve actually spent quality time with boyfriend, friends, cats, The Age Of Innocence, Dragons' Den, Demi Lovato’s ‘Cool For The Summer’, prosecco, Sunn O))), London parks, and the urge to give up veganism). For me, there’s something about August that says laze and laze some more; I remember one year I desperately tried to get into the Ryder Cup rather than do anything productive.

Part of the reason for the [post-rock] lull was a natural rhythm change. As I mentioned before, I’ve consciously tackled this book differently to Seasons They Change; I’m trying not to interview people haphazardly, but instead figure out patterns, see how people knew one another, work out the different factors and dynamics in and between individual groups and ‘scenes’. In July I felt the bulk of my British interviews of the late 80s and early 90s were in the bag – although transcribing them is a different matter entirely – and I’d done a shitload of research on the influences that fed into [post-rock], as my blog posts up to this point testify. I’d also made some strong decisions as to the shape of my book: moving away from a strictly linear approach into something organised more thematically.

Didn’t I deserve a break of a few weeks? Wouldn’t it improve the book if I did so?

As Nicki Minaj says, playtime is over, motherfuckers! I’m listening to Goodbye Enemy Airship The Landlord Is Dead and getting my head back in the game. North American [post-rock]: I’m coming for you.

Confusion Is Next

 

A phrase from my last blog post has properly bothered me over this past couple of weeks.

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.

‘Guitar deconstruction’. I know what I’m getting at with it, but it reads to me now as clunky shorthand, without adequate contextualisation. (This is the reality of being a writer. If all the usual life horrors aren’t enough, you get this shit waking you at four AM).

I think I meant that the bands I was discussing – Slint, and Sonic Youth especially – radically changed the parameters of the guitar, but not through accepted channels or gimmicks such as making it faster, slower, louder, fiddling with tunings and guitar effects, etc etc. They may very well have employed any or all of these techniques, but it was more in their philosophical attitude to the instrument. They took apart – deconstructed – its usual ‘rock’ purpose but they did not destroy it. They sought change it at its very root. The music that emerged was, at least partly, an inevitable consequence of this attitude. It’s linked to what Simon Reynolds talked of in his original definition of post-rock: that the guitar was used to facilitate texture and timbre. Reynolds cited Sonic Youth as a key example of how the guitar was un-rocked, and this Wire essay by David Stubbs further expands on the theme. I’ve also been listening to the No Wave artists that immediately preceded and inspired Sonic Youth, like Glenn Branca, and Rhys Chatham, whose ‘Guitar Trio’ (composed in 1977) was performed numerous times in the ferocious underground venues of late 70s-early 80s New York.

While I’ll be going more into No Wave and all this un-rocking in my book, what has started to fascinate me is deconstruction itself, and how it seems a fundamental principle of [post-rock]. When I tossed off that phrase in my last blog post, perhaps I unconsciously had in mind something Rudy Tambala said to me:

We didn’t want a guitar to sound like a fucking guitar. And I think that song [‘Sulliday’] really encapsulates it. You might think that’s a power chord, but it’s not, it’s just smashing a guitar against something, dropping it, and then going over and having a smoke, or whatever. But it was really, let’s try and tear away, aggressively, any aspect of rock and roll. […] There was this desire to destroy, even the groove. I think eventually we ended up thinking we’ll keep the groove, keep the bassline, even if we deconstruct it, keep the groove going, and just go fucking out there.

 

What is deconstruction? Let’s turn to the Sonic Youth of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida.

From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs.

We are all trapped by this, us poor sheep; we’re only able to create or analyse anything through ‘signs’ – which dominate everything from language to the unconscious – and think in set responses that (a) predate our existence and that (b) we’ve internalized throughout our lives. Signs are not a route to free expression, but a limiter of it; words, for example, only work in relation to other words. The idea of ‘logic’ dominates Western thought and shoehorns us tighter into those expected channels.

Deconstruction – as I understand it – isn’t just about fervently searching for these signs then, when we find them, holding up our hands and thinking ‘oh well, life’s a done deal’ (see Structuralism). Instead, deconstruction says that we have to look, and look really fucking hard, for everything dictating our responses. But another mode of seeing is possible. And once we’ve accepted that we have to go back to the roots of everything to find this new way, then we can deconstruct those signs, those structures.

In short, deconstruction doesn’t destroy, with all the nihilism that implies; instead, it studiously takes apart, analyses, and then carefully, radically (and threateningly) reorders, using the same materials.

This is highly relevant for [post-rock] guitar, but it’s also an underlying theme in numerous other aspects of the [post-rock] sound and aesthetic. What I’m finding as a recurrent topic in my interviews is a fixation on destroying cliché. And it’s waaaaaaay more than just the usual ‘we’re doing things a bit differently’ statement within every musician's interview arsenal. The torturous recording process of many key albums bears testament to this.

 

The first time something is played it is at its finest, and the minute you try to recreate that it becomes an imitation of something that was originally better. But… the problem with a lot of improvisation is that it meanders away from the point too much. So the thing that this time [studio sessions for Laughing Stock lasted for seven months] afforded us was to go in with people that we wanted to play with almost from an attitude point of view, give them absolute freedom in terms of what they play, so that everything they do play is free form, but then to construct an arrangement by taking little sections of that and building that up from there. But that takes a large amount of time because… ninety per cent of what you play will be rubbish. If you’re improvising, if you get 10 per cent which is any good then I think you’re doing really well. I think you’re doing amazingly well if you get half a percent!

                                                                                                            (Mark Hollis, Talk Talk)[1]

There’s plenty of other gold in the deconstruction hills (challenges to authority; listener comprehension; critical interaction) that need a lot more thought on my part, but with a pretty free July, I’ve got time to give it. And although I’m bastardising Derrida’s notions somewhat (or rather ‘deconstructing’ them HAHAHAHA) to help interpret the works I’m considering – I think, after months and months, I’ve found the first definite thread bringing my [post-rock] peeps together.

That it’s a subversive and nebulous one in itself is entirely, entirely fitting.

---

[1] Hollis was interviewed c.1991 by John Pidgeon for a promotional cassette; this quote is via the excellent Quietus piece by Wyndham Wallace http://thequietus.com/articles/06963-talk-talk-laughing-stock

The image at the start of this post is from the installation Six String Sonics by Gil Kuno (2011). In this fully playable sculpture, Kuno reconstituted each of the usual six guitar strings into a separate instrument, effectively making six guitars with one string each, which can be played simultaneously by six musicians. More information, and watch/listen here.

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)