A Sense of Doubt blog post #4123 - Liminal Space and Lazy Calm - The Music of Robin Guthrie - Music Monday for 2606.01
I adore Robin Guthrie.
Here's good links, plus an article I did not share.
https://robinguthrie.bandcamp.com/
Liminal Space and Lazy Calm - the ambient music of Robin Guthrie
I first met Robin Guthrie three years ago. I
was playing guitar with Seattle chanteuse Heather Duby and we were opening up
for his band Violet Indiana. Needless to say, I was very excited, as I had been
a Cocteau Twins fan for quite some time. The mere chance to see Robin play live
was a thrilling prospect, let alone sharing the stage with him. Three weeks
after the gig, I ran into him at the grocery store in Seattle — weird
considering he lives outside of Rennes, France. He was on vacation with his
family and I had a chance to spend some time with him. Later that year I paid
them a visit when I was in France and we have stayed in touch ever since. Robin
was born in Scotland in 1962 and began playing guitar when he was 15, inspired
by the British punk scene of the time. When he was 18, he formed the Cocteau
Twins with Elizabeth Fraser. They remained together until 1997, initially with
bassist Will Heggie, but playing for most of their duration with
bassist/instrumentalist Simon Raymonde. Since then Robin has spent his time
writing instrumental music, playing with Violet Indiana, producing albums and
both owning and running the record label
Bella Union.
The last time we spoke, you
were telling me about your latest project, which involved composing music on a
train ride from Philadelphia to L.A. Fill me in on the details.
I wanted to go to
California because Cocteau Twins had pulled out of Coachella. A whole bunch of
Cocteau Twins fans had spent a lot of money on plane tickets. I didn't feel any
guilt about it whatsoever because it wasn't my decision to pull out of
Coachella. But I did think that I might make some people happy. So I agreed to
play a concert in L.A. the night before when Cocteau Twins would have been
appearing. But I thought, "How am I going to do that?" I didn't want
to do what I usually do — I wanted to make it special. Slowly but surely the
idea came together [to] combine one of the things I like the most — which is
traveling — with some new music. I had a look around on the web, had a look at
the Amtrak system and found out they had powered outlets and thought,
"There we go. It will get me away from family responsibilities, I'll be able
to work a bit and come up with some new shit." I don't know why I hadn't
thought of it before — [to] come up with things out of a constantly evolving,
new landscape.
Did you have your own cabin?
It was little, a
small room with a bed. But it was perfect when you've got a laptop and you are
trying to make music. You just shut the world out for 18 hours.
What software were you
using?
Cubase SX2 — a very,
very minimal installation. I really limited myself on the number of plug-ins,
instruments, and all that. It really trims the fat off of the songwriting
process. I wanted to give myself restrictions. I put in an electric piano, two
synths, an organ and some drum stuff. Nothing like what I've got at home. I
knew I was going to write the guitar parts once I got [to] L.A. I was making
karaoke tracks basically, something to play along with. That's pretty much how
my writing process is most of the time anyway. The guitar is usually not the
first instrument. But it's not always that way.
Are you going to record this
stuff?
Well, my writing and
recording process is so similar these days. Half of it was written already. I
took my laptop home and dumped it into my main system. Then I've got the
guitars to record and most of what I'd written for the show will remain. I'll
tweak it and work it, but it's basically the same. Some of it will be used in
some upcoming shows, some if it will remain instrumental stuff, some of it will
become Violet Indiana songs and some of it will disappear.
Are you going to do
something similar to Lumière — which I saw in Seattle last fall — and
incorporate film and video with these recordings?
No, this is going to
be kind of a follow up to Imperial [an instrumental album released in 2003]. I
could have gone whole hog and done the travelogue movie thing, but this is not
the time for that. I'm really happy doing my visual work without a concrete set
of music with it. I always change the music I play with Lumière, or any other
visual stuff that I do. I don't want to be doing a DVD — I keep it a special sort
of thing. The only time people get to see it is at a concert — it's not
something you can really become familiar with. I see this next record as being
more of an aural sort of thing. That's not to say I won't do something
different in the future. I just need to get some new music out there, that's
the mother of everything I do. The rest are all tangents, really.
I think a lot of people feel
that way.
I spent the last
year really not doing a lot of new pieces of music. I've done a lot of
concerts, I've done that Mysterious Skin soundtrack, which was just me
reworking stuff from a year ago.
Interesting. Let's talk
about your studio, September Sound.
Well, that closed a
long time ago — seven or eight years now. I started the studio at home with a
Revox B77 back in the day while I was still in Scotland. That's what we use for
Cocteau Twins for our concerts. We used to record things straight on it and
then moved on to different 4-track set-ups, and eventually to 16- track when
the first half-inch 16-tracks first came out. I can cut the story short by
saying it became four fucking studios. The key point is, we built a studio and
did Blue Bell Knoll. It was a really punky, sort of grungy little place with
carpet on the walls, but it had a vibe to it. At that point we had an
opportunity to get a room at Pete Townsend's Eel Pie Studios, which was pretty
much closed down at that point, I think. It was just one floor of a building,
just one recording room. It was my private, personal domain. I was also
producing other people and [it] seemed like a good idea to let other people use
it. Slowly but surely it turned into a studio business. It really upset me. It
was like, "If I leave something someplace I expect it be in that spot two
weeks later," but all of a sudden, people were in there fucking up my
patch bay, rewiring things. It [was] no longer personal. Then to make matters
worse, I eventually tried to combat that and took the rest of the building over
and built one, two and eventually three more studios in order to retain a space
for myself. But the overhead was such that we had to rent all of the studios to
pay for the building and the staff. It became so frustrating that I couldn't do
any of my own work. That's why we recorded the last Cocteau Twins album, Milk
and Kisses, in a house in France. We rented a house and took a bunch of
equipment over since I couldn't get into my studio at the time.
What equipment did you take
with you to France when you did Milk and Kisses?
I think it was one
or two ADATs and a little Mackie desk. There was no software sequencing at that
time, it was all hardware and I was using an MPC 60 MKII — that was all the
drums and sequenced stuff like that.
No live drums?
They were all
sequenced. I could play all the beats, but I was never, ever a good enough
drummer in a million years to play on a record. I programmed them like that
because I can visualize sitting behind the drum kit and playing them with my
hands. That's how it developed, anyway. In the mid-eighties it was an infinite
hi hat which could carry on like a three-handed drummer. I wanted to emulate
the sound of a drummer — I didn't want to take the thing into electronica with
eclectic sounds, and live we were using a real drummer. I wanted to retain a
consistent feel.
You talked about how the
studio evolved into a business. Can you tell me what it was like to be an
artist running a business?
I am not an artist
who is capable of running a business. I am totally useless. [laughs] There is
nothing creative about running a recording studio. It's like running a fucking
Starbucks — you are in the service industry. Where's the fucking sanctity
there? Of course, I tried having a record label [Bella Union] and I see that as
the same fucking thing. It's like selling cans of dog food and that's why you've
seen me ditch those things in the last 18 months to 2 years. I said, "Fuck
it. I am going to stay in the part of the business that doesn't really pay you,
but it makes you feel good."
Why did you close September
Sound?
Because it was a
money pit. We were having to run at 85 percent capacity just to pay the staff,
pay the rent, stuff like that. And somewhat simultaneously, you saw the
beginning of the digital recording revolution. That's when Radar, Pro Tools and
things like that started coming out. I had Sound Tools, the precursor to Pro
Tools. It cost me an arm and a leg and I used it on one record. It was a two
track digital editor — I paid about two grand for a 500-megabyte drive.
[laughs] I was an earlier adopter, but I wasn't sharp enough to see how
radically the industry would change.
I really don't think anybody
was.
Right. Now the
barriers between professional and amateur recordings are completely blurred.
It's available to anybody. I see myself much more as an amateur now than I ever
was, and that's a good place to be. I make music in my spare time. You know,
that's the icing on the cake. I've got a life to run, bills to pay, things to
do. So when I get into the studio it's a much better time, really. I've had
periods in my life where I was managed. It was like, "Keep Guthrie in the
studio, get him to finish more tracks. If he needs another fucking kilo of
coke, go get it." Awful.
What were your early Cocteau
Twins recording sessions like?
Garlands was us just
setting up and playing live in the studio. Seven days and that was it. I had a
few arguments with the tech people, but I didn't know what was going on. I
didn't know what a producer was or what a sound engineer was. There were just a
bunch of grown ups in the other room and that was it. [laughs] The biggest
argument was that we used to have a drum machine that we ran through a fuzz
box, through a guitar amp and that's how we used to play live. So the drum
sounds were more like the Beastie Boys — more distorted, hip-hoppy drum sounds.
And they wouldn't let us use it. They were like, oh it's hitting in the red and
I can hear some distortion on it. There were all these technical reasons why
they wouldn't let us use it that way — which is why the drums just sound like
an 808 — which of course is what it was. It was still kind of different because
at the time people weren't really using them for those sort of things.
Over the years did you guys
work with producers or did you just produce yourselves?
The first record was
produced by Ivo. He was the guy in the studio with us because he was the guy
paying for it. He was our sort of mentor at the point — he was like ten years
older than us. He was a grown up. [laughs] The first single we produced
["Peppermint Pig"] was produced by Allen Rankin, who had been in a
Scottish band called The Associates, and for me it's still one of the most
horrible things Cocteau Twins ever recorded. I don't know why it still bothers
me because that was 22 years ago. [laughs] But it still rankles a little bit
because it was so not what that band was about. Anyway, then we went on tour
and Will Heggie left 46 dates into a 50 date tour. It was then that Liz and I
decided we were going to do the records our way. I was completely overwrought
at first in recording studios. There were lights and knobs and everything and I
didn't want to touch anything. But by Head Over Heels, which was our second album,
I produced and engineered the whole thing. I fell in with a guy called Jon
Turner, who owned a recording studio in Scotland. He, in a lot of ways, was a
sort of mentor for me. He actually taught me and encouraged me to touch the
desk and try out the shit I wanted to try. Because of my background in
electronics I understood everything in terms of signal paths and what not. But
I had never touched the desk before. [laughs] I would talk to him when I got
stuck and he would encourage me when I went to try out weird things with
reverbs — and I got to use Linn drums.
What tricks did you develop
over the course of the years?
There's only one,
fucking really. [laughing] That big guitar fucking thing, isn't it? Actually
I'll tell you what that is. As someone who works with a lot of people, if I am
producing or working with a vocalist, it's engineering and recording the
session to get the performance out of the person. I don't like sitting at the
back of the room like a producer, but being hands on to get the performance out
of the person. Because quite often, that person will not be at their best in
that alien environment with their headphones on.
So as a producer you are
more hands on then?
Absolutely, but it's
really just for the vocals. I'm really not interested in engineering the
backing tracks, but I like to be there so I can talk to the band about the
arrangements. I'd rather leave that up to someone who knows what the hell
they're doing. Someone who has been in that particular studio is going to know
a lot more about their mics and their room than I would. But the vocals are the
absolute focus, the most important part. Because they can really suck in the
studio and I have to make sure they don't suck.
I know you produced
Chapterhouse and Lush — a lot of the shoegazing bands. Who else have you worked
with?
I haven't worked
with anyone for ages and the ones I have you probably haven't heard of. I think
the last record I produced was like five years ago — Guy Chadwick. I've done a
lot of collaborative things, remixes, and things like that. But I haven't
produced anything in a while, which tells me quite a lot about my social
skills. [laughs] They don't want to get into a room with me. Once I got settled
over here [France] — it took me about a year — I started to make all these
musical decisions, trim the fat and whatnot.
So is the studio in the
house or in the garage?
It's in the house.
It takes up about two-thirds of the top floor, which was a really big room. I
partitioned it off and now I've got an office, a live room, and a control room.
What's your setup?
I use Cubase running on a 3GHz Pentium 4
and a gig of RAM. It's on a network and I've got about a terabyte of hard disk
space. I've got a MOTU 2408, but it's not my ideal choice because I run two
Yamaha O2Rs slaved together. So the 2408 has 24 channels of ADAT and the whole
thing is linked up digitally. There's not analog in there at all, except for my
sends and returns, so if I want to use some nice compressors and some nice EQs
I can do that. Effects-wise, I still have far too many of them to warrant having
them. There are still a couple of choice pieces that I come back to time and
again: The Urei 1178 and Tube-Tech EQs.
Let's get back to that big guitar sound we talked about earlier.
It seems like a lot of people took that sound and really ran with it. Back in
the early days, how did you get it?
My amp
went to 11, man! [laughs] That sound was not critical to any one thing. I found
with a couple of the right pedals I could go anywhere and sound like me, which
has more to do with limited playing skills and the chords that I make than
anything else. It evolved from my frustration with being a really fucking
mediocre guitar player when I was learning to play. A lot of my friends could
play along with records and I couldn't do that at all. But what I could do was
build the shit together and build little fuzz boxes and wah wahs from diagrams
in magazines. I would build them inside my guitar to make noises and textures.
I was really keen on effects pedals. This was the late '70s, and I would scrape
what money I had together to buy flangers and analog delay pedals. It was a way
of making me sound different than anyone else. Everybody else could play better
than me, but nobody could sound like me. So, wind that forward 25 years —
[laughs].
Robin Guthrie blazed trails as one third of the truly unique Cocteau Twins. Now he blows the doors off our regular feature where all he has to talk about are his influences. Still, what did we expect from a man whose music has always defied description?
SETTINGS
I’ve always recorded a lot of the Cocteau Twins’ music in different places and then gone back to my home base to work on it. It’s so easy to do that now. I recently worked with a band in Peru and then used a thumb drive to bring home the recordings to finish them. Some of ‘Milk And Kisses’ [the Cocteaus’ 1996 album] was recorded sitting by my window with a view of the Atlantic Ocean in Brittany, which is where I live. I once wrote music while crossing the US by rail. I wrote all the music on the train and then performed it when we arrived on the West Coast 10 days later.
I often go off and create my own little mobile studio somewhere for a week or so because I get really inspired by moving about and doing things in different places. I’ve been working with the Australian band Heligoland in a lighthouse in France. I made my ‘Sunflower Stories’ EP sitting in a field full of sunflowers. I try to keep my life interesting and not worry about music or being a pop star. I leave that to the youngsters.
MUSIC
I started listening to music in the 1970s, essentially pop groups like T-Rex and Roxy Music. I was never into rock music like Pink Floyd. I didn’t have long hair or a big stack of Genesis albums. My older brother did and that was probably the reason I hated all that. I was much more into the Phil Spector sound. I liked huge pop records – The Ronettes, The Shangri-Las – and I went through a phase of listening to Motown. I didn’t have the means to reproduce that sound completely because I didn’t have live musicians and orchestras, but I did have effects pedals to make a big sound with where that mixture came from.
Then punk rock and post-punk came along. I had a lot of respect for The Birthday Party in the 1980s. I admired them because they were making beautiful but noisy music. John Peel introduced them to me, by which I mean I first heard them sitting next to a wireless in Scotland. We had none of this internet or download stuff, just the wireless and the weekly music journals, NME and Melody Maker, which used to get to Scotland by the weekend. The Cocteaus didn’t feel particularly attached to those bands scene-wise, they were just the kind of things we were listening to – Nick Cave, Joy Division, edgy stuff like that. I can’t listen to more than about 10 seconds of it now without putting my fingers in my ears.
I tried to use that punk rock and post-punk energy alongside a big wall of sound. It was always going to be very restrictive and at first I didn’t make the records I envisioned. But it was very exciting when we got the opportunity to make a record with the grown-ups in a recording studio. For the first Cocteau Twins sessions, the guys just put the mikes against our amps and recorded it. By the second album, ‘Head Over Heels’ in 1983, I’d learned how to make the sound I wanted in the studio. For me, that was ground zero, although I always thought the record didn’t sound as good it did live.
EVERYTHING… AND NOTHING
Everything I’ve done from being a teenager to now has been a continuous line. I’ve never reinvented myself or followed a new fad. The music I make now seems a little more mature than when I was a teenager because that’s what the experience of life does to you – working, travelling, children – but there is no record, book, film, or particular person that’s been a standout influence on me where I can say, “I did this because they did that”.
Books mean more to me now because I’ve started to make a lot of instrumental music. But at the time of the Cocteau Twins, we weren’t directly taking influences and trying to reproduce them, and we were trying tokeep away from every type of new music. I hated how people would have a style and then change themselves a little bit for the next record, based on what was fashionable. I liked what we did and I figured we could do it our way, so we didn’t need to do that.
We were very much fans of 4AD Records and wanted to be on the label, although we’ve never been fans of all the bands on the roster. We came to London from Grangemouth in Scotland and took our cassette tape to the 4AD office. You cannot believe how young and confident we were. Liz was 17 and I was 19. Our contemporaries at 4AD were five or six years older than us and we saw them as grown-ups. It’s because you haven’t experienced failure. We were young and driven and very naive. How lucky we were that, just by chance, they listened to that tape and thought, “Wow, this is good”. I think I’d put the number of the telephone box down the road from my house on the tape.
The Cocteau Twins often get compared to bands from the shoegazing movement, but we were never part of that. I was really pushing the electronic idea, which was limited at the time. A lot of electronic processing didn’t exist back then, so it was literally, “What happens if we plug this thing into that thing?”. I was using equipment that wasn’t designed for what I was doing. I was using guitars as the input as opposed to using keyboards. And I wasn’t just happy to put my guitar through one effects pedal, I’d put it through loads of effects pedals. But I had this idea and I wanted to take it further and further. I very much grew up listening to records and getting ideas.In my diary entries, it’s clear this is how I wanted to see myself, sketching out how something was done on the fly, most of it in public view, not going away and hiding. I was learning on the job.
WORKING IN FILM
I’ve been doing music for films for a few years, which I like because then I become part of a story-telling team, making music that is functional as opposed to completely self-indulgent. I still feel like an outsider looking in, though. If I go to the Cannes Film Festival, then I just go home to Brittany. I don’t belong in that world at all, but that’s usually where and when I get to see the finished film. I like all sorts of movies, but I tend to get asked to work more with indie film-makers because my music is not so mainstream. My favourite soundtrack is one I made for a Spanish film with a Mexican director called ‘3:19’.
Reissues of the Cocteau Twins’ ‘The Pink Opaque’ album and ‘Tiny Dynamine’/‘Echoes In A Shallow Bay’ EPs are out on 4AD
Three Questions With Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins
The amazing musician,
songwriter, composer, producer, and engineer Robin Guthrie of Cocteau
Twins answers Three Qs.
As co-founder of Cocteau Twins—one of the most influential and revered acts in alternative music history—Robin helped pioneer the 1980s alternative subgenre of dream pop and helped define what would become shoegaze.
Their 1986 album with Harold Budd, The Moon and the Melodies, has been recently reissued on vinyl for the first time in almost forty years–remastered, from the original tapes, by Robin Guthrie himself. Pick up a copy here.
As part of Issue Four.
Without further ado...
Synth History: Can you recount one of your favorite memories from performing live or recording in the studio?
Robin: For me, there is a critical moment towards the end of mixing a song, when I enter a state not unlike one that I’ve witnessed my dog doing when she sees a deer or a rabbit or something. It’s like a sharpening of the senses, a clarity, the shutting out of the distractions around me and a focus—a focus, it should be noted, that I seem completely incapable of while trying to remember where I left my car keys. It seems like at that moment I’m inside the music, I am inside the sound and I’m aware of my mix being objectively correct. The discipline involved to finish at that point comes with experience. It’s all too easy to do ‘just one more adjustment’, at which point the delicate equilibrium thus far created, fades like a mirage and the moment gets lost. You see, inside the mix any change will have its influence and something else will soon appear ‘wrong’.
And so it goes. I’ve never been a ‘that’ll do’ person. These are my favourite memories of recording, indeed, the very reason I continue to make music. It’s about the journey having equal importance as the destination. I guess it’s always been an area of my life that I have allowed my inner control freak to dominate and all I can say is, thank goodness .
Synth History: What is one album you think everyone should listen to at least once in their lifetime, apart from your own, and why?
Robin: I am the least qualified to pick other people’s music as if I am some arbiter of taste,
knowledgeable or even interested in such matters, so it’s a difficult question for me to answer
definitively.
However, The Köln Concert—the live recording made in 1975 by Keith Jarrett—is this morning’s choice and, as it happens, the reasons for choosing this illustrate the irony of my answer to the previous question. My moments, described above, happen in a studio where I take the time to mould everything that I have at my fingertips; sounds, performances, inspiration—toward an end that I feel worthy of immortalizing in my mix. The moments that Mr. Jarrett appears to be having during The Köln Concert are, well, all the above but happening in real time.
I mean that’s just so fucking awesome to me. How can someone even do that? The idea that all these years spent learning an instrument, mastering performance and improvisation techniques—classes that I clearly missed—could pay off in such a startling way and make such a profound connection with the audience is all rather brilliant. And he can do this night after night. It is just simply so very, very different to my understanding or experience of creativity. It’s vibrant and imperfect in so many ways, ways which would normally induce a panic attack in me were it my own creation, and that’s why I chose it today. Also, and as I suspect Mr. Jarrett may have been aware, another benefit of learning to play the piano—and this counts for singing as well—is that you are seldom troubled with having to fanny around on your knees all evening trying to get your effects pedals to work nor with having to carry amplifiers, drumkits and the like.
Synth History: What is one tip for approaching a new instrument?
Robin: I would generally try not to get too hung up about what the instrument is meant to sound like or the context or genre it was designed for. I think of unfamiliar instruments as input devices, albeit ones that I am unaccustomed to, which can often lead to originality although in a rather unpredictable way. However, for most things technical I’d say, RTFM. Even if you don’t understand what the technology is capable of, there are often little nuggets of information hidden away in the manual which may come in useful later. I like manuals, always have.
Synth History Exclusive.
Interview Conducted by Danz.
Ex-Cocteaus man Robin Guthrie gives the scoop on his unique approach to music, and how these days he’s just as likely to make an album in the back of a camper van
Renowned guitar-scape architect Robin Guthrie is best-known as a founding member of pioneering ethereal pop act Cocteau Twins. However, since the trio disbanded in 1997, he’s continued to produce music at a prolific rate. With a canon that includes multiple collaborations with minimalist composer Harold Budd, a few soundtracks, plus stints in the production chair for folks as diverse as Lush, Heligoland, and Jay-Jay Johanson, Guthrie has largely focused on an ongoing series of releases under his own name. The latest of which is titled Astoria.
Having worked with the major labels Universal and Capitol Records, as well as indies such as 4AD, Darla and Rocket Girl, Guthrie founded Soleil Après Minuitin 2005 to manage his own catalogue. Along the way, he’s started using Bandcamp as a direct connection to his fanbase.
“As an artist, it’s nice to have so much control over what I release,” he says. “I could have an idea on Thursday morning and it could end up in the store on Friday.”
An avid photographer, Guthrie also designs all the artwork, stating that “I really enjoy creating these series of interconnected things.”
On the surface, Guthrie’s music may seem unchanged from his days with Cocteau Twins, but he has a more nuanced view.
“My music does evolve, but just very slowly,” he says. “I don’t really try to force evolution – that’s what experiences in life are for. I interpret what I feel, but often using very different techniques.
“I studied and worked with computers in the late-70s and early-80s. I’ve always been a bit nerdy and had computers around, it just took me a while to integrate a good ‘computer-only’ music production workflow due to the limitations of the hardware of the time. The technology, whether old or new, doesn’t seem to make more of an impact than time itself.”
Guthrie’s process has shifted in much the same way.
“Technology has made it almost effortless to achieve sounds, the making of which used to be fairly complex,” he continues. “Now anyone can emulate sounds from any part of my past with plugins on a computer. On my own computer I’ve even created a ‘September Sound’, the Cocteau’s old studio. I collected all the equipment that I used back then and put virtual versions together. That’s not really for work though, it’s just showing off what can be done.
“The early computer sequencers were MIDI only, but hardware sequencers had been around for a while, like the Roland MSQ-700 which I used on ‘Treasure’. I then settled upon an EMU SP1200, and then the Akai MPC60, which combined sequencing with a sampler. This, though, lacked streaming audio, so I continued to use analogue tape. On ‘Heaven Or Las Vegas’, which was around ’89, I got a digital editor, but it was strictly 2-track, Digidesign’s SoundTools – the grandfather of ProTools – running on an Atari ST4 with 4MB of RAM… yay.”
“I’ve been one of the most privileged people in the world with technology, because I was able to ride a wave that started in analogue, all the way to us now making music on our cell phones. I really got to a place where I’d learned a huge amount about analogue recording, mixing desks and editing tape. Early on, when I was in a proper grown-up studio, like the BBC, I used to watch and absorb what everybody was doing. I had these big, thick textbooks of recording techniques from the 50s and 60s.”
Toward the end of the Cocteau Twins, in the mid-to-late 90s, technology was moving at a crazy clip and Guthrie’s enthusiasm attempted to keep up with it. As he divulges, that had its own repercussions.
“I had a stupid amount of equipment,” he admits. “I haven’t kept a lot, but I’ve kept enough to be encouraged by my family to get rid of some of it so that we can have some space for furniture in the house. I do go back to old equipment. I pull things out cyclically, use them for a few months, and then get something else out. I’ll think, ‘Ah analogue chorus. I’ve got a couple of them, that’ll be fun.’”
But Guthrie’s primary inspiration for music comes from his surroundings, scenery, and literature.
“‘Atlas’was obviously a travel thing,” he says. “I travel a lot. When I turned 60, I promised myself that I was going to travel more, however music is all-encompassing, and I never travel without a laptop.
“Many of my records have been travelogues. I made an EP called ‘Sunflower Stories’a few years ago in the back of a camper van in the middle of a sunflower field in Vendée [Western France]. Four days just sitting there recording. ‘Continental’was a transcontinental trip across the US by train, back in 2005. I wrote that album watching Texas going past really slowly. I avidly scribble down noteworthy things that I encounter, because my other pleasure is reading.”
William Least Moon’s ‘Blue Highways’ was the book behind the title of the Cocteau’s album ‘Four Calendar Cafe’,and the whole of Guthrie’s ‘Carousel’was based on a single tome.
“Yeah, I do find words and phrases worth stealing – I mean, inspiring…”
Guthrie’s worked on a variety of film scores, most notably with close-friend Harold Budd on movies by Gregg Araki, such as 2004’s Joseph Gordon-Levit starring ‘Mysterious Skin’. Since then, Guthrie has also soundtracked several shorts.
“I really love the process of putting music in a movie, because that’s where I get to take my skill set and use it within different parameters,” he explains. “I really like doing commercials – I’ve hardly done any – but I love the challenge of trying to make my thing work in 29 seconds.”
While currently working around remastering his own and Cocteau Twins reissues, Guthrie still manages to regularly release new music. ‘Atlas’hit Bandcamp in July, followed closely by the single ‘Mountain’.
With an album due in 2025, the current release ‘Astoria’is a “sort of conclusion” to ‘Atlas’.
“The two EPs were made at the same time, telling different sides of a particular journey,” says Guthrie. “The intro, the downtempo bit is ‘Atlas’. The second is a little more explosive.”
‘Astoria’ is out now via Bandcamp
Interview with Robin Guthrie
- By
Pat Mannion and Brant Nelson
- Dewdrops
Fanzine
- 1994
We got a chance to
talk with Robin Guthrie (of the Cocteau Twins) before their show on the
Claremont College campus last April. Robin has decided to turn over a new leaf
and begin dispelling that air of mystery that has surrounded him and the band
these last few years, specifically regarding his battle with drug use. A very
happy and confident Robin Guthrie sat down in the bleachers behind the nearby
college baseball field, ate some of our homemade cheese bread, and told us what
really happened…
“I tackled my drug
problem head on. I was really sick, you know. Not long for this fuckin’ planet,
really. I’ve come back a bit. and that’s basically what’s been making me
change. I’m changing as a person, becoming a lot more open-minded to try
things. I’m not locked into paranoia and fear. I’m not worrying so much about
new drugs and being locked into this fear that doesn’t let me try new things.
“Like drummers for
instance, that’s a definite example. I hadn’t worked with a drummer for years
because I decided not to years ago. It’s just like I got locked into that idea:
‘We’ll never have one, we don’t need one. dammit!’ I used to just really
convince myself that it was better without one. But, it added something to our
live show, just the fact that it was different. A lot of things were different
without really trying. It’s just, that’s the way it was. But anyway, we met up
with the drummer after I got clean and we tried it and it was all right. I
never would have even considered it if I was still using drugs. That would have
been a lack of control. I like it now. It’s not a true live band as we’re still
playing with tracks and stuff like that.
“I haven’t started
fucking with the sound yet. I might decide that the Cocteau Twins need a
change. Actually, it’s going to change—I can tell you it’s going to change
radically. I don’t know how ‘cause I haven’t thought about it yet, but I feel
open minded. I don’t know what I want to try. Getting clean after using drugs
since I was about 13 or 14 has changed my life. It’s changed my perception. I
don’t know what I want in my life. I mean, me and Liz don’t live together any
more—since about nine months ago. I didn’t want that. I couldn’t actually get a
life together for myself living with Liz, because we’d been together for 12 years.
You know what I mean? Everything was like us. There was no Robin, it was like
us, our friends, what should we do tonight. So things like me going out with
the guys—that didn’t ever happen.
“So there have been
a lot of big changes. I’m really like a teenager who’s experiencing a lot of
things that people experience in their late teens—emotional development. And I
love it! It’s quite exciting. I really don’t know what I want. I don’t know who
I’ve been really, but I don’t know how to be anything else. I enjoy making
music but I don’t enjoy making music that???, but I’ve come to accept all the
trappings that go along with that like having a car and a home. I kind of got
stuck in those ideals. And there have been wild changes, I tell you! I signed
to an independent label and fucking hell, it turned into a major label! I just
thought it would be cool to make our records the way we wanted to, not worrying
about the marketing, not worrying about selling, not worrying about taking
signals and giving people fucking jigsaws with the records and things like
that! Everybody else thinks otherwise, and I’m left the only one thinking it’s
a shitty thing to do. But the rest of the band likes it for their own reasons,
so I’m happy to go along with them. But I still don’t like it! It goes against
a lot of my own personal values. I’m the one who goes “no” all the time, and
the two of them tell me I ought to do things. Like this ‘Tonight Show’ thing
we’re going to do. What?! Why in fuck are we doing that?! I don’t want to do it.
It’s really embarrassing, but everybody really wants to do it. It’s more than
just me. I’m not in control in the same way I have been in the past.”
Who came up with
the idea to do the Tonight Show?
Probably some
promotions person somewhere. Some sort of moron, you know what I mean? The idea
in the music business is to fit every square peg into every round hole they can
find. To be honest, it was getting to be like that at 4AD as well. As the level
of sales and success goes up the pressure to play the game comes up as well.
The reason we went in and found a label in the first place was because early on
we were repulsed by that side of the music business.
You’ve had a lot of
experience over the years producing other bands.
“Not since I’ve
been clean. It was something I used to get drugs. There were quite a few things
I did I did to feed my drug habit. Most of the bands I’ve worked with have
turned out good; and two or three bands that I’ve worked with, that you
probably haven’t heard of, stuff never came out of it. And towards the end of
my using I did a couple of jobs just for cocaine. Really, I gave no value
system. It got me off of the idea of working with other people. I really am
ashamed of myself, thinking that they had nothing to offer. I think I could be
a good producer. I think I am, at times, a good producer. But there were quite
a few when I just fucked things up.
“As soon as you get
out of your band and move into production, you’re taken very seriously. I get
paid half the rate that a “real” producer would get paid. Today I value myself
more and I’m not going to let stuff like that happen to me anymore. I’ve got
more self-respect.” Are there any bands you’d like to produce?
“I’m definitely
going to produce some people before doing another Cocteau Twins thing. I really
want to clear my head from this tour, which has gotten to be tedious. I would
always keep that face up, like ‘Yeah, the tour’s going great. I really enjoy
it.’ I could never be honest and tell people what was really going on, that I
was not really enjoying it. I mean I could now; the show we just did in San
Francisco about a week ago was really a fucking unpleasant gig! I suppose it
was all right for the fans, especially if it’s the only show they’ve seen. But
on a personal level it’s… I don’t know, I just want it to be fuckin’ better.”
Are you getting
sick of the songs?
“I like our songs.
But, I mean, I’m sick of some of the new ones, as well as some of the old ones.
The songs that were chosen were okay, but it would be nice to have a week off,
time to learn five or six new songs, and teach them to the band. That would
nice. That would be a luxury. We haven’t got the time, so that’s that. Every
day off costs us X-thousand dollars, and we’re losing money on this tour! I’m
paying for it, ultimately, from my royalties.
“I mean, I don’t
work for wages, but I do just as much work as everybody else. And I still go
home when the tour’s over and there are bills to pay, rent and taxes. But the
truth is I don’t have those 3-4 months’ wages like everybody else with a
regular job has.
“If we just did a
European tour, we’d save so much money and time and we wouldn’t have to go
through so much heartache. But we’d let down a lot of people who want to come
and see us in the U.S. Is that fair to them? I think I might be becoming a bit
reasonable in my old age, ‘cause I used to think ‘Fuck the fans—this is what I
want!’ You know? It’s only fair to the people that if we’ve advertised the show
and they’ve bought tickets, that we should do the show. So am I being true to
my music? Or what am I being true to? I don’t know. I’m trying to do the right
thing. I always tried to do my thing—not the right thing.”
Are you doing any
shows in Australia?
“No, we can’t
afford it. To do seven shows in Australia we’d lose about $45,000. That’s too
much to lose, but we’re losing far more than that in the United States!”
How old is your
daughter Lucy, and what’s the silliest thing she’s ever done?
“Lucy’s four.
Absolutely fucking gorgeous. [He shows us her picture. He’s right.] You should
have seen her after Chicago, she got all her hair cut off. What’s the silliest
thing? She came on stage with us at the sound check and just took the mic and
sung a whole song with the band playing. Don’t know what song it was, but it
was in tune. She was just “la-la-la-ing.”
Is it difficult
having kids on the tour?
“I think it’s
fantastic. Liz just sent her home. I miss her. I really miss her because it
gives me a distraction and it means I’m not constantly worrying about fucking
music performances!”
And how is it with
Liz?
“It’s fantastic. I
like it. On a good day me and Liz are really good friends. On a good day…”
Do you still call
Mitsuo the “fat Japanese fuck”?
“No, he’s the
‘fucking Jap’ at the moment. ‘Where’s the fucking Jap?’ Mitsuo’s a gorgeous
human being, but I just don’t understand it. He’s the enigma of the band. He
speaks less English now than when I first met him, but he understands ten times
more! He’s fantastic. That name calling is the sort of thing I used to really
say and think it was funny when I was using drugs. I put people down and that
made me really good. I just don’t live my life that way any more.”
You’ve obviously
lost a lot of weight.
“I’ve lost 56
pounds since November. I’ve been fat all my life. My whole family is obese and
it’s cursed me a bit. I have about another 30 to go and I’m finding that really
difficult to do. But it makes me happy. Things like that in life can really
hold you back. If you’re really hung up about being fat or being bald or
something physical that makes someone not accept you as they should as a
wonderful human being, with the pressure from society saying you should be thin
or have hair. I’ve felt it more since I stopped taking drugs. I mean I wash
now! I take care of myself.”
We’ve heard rumors,
but where did the name “Cocteau Twins” come from?
“The Simple Minds,
just before their first album, had a song called “The Cocteau Twins.” The name
sort of stuck. Me and Will Heggie had sort of quit music for a while. Then we
bought this drum machine and effects pedals and stuff like that to try
something different. The name practically had no meaning to us at that time. I
had a rough idea who Jean Cocteau was, but I was young! Apparently the song was
written about these two gay guys who were into Jean Cocteau. Actually
somewhere, I don’t know if I’ve still got it, but I had a live tape of the
song. The tune of the song turned up on their first album and it was called “No
Cure.” It had completely different words. This “Guthrie garbage” try no to do
too much of that!” [Robin is referring to our answer to a letter in Dewdrops
#10 where we referred to this same story as “Guthrie garbage” because we were
sure that he’d made it up. Now we know it’s the truth! - ed]
Do you get a lot of
fan mail?
“Nah, we don’t. Not
like on TV where you see these mail bags full of fan mail. We get a few letters
a week. I must be honest. I answered fan mail for years, then I stopped. If I
read a letter, I really appreciate the sentiment usually. I don’t understand
the person who’s writing it—to start to tell what the motivation is, not trust
the fact that they’re just a genuine fan and really like it—cause I’ve never
ever sent somebody a fan letter myself! I quite don’t understand that. That’s
really quite sad. I’m trying not to turn my back. I miss talking to people who
are really into us, people like yourselves.
“I’ve got about
20-odd people on my fan list and I’ve been sending them postcards. I’m just
kind of getting back in touch with people. People who are into you. It’s not
like reality. It’s like the movie “Spinal Tap.” It really is fuckin’ like that.
Come in to our dressing room and I’ll show you the pieces of fuckin’
bread—they’re that size! And the pieces of cheese are that size! I swear to god!
Every single thing in that movie—in one way or another—has happened to us.
“The funny thing is
that in real life, touring can become a big issue. Something as trivial as
that. It used to be when I was drinking, if the wrong kind of beer or champagne
or whatever came around you’d freak out and fuckin’ send them out to change it.
‘It’s the wrong year, you fuckin’… ’ Because it would be such an important
thing. You’re not connected to the real world at all, in any way, whatsoever.
Everything in that movie is true. [Robin quotes from the movie…] ‘Does the fact
that you’re only playing to this size of audience—and a few years ago you
played to bigger ones—does that mean you’re losing popularity? … No, no, we’re
playing to a much more selective market!’ I heard someone say that to me!
Actually it’s because our record stiffed! That’s the reality. For the first
time ever we’ve got a record that hasn’t sold more than the one before it. That
freaks me out. I probably thought I was invincible. I’d taken our success for
granted, probably, over the years. And it doesn’t make me feel good. It makes
me feel kind of worthless and unwanted, because I get an awful lot of my
self-worth from my music. People put my music down, and I take it personally. I
think that they’ve put me down as a person. My rational self knows that’s not
the case, that I’m an all right person. But it’s very easy if someone goes,
‘Hey you suck, man!’ just to go [shriveled up, dying noise].
“So our record
hasn’t sold. I can piece together a lot of contributing factors to it. I think
we’ve alienated our fan base on this one, or maybe the record company has.
We’ve not serviced the people that do us real well in the first place. I think
that’s got a lot to do with it. Getting new fans has been at the expense of
losing our old ones. A lot of people weren’t even aware there was a new album
out. People that had been following us. Because they move in the circles of
independent record stores, coffee shops. They’re not necessarily the people
that buy mainstream things and we’re not even getting into mainstream things.
We’re fuckin’ nowhere at the moment. We’re not hitting your normal stores and
we’re also not hitting that sort of subculture type stuff. Where are we
hitting? Nowhere. That’s a major record company. Our record company is in
pieces at the moment. We’ve done three records at Capitol and we’ve had three
different presidents and three different fuckin’ sets of staff! We’ve just got
a new president taking over who doesn’t really know what’s going on, but I met
him the other night and I think we could do business with him, He’s willing to
listen to any input we’ve got. Let’s face it I do know a bit about what’s
fuckin’ made our music successful over the years. By not doing a lot of crass
things! People have a bit of respect for that. I really believe that. And not
being seen to just sell ourselves in a very cheap way. I think people tune into
that and respect that because they wouldn’t do it themselves.”
We actually get a
lot of fan mail addressed to you through Capitol.
“I’ll tell you
what, you can keep all the ones with poetry! I don’t understand that. I think
it’s really nice that someone’s taken all this time out. They love my music so
much that they’ve taken a part of their life, put it in an envelope and sent it
to me. I don’t know what to do with it! It makes me feel really worthless, like
I should be doing something with it, but I just don’t know what to do with it.
I don’t do this. I’m thinking about responsibility. It’s probably not really my
responsibility. But it does half-make me feel shitty sometimes.”
Have you considered
starting an official fan club?
“I’d like to have
official everything, but I don’t know how to do it. I haven’t even got anybody
to run my studio! We don’t come into contact with people. Because I don’t know
anybody that could do the job. I’ve never come into contact with anybody who
said ‘Hey I’ll run your fan club for you,’ so we don’t have one. Everything
that we’ve got and everything we haven’t got is just purely by chance. We bump
into people by chance. We don’t go out looking for things. We’ve never been
that organised. I mean I’d love to be that organised. Our management is, god
bless them, they look after us, but they’re obsessed with selling. That’s their
job: to sustain us with income so we can carry on what we’re doing. I’d like to
have someone work for me, but I just don’t come into contact with people. I
mean it’s taken us 13 years to get a drummer!”
You actually have
two drummers, right?
“A drummer and a
percussionist. The percussionist used to play with Cabaret Voltaire. Mel is a
close friend and Cabaret Voltaire doesn’t exist any more because Mel’s moved to
Australia. The drummer actually toured with us in Europe in another band called
Frazier Chorus. When I was clean for about three months I found out he was
actually in “the program” for about eight years ‘cause he was a junkie as well.
We met at a meeting and we just got talking. He told me all the horror stories
of what I’d been like that on tour. It’s just like that. No great master plan.
Nothing like that.
“The record company
wants a plan from the management saying what were going to be doing in eighteen
months time or three years time, and I don’t know what I want. Maybe in three
months time I’ll decide I want to crack the rock-n-roll business! I’m sure I’ll
find something, eventually. I hope I enjoy it, you know, because it’s really
about enjoying yourself. I have such a privileged fuckin’ job. I can get paid—a
little bit—to do something I really love doing. In a lot of ways I may have to
make a decision to part with that just to keep my sanity, ‘cause I don’t want
to turn into a bad product of the music business. Sort of a spent out person
realizing what he should have been in the first place and now feels terribly
bad about it, cause he didn’t. It’s a difficult thing, though. I’ve got
commitments. I’ve got a studio and record contracts. I’ve got a lot of people
working for me. If I decided to back out it would directly affect a lot of
other people’s livelihood. That and I don’t know how to live my lifestyle any
other way. I don’t have any money put away, anything like that. No savings
whatsoever. I live pretty much hand-to-mouth. The money I take out of business
pays for my life the way that I live it, which is not really extravagant.” ▣
https://post-punk.com/an-interview-with-robin-guthrie-of-the-cocteau-twins/
In 2014 we interviewed Cocteau Twins’ Founder/Maestro/Guitarist Robin Guthrie. Robin was a pleasure to talk to, and we discussed 4AD and their recent reissue campaigns, plus Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil. We also spoke about his scoring work with Gregg Araki, such as the upcoming film “White Bird in a Blizzard”, starring Shailene Woodley, and Eva Green, which should be available to watch online this Wednesday, the 25th.
During the interview, we also discussed Robin releasing another record with Harold Budd, and an LP Mark Gardener of Ride.
PP: So there are these recent vinyl reissues of Blue Bell Knoll and Heaven or Las Vegas, and people focus a lot on the Cocteau Twins but I’ve noticed that you’re always busy, there’s always a new project, always producing something, collaborating with someone, etc. For example, I really enjoyed what you did with Mark Gardener recently.
RG: Oh you’ve got a treat coming because I’ve done a whole album with him, that’s going to come. It’s all finished and everything, I’ve just got the artwork to do and also I need to find somebody to put it out, really. We haven’t had much good feedback from record labels and things…Ultimately I’ll probably just put it out myself but Mark’s manager thought that this should be a, you know, a record that could get cart entry if it were put out on a label, so we tried. But regardless of that, I mean, you’re going to like it because you’ve really probably only heard one track that Mark and I have done and that was about four years ago, five years ago now.
RG: Yeah. So this is a whole album full of that I think is a little bit better because “The Places We Go,” that was really just the first thing we tried together – we just had a weekend together and tried it. And since then we’ve done some touring and playing together and stuff like that and we kind of really got into our groove a little bit. You know the first tentative thing when you first meet somebody – it gives you an idea of how good something can be but it doesn’t quite get you there? This album is going to get you there. It’s really good.
PP: So we’re going from the foreplay straight into it, ok.
RG: Exactly, exactly.
PP: I mean, this one has got me really excited; this one seems to be the most cohesive, it goes together better than…you know you did something with John Foxx a while ago and I actually followed Violet Indiana.
RG: So you’re the guy, are you?
PP: I actually talked to you through an email a long time ago, I think, about Violet Indiana.
RG: You know, Violet Indiana has never really broken up, we’ve just ceased to be in the same country and it became increasingly difficult to do anything: our guitar player went to Japan, I moved to France, and Siobhan stayed in England, so…We do keep in touch, so never say never – we might do something again. I’ve got a Violet Indiana folder on my computer with lots of little things that I’ve done that have been put to one side and I’ve gone, “I’ll get Siobhan on that one day.” So…
PP: I would look forward to hearing more. I think it was released not at the most opportune time, I mean that period…I think it would do better now but I mean that’s just my opinion. I’m a big fan, so I’m a little bit biased.
RG: People can still buy old records, you know?
PP: Yeah well…that’s true. Imagine that! Records!
RG: Yeah, eh? Sorry, I’m using outdated terms now, I’m old.
PP: All right, now I’m going to talk about some Cocteau Twins stuff but I promise I won’t be annoying and say, “Oh, Treasure was their greatest album ever.”
RG: That wouldn’t be it. But I’m starting to get used to it now.
PP: I mean it is the 30th anniversary this year of that record, in the fall.
RG: Yeah, it must be, yeah.
PP: Definitely a great record but I wanted actually to talk about a lot of your work in like ’85/’86 because I listened to your scoring work and the stuff you’re doing with Harold Budd and it’s just like it seems like in a period you found your niche, like ’85/’86 you found this…It seems like you found this sound that you’ve stuck with through your career as like your trademark sound.
RG: Well yes and no. I think earlier in my career, in the early 80s, it’s basically that Head over Heels is the watershed record between me sitting at the mixing desk and engineering and making my own record. Prior to that, there were other people in the studio because we were just kids and we didn’t know what a studio was, you know, and we were taking a lot of guidance; other people were engineering and producing it effectively, even though we didn’t know what producing was. Come Head over Heels time, that’s when I start to get my hands dirty with it and, er, and it all goes forward there. So that’s actually before what you were saying.
PP: I agree with you and I see what you mean there. But what I mean is there’s something that started coming out, I think, around 85, like Love’s Easy Tears, The Moon and the Melodies, and Victorialand and things like that…I mean it seems like you were scoring things already with those records.
RG: Yeah…Well you know only in my life post-Cocteau Twins have I ever written any songs with anybody. You know, Violet Indiana was very much about me and Siobhan being in the same room and me strumming a guitar and her singing and us making up songs. But prior to that all I did was make instrumental music and then hand it to Liz and say, “Have a go with this.” You know? “See what you can do with that.” So we didn’t actually write songs together. Do you know what I mean?
PP: Yeah. Well that makes sense.
RG: The vocals are distinct; they’re put on top of the music.
PP: That’s why I think you could take Liz away from the Cocteau Twins and the songs would still stand on their own. Of course with her soprano it’s great, amazing, and absolutely beautiful. I was thinking about that period and one of my favorite tracks is off Tiny Dynamine and that’s “Ribbed and Veined”.
RG: Mm-hmm.
PP: It blows me away every time I listen to it. it’s perfect. And I feel in that period you had this really defined sound, that it was even a step further from “Head over Heels” and some of your music sounds like a cross between the lap steel guitar and the steel drum. I don’t know if you know what I mean by that.
RG: I think I do but I don’t try to analyze it. You see it’s never my job to describe in words what I do. It’s kind of your job. So I have the luxury of just doing it without having to really explain it, if you know what I mean? I don’t really think of it in terms of the way that you’ve just described it and of course, it’s so subjective – you describe it like that but somebody else describes it another way. I just do my thing, you know?
PP: Well that’s probably why nobody else sounds like you,
RG: I’ll come into the room and I’ll see this TV commercial and I’ll go, “Fuck! That’s, what? What? That’s my-! Huh?” And it’s not, of course, it’s not. And what’s happened is – we’ve looked into this a couple of times because my publisher’s been really, you know, arsey about people stealing intellectual property – we looked into it and it turns out that when the TV commercials get made they use Cocteau Twins music or my music or my guitar or whatever, they use it as temporary music while they’re making the advert. And then they can’t afford to license it so they get somebody else in just to copy the style and do a sort of pastiche of it. And this has happened quite a lot and actually my publisher’s taken a few of them to court over that, you know, which is…I don’t know. I don’t police those things, I just find it quite interesting. As far as I’m concerned you can’t copyright your “thing,” can you? You know, you can copyright a song or whatever but my “thing,” the way that I do it, well, it’s just the way that I do it.
PP: I heard that David Lynch tried to get the rights for Blue Velvet to use This Mortal Coil’s “Song to the Siren”?
RG: Yes, there’s actually more to it than that – he actually asked me and Liz to be in the film. We were going to be standing on stage in the background performing it, so that makes the story even better. But it all got blown up because Ivo at 4AD, I guess he was in control of the This Mortal Coil project and he just asked for way too much money. And I’m, you know, I regret that because that would have been really cool to be in a David Lynch film, wouldn’t it! You know, that would have been quite a thing to tell your grandchildren.
PP: Maybe instead of Julee Cruise you could have been in Twin Peaks, you could have been the band in the Road House?
PP: Something I personally wanted to ask you about because – this is not directly related to you – but I’m a big Lowlife fan and I believe you had something to do with the formation of that band and I think I read somewhere that you convinced Will to join? Back in the day?
RG: No…no, not at all! But it’s curious that you want to talk about that because I saw him last week! I was in Scotland and we hung out for a few days, it was cool. Doing that old guys’ thing, talking about old times and getting pissed, you know?
The guys that were in Lowlife, they were in another band before Lowlife started…
PP: Dead Neighbours?
RG: I think I helped them with some recording or something but I think that was just, you know, because I was there. Because Dead Neighbours were a kind of psychobilly band and it wasn’t really my area of expertise. But they were friends from town so, you know. Small town.
PP: Grangemouth. I just wanted to mention them in this interview because Craig, the singer, passed away a few years back…
RG: He did, yeah.
PP: …and it’s just a shame because Lowlife was one of the bands I wanted to see live but I knew it was never going to happen.
RG: No, I’m not sure I ever saw them live to be honest. I can’t remember.
PP: I think they were one of those bands that seemed like they weren’t interested in fame, they were just interested in playing good music. The music is really good.
RG: Yeah, I…you know, Craig’s missed and we were getting quite emotional talking about it last week, me and Bill, so…what’re you going to do?.
PP: So I’ve been talking to Scott Heim lately and, you know, he does that “The First Time I Heard” series and of course, you scored Mysterious Skin and that was a great movie.
RG: I’ve just done a new movie with Gregg, it’s coming out in September and I’ve done the soundtrack album for it, which is coming out in September as well.
PP: White Bird in a Blizzard. So, how did you start working with Gregg? How did that come to be?
RG: Just got a call. He was using Cocteau Twins tunes in his films-
PP: And quoting lyrics in the scripts too.
RG: Oh yeah?
PP: Quite a few times. There’s a few here and there from the Cocteau Twins, yeah. And some from Chapterhouse and from Slowdive, actually quoted in the scripts, names of the songs, etc.
RG: Oh right. Yeah well, the new one, I’m really happy with the music that I’ve done but I think Gregg’s sort of using his movies as a sort of showcase to play his favorite records, right. So when you score one of Gregg’s movies, what you’re doing is you’re actually scoring the bits of the movie where he’s not featured one of his favorite sort of shoegaze songs, you know, and that can be a little bit irritating because it’s more incidental than scoring, which upsets me a bit but…I know what his priorities are, you know. But this seems to be nice. The scenes that I did – I’ve put in about 15 pieces of music or whatever – it seems a bit more mature, the film? More…less like Kaboom, which was a bit of a head fuck.
PP: Yeah, I didn’t know what to make of that movie, actually.
RG: It was really…I think I was about 40 years too old to watch it.
PP: It was like he had this serious movie about molestation, then you go into this kind of surreal film closer to Doom Generation and Nowhere.
RG: Yeah. Well this one has a nice air about it. I mean it seems quite mysterious and it seems quite dark but it also seems a little bit more mature…
PP: It’s got Eva Green in it.
RG: Yeah, she’s in it and so’s Shailene Woodley as well, which is kinda cool.
PP: You know what’s the oddest thing that I think is on your discography – and it’s not a combination I would have expected The Gun Club?
RG: Ah! Well yeah! I sort of produce them and Jeffrey looked me up and found me and was a big fan of what I was doing and it turned out that we actually lived a few miles from each other, we became good mates and saw a lot of each other during that time we did that record.
But the music that I was listening to in the 1970s, before punk came along, was, you know, kind of like- the early ’70s because I was about 10 or 11, so I was into, like, the pop music, you know, of the day, you know, David Bowie and T. Rex and Roxy Music. And then in the mid-70s when everybody was getting really long hair I got into these, sort of…I guess you would call them garage bands? You know, bands like Dr. Feelgood and The Count Bishops and people like that? You know, like playing kind of fast, grungy rock ’n’ roll. I really, really like it so it made complete sense to me, The Gun Club. So it didn’t faze me at all.
PP: Yeah well “Breaking Hands” is a great record, absolutely amazing. And you worked with Ian McCulloch as well, right?
RG: Yeah, I did. I did a few things there. Do you know what, this discography thing goes on forever and I’ve got a few new things to add to it but updating my website’s such a chore. I’m not really that into self-promoting so I tend not to do it…New things….a new band from the south of France that I’ve just produced are really, really awesome; they’re kinda kids, they’re all, like, in their early 20s but they’ve got a really good sort of vibe. They’re called Boreal Wood.
PP: Boreal Wood. Like as in a northern forest, right?
RG: Yeah, exactly. Boreal Wood. They’ve got a couple of things up on Soundcloud but I don’t think they’ve put up any of the things I’ve done yet. That’s really good. I’ve just done the new Heligoland record, which is not out yet but I think it’s going to come out before the end of the year. Er, what else have I just done? I’ve got a new record with Harold Budd; I think that’s going to be at the end of October. It’s all finished but I’ve just got to do the artwork and stuff. I’ve got the record with Mark Gardener, which will be before the end of the year. I’ve got the soundtrack for the movie and I’ve started working on a new record with Jay-Jay Johanson, which we’re doing as a sort of…instead of me playing on his records and he sort of writing the songs with me. So that brings us up to date.
PP: Are you planning to do any more shows with Mark Gardener when you release a new record?
RG: Maybe. Yeah, I saw him last week when I was in the UK. Yeah in principle we’d like to do stuff with a band but we have that logistic problem of, ok, when do we get to play and where are we going to do it? Because you live in England and I live in France and anything that we do costs money. You know, if you do, like, two shows you’re going to lose money. You need to do, like, 15 to make it pay for itself. And that’s as far as we got in the conversation. Because it’s like until we get some backing behind the record and the public take to it and it gets some good reviews, then we can go out and get some shows. It’s like, what’s first, the cart or the horse, you know?
And we’ve just done an album and in the subsequent five years we’ve, you know, we’ve played together, we’ve got to know how the other works and everything and I think that the new album is a lot…oh I don’t know…it’s more evolved, that’s what it is. It’s not really like that song that you said. But it’s interesting because it doesn’t sound like the Cocteaus and it doesn’t sound like Ride but it sounds like a sort of nice…you can tell it’s me and Mark. But it doesn’t have the sort of tags or, you know, the obvious reference points.
PP: I’m really looking forward to hearing it.
RG: Ah you probably will. It is really good tough. I would tell you. You know what I would tell you if it were a bit iffy. I’m really happy to talk about it because it’s really…it’s just something I’m proud of. I just wish it were out already. It should have been out already. I don’t like sitting up on things. I always have that feeling of unfinished business if I’ve not got a record out. And I’ve started another one so I lose interest in the old one, etc., etc.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment