'Digging for Gold' - An interview with Robin Guthrie

Something I never thought I'd do this early on is interview a hero. Last week I did, on behalf of One&Other magazine:

“[Instrumental music] is very visual. There’s no singer bleating something over the top of it, locking you into one way of thinking. It gives the listener space to put something of them into it, layering your memories which become intrinsically tied to it” – Robin Guthrie

To the erudite amongst you, the name Robin Guthrie will follow hot on the heels of one of Britain’s most revered yet modestly-discussed bands; the Cocteau Twins. In truth however, the Grangemouth-born Scot has come a long way since his 4AD days: a prolific composer who over the last decade has produced intensely personal instrumental works; collaborated with others such as renowned contemporary-classical pianist Harold Budd, and even scored the odd film here and there. Ensconced in his adopted home of northern France, he continues to reveal his collection of aural postcards to a dedicated audience. ‘Fortune’ – released in November on his own Soleil Après Minuit label – continues in the canon of ambient guitar sounds that have become his signature, with its ten tracks traversing very aspect of the emotional spectrum.

If conducting this interview was not nerve-wracking enough, having him ask me to “show us to a nice café” only added to the pressure. I played it cool, eluding him to the fact that I’d spent the preceding half an hour asking friends for help. We, along with his partner Florence, eventually sat down upstairs in the Little Shambles Tea Room and – sipping a double espresso – the tape began to roll. The burly Scot appears tired, having travelled from Manchester in the early hours following a packed house at the Band on the Wall. “I promised myself today I was going to eat healthily, but when you’re travelling it is very difficult – the promoter usually turns up at the end of the night with a pizza”. The guitarist chuckles, tucking into a grilled blue cheese sandwich as I muse over his return to our pokey little island. This tour has been Guthrie’s most extensive for some time: “It’s the first time I’ve been asked come to here with this many dates – a simple as that. We simply go where the concerts are offered, and we get a lot more in other countries than we do here, whether it is America, Japan or wherever else we’re popular”.

It’s a testament to Guthrie’s continued following that he is able to get full houses without real promotion, and ponders the notion that with the right amount of backing, they could step up the level of venue they play in. “We rarely get support from British media. The anomaly is that we’ve been selling out some of these shows – we were at the Band on the Wall in Manchester last night [14/02/12] and it was packed – but then we go to Liverpool and there are 20 people there”. Eschewing direct album promotion because “it takes a while for me to actually figure out how to recreate it onstage”, the trio will be drawing on a decade of material from 2003’s ‘Imperial’ onwards. Due to its rich and textured nature –all the parts often recorded by Guthrie – a gap has emerged between the songs on the record and those which can be worked into a live setting. “I like to keep things down to the trio, which means that of the hundred-odd songs we have, there are only really thirty that I can do”. There are no rearrangements, rather a series of loops played by Robin himself, alongside bass player Steve Wheeler and drummer Antti Makinen.

Our conversation soon turned to the music, and like myself, Guthrie remains imbued in the whole ‘experience’ of producing a record. Since ‘Imperial’, artistic continuity has been paramount, even down to fonts and numbering. “Working with 4AD and Vaughn Oliver, I took it upon myself to get involved with the artistic side of things. It took a while to get confident, but I thought ‘I’ve got a computer, I’ve got a camera, and it’s my record, why not’.” One would imagine that with such an elegant touch on his instrument, this is a man enamoured in theory and rolls of parchment. You couldn’t be more wrong. “I can hear it in my head and visualise where to put my fingers, but if a bass player were to say ‘hey, is that a D?’ I’d say ‘I don’t know! Is it?’” This is no false modesty, and the guitarist is acutely aware of his gift for arranging, recognising that he can exploit his ability to ‘not play properly’. “I really cannot play any other way. I’m good with one or two strings, but it’s a horror of mine to arrive at a party, there’s a guitar in the corner and someone says ‘give us a song!’”

Offering a glimpse into his creative process, Guthrie remains profoundly inspired by his surroundings while at the same time embracing modern means of ‘getting it down’: “I don’t really listen to music, it’s quite shamefully really! I’ll have it on when I’m making dinner – open a bottle of red and listen to some John Coltrane, but I’ve lost the ‘music fan’ thing that I had when I was younger.” To park up by the beach and sit with a laptop and a rollout keyboard is a synergising of two worlds symptomatic in his music – the natural and the ambient, colliding with the digital to create something distant yet surprisingly intimate. “Part of my process – I’m not sure you could call it a talent or skill – is turning what I see and experience into something aural”. He recalls the story of his album ‘Continental’ [2006], composed on a train journey between Los Angeles and New Orleans: “It took two and a half days, just watching the world going by; it was hugely inspiring. When I arrived in Los Angeles, I borrowed a guitar from somebody and performed the whole thing that night.” His nonchalance is charming; evident that behind the tapestries of sound is a gifted arranger, a Dylan-esque craftsman, with an innate understanding of melody. Conversely, new album ‘Fortune’ was completed without travelling, a feat fraught with its own difficulties. “It became a challenge to live my domestic life and create something of that emotional depth – that’s okay though, because I’m sure the next one will be different again.”

Working with a musician of Budd’s calibre would be daunting for anyone, and Guthrie is no exception, but he is humbled by the experience. “I feel privileged to work with him; someone who touches the keys and is instantly recognisable”. Their relationship can be traced back to the 1980s, but their score for cult film Mysterious Skin is where, for me at least, their styles gelled. Guthrie cites this as one of his most challenging musical excursions because “he can play properly [laughs]. He’ll sit down in his house and just write manuscript perfectly. Now, try putting that in the same room as someone who doesn’t know what the black notes are for”. Their styles compliment one and other beautifully, Budd’s rolling arpeggios skipping like pebbles over Guthrie’s sustain. But the former’s age – now 77 – and experience can create worries. “In the studio you have time, but live we’ll have a quick soundcheck. I’ll think ‘hmm, this is in E – I can do that…but please don’t do any black notes!’”

Recounting a number of issues I addressed in my Sunday Essay last month, attention turns to record sales, and the impact on artists desperately trying to sustain themselves in an increasingly disjointed industry. “Sales are going up, without a positive gradient in terms of what the bands are actually making: people are beginning to reject iTunes and Amazon in favour of Spotify. People assume that because I’ve been doing this for 30 years I’ve made a lot of money, which couldn’t be further from the truth. People ask ‘why do you continue?’ To feed my family, quite simply: much of what I earned in the past [Cocteau Twins] has been signed away to someone else. I am very grateful for what 4AD did for me in my previous band, but the assumption that I’m still resting on it is wrong”. In our time of open-source outlets like Youtube, the volume of readily-available music has seen an almost Darwinian sense of competition emerge: “nowadays you can put something out on the internet, and it can potentially have the same value as something released on a label”. As the words leave his mouth he holds hands up – “…but that shouldn’t stop anybody from making music, because it is such fun”.

So where in this ephemeral world of iPhones and Twitter feeds finds room for an artist like Guthrie? It’s a tough question because ambient music, if you’ll forgive the pun, is always there; rock’s quiet unobtrusive friend at the party. He has managed to keep his foot firmly behind the door to the mainstream, casting a shadow on a new generation of bands lavishing money on their echo units. He will remain respected, but perhaps not pedestaled in the Eno sense. Before packing up and heading over to the venue, I asked Robin where he would be heading at the end of this tour: “as soon as the tour is done, I shall be off travelling again – taking a few trains, moving around America perhaps”. No doubt he will bring some more postcards back with him.

Sunday Essay: Physical vs Digital

A piece I am proud to present, which was written two weeks back now. One&Other gave me some wriggle room and - following the HMV crises - allowed me to write something that I hope will provoke discussion:

“For a collector – and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be – ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects”. Walter Benjamin, 1992.

Yesterday I sat in my usual pub, in my usual chair by the fireplace. I took a swig of scotch and tensed as the burn caught the back of my throat. Across the room two of the regulars were locking horns. After several minutes tones elevate and hands flail, moving light-hearted gents’ banter into a full-blown war: in one corner, the traditionalist – unkempt and sporting a Genesis t-shirt and a Walkman held together with tape; in the other corner, the modernist – white ear buds hanging from his shirt collar, using names like ‘Spotify’ and ‘Apple’ as verbal cannon fodder. The fact is that debates over the format and distribution of music have moved beyond the realm of barstool chatter to serious academic exchanges, and as such, my mind was in two camps when I was asked to write this article. My first thought was that somebody somewhere must have placed a serious bounty on my head in approaching such a contentious topic; the second was simply ‘where the devil am I to start’? It is very easy to sound evangelical when discussing physicality in record buying, however, and without wanting to come across too academic, I will endeavour to avoid too many jingoisms. That said, as I sit now in a room replete with CD cases, dust jackets and cassette boxes, I suppose it is fairly obvious on which side of the fence I reside. When HMV announced its administration earlier this month, my personal Facebook and Twitter accounts were rife with sobs from friends – those who defected to online outlets still found themselves mourning the loss of Britain’s most recognised multimedia store. It has always been de rigueur amongst music diehards to belittle the franchise for its commerciality and unashamedly mainstream focus, but because of that very position in their consciousness, its demise has been a hammer blow to both high-street and independent record buyers alike. For those of us who still enjoy filling our shelves, we appear more determined than ever to cling on to high-fidelity means of music consumption.

In record purchasing, ownership is a highly tactile, conspicuous experience. The act of physically ‘picking up’ your item and paying for it – or vice-versa, if you’re using a website – is a strangely personal one; the £9.99 exchange leaves you with something you can touch, an acquisition an experience in its own right. Whatever your poison, an album sleeve potentially colours your listening – from the fantastical landscapes of Roger Dean [Yes] to the stark brilliance of Peter Saville [Joy Division], the listener can choose to envelope themselves sonically and visually within something tangible, that really is theirs. A far cry came in September last year when the Sunday Times published an article challenging our ideas of ownership in digital music consumption. Silver screen veteran and known music collector Bruce Willis allegedly sought legal action upon discovering that his extensive iTunes library would revert to Apple when he dies, unable to pass it on to his family. Though the lawsuit was promptly dispelled as folklore, the article provoked quite a reaction with readers learning that those files and folders didn’t actually belong to them.

When discussing purchasing, I used the second adjective for a reason: coined by economist Thorstein Veblen in 1899, ‘conspicuous consumption’ is something increasingly practised by high-fidelity listeners as we find ourselves fighting against the digital market. I am certainly guilty, with the mere mention of ‘download’ forcing my hand toward the nearest shop like some unwieldy defence mechanism. Satirically depicted in Nick Hornby’s ‘High Fidelity’, the image of the collector has become one of near introversion: scribbling names, thoughts and dates in a little black book, unwilling to accept the ever-changing outside world. That is the cliché, and it can be construed as shallow to some.

Philosopher Walter Benjamin, from whom I take my tagline, postulated that our collections form a ‘material biography’ – that our dusty shelves reveal something unique about us as people. Indeed, my own personal record collection maps a trajectory that underpins the best part of a decade. Record ownership is profoundly social, a game of join the dots if you will. In my first year of university, I played a record by Pink Floyd to a guy I met at a mixer; the next day he came in with a CD case in his hand, threw it down onto my bed and said ‘dig this, man – David Gilmour produced it!’ Like a scene from ‘High Fidelity’, this is a record I can date with a snapshot of my personal history; a reminder of my first days as a freshman. Numerous sociological studies have been conducted to show that digital music libraries can also house such biographies – Marjorie Kibby’s ‘Collect Yourself’ warrants further exploration. However, there is nothing as ephemeral as that which can be erased by pressing a key, casting it off into a silicon no-man’s-land. Record or even CDs can decay physically just like their owners – scuffs, worn jackets or a mysterious stain – but ultimately continue to turn with the aid of the right mechanics.

The wealth of music open to the digital user is unprecedented – between legal and illegal sources there exists a boundless, readily available catalogue. Whether it is the instant gratification this medium provides, or perhaps that you have access to hours of music without risking disappointment, the appeal is easy to see: ‘every song you have ever owned in your pocket’ is enticing and liberating, waving goodbye to your cluttered, cobwebbed storage spaces. Having no fixed location frees us to take our music on the move, creating a mobile, ‘imperfect sanctuary’ in which to reside as we traverse our environments.

The choice afforded by your friendly neighbourhood record shop is always going to trumped by, say, the Apple store, but like the self-service supermarket, an interface can only take us so far before we require the services of a sentient being. Software can offer us suggestions, but it cannot ‘recommend’ to us in the same way; your local record junkie is always on hand to say ‘hey man, if you like this band, try the guitarist’s new solo album’ – if the projects are stylistically different, it is unlikely that a buzzword-based computer system will make the connection.

Operating economist Nigel Thrift’s ‘technological unconscious’, it is only when you begin to analyse the complexity of the processes involved, that user-friendly cracks appear. If these processes fail – power cuts, computer viruses and the like – our collections become dormant and isolated. I will never forget the week I spent carefully ordering my CDs and vinyl onto a portable hard-drive, only to be met with the message ‘your disk has corrupted and is unable to complete this operation’. Suffice to say I haven’t bothered a second time. My record collection is my back-up, my hard-drive – when my mp3 player packs in, I will still have a ground zero to return to. Call me shallow, but I like having something I can point to, something of which I can say “I bought that. I sat down and listened to that on this stereo, with these headphones”. Above questions of ownership and tangibility however, stands the true vernacular; we simply enjoy collecting and sharing things.

I believe it is too dramatic a leap to say that the record as an artefact is dead, and while file-based formats continue to supersede, a vast cottage industry exists for those willing to investigate. Giving new salience to Benjamin’s ideas, I move to suggest that combined, these formats serve two distinct purposes: my digital collection is the functioning offspring of what is on the shelf – I can take it out with me and listen on the move, but always return to the original at the end of the day. This is the true collection, the one that I continually nurture and love.

ME - 'Even the Odd Ones Out'

Another for Soundsphere:


Australia has been responsible for some serious musical talent, rock and otherwise. One need only reflect on the Great Southern Land’s aural history to discover a wealth of song writing brilliance: from the everyman’s bard Paul Kelly, through the tortured literary inflections of the Go-Betweens, to the downright oddball Luke Steele [Sleepy Jackson/Empire of the Sun].

Four years strong and Melbourne-based ME are playing out their own twisted dreams down-under, earning a slot at the Big Day Out and a gig roster into triple figures in 2012. Having played alongside the big names both here and at home, a palpable excitement surrounds the band’s début album.

There is a sense of grandeur and near theatricality to this record. Production duties are handled by Barny Barnicott, knob-twindler to everyone from Arctic Monkeys to the Editors and Kasabian; pair this with the bands penchant for melodic quirks and Roy Thomas Baker grandiosities, and the overall effect is suave and direct without ever being “in your face”. Luke Ferris is an undoubted talent, with his vocal range swooping and wailing with the panache of a less hare-brained Matt Bellamy. Opener ‘Hoo Ha’ is a strong a statement of intent as anything this side of the first Black Sabbath album – blending almost-ostentatious vocal harmonies with a highly singable chorus and cabaret horn punctuations, this is Brian Wilson gone mad, and it is wonderful. For us, Damian Tapley is the star, his guitar playing rich and suitably unconventional; he is clearly a capable and versatile musician, never sounding misplaced in an “art for art’s sake” kind of way. If a strummed acoustic is required – as on ‘Trails In The Sky’ – that is what he plays, the ululating slides notwithstanding.

As you might expect from the preceding comments, ME never paint with the same palette twice – colours are mixed and smeared, brushes thrown and hands flicked making for a seriously eclectic yet nonetheless coherent listen. ‘Like A Fox’ may recall a West-Coast acid trip, but the following ‘Westward Backwards’ – replete with barrelhouse piano and stop-time guitar – jigs along like an after-party with the cast of ‘Alice In Wonderland’. Elsewhere, operating a kind of experimentalism that would give Peter Gabriel a coronary, Choral pushes Spector’s wall of sound to lofty new heights with its multi-part vocal harmonies: set against searing percussive flourishes and minor-key orchestration, the piece reaches a near-Progressive state before unravelling to reveal its five note coda.

On ‘Even The Odd Ones Out’, ME have done the near-impossible and made a record that transcends genre and decade, and sounds very fresh indeed. The orchestration actually works – all too often, things become bloated and smothering as instruments do battle for the limelight, but here they simply augment and deepen the material at hand. The future of Australian music may well be in safe hands.

Heaven's Basement - 'Filthy Empire'

Another review for the lovely folks at Soundsphere magazine:

Now, we’ve heard the term “coming through slaughter” – when Syd Barrett left Pink Floyd in 1968, they spent years fumbling around, searching for a direction before focusing their craft on ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’.
Okay, that was an ostentatious example, but the point is valid; a band that changed its stripes following line-up changes and eluded success yet continued where others floundered. ‘Filthy Empire’ is Heaven’s Basement’s full-length debut, yet the roots of this band can be traced back a full ten years. Emerging in 2003 under the moniker Hurricane Party, prompting a name change to Roadstar following the New Orleans disaster, these boys played classic British rock with a capital “C”.

Boasting a wealth of tousled rock locks and a flamboyant front man in Richie Hevanz, things looked promising for Roadstar. The Kevin Shirley-produced ‘Grand Hotel’ won them the coveted 2006 ‘Best Newcomer’ award in Classic Rock, beating the hotly-tipped Australian trio Wolfmother. As career positioning, it seemed perfect. Supporting the likes of Thunder, Deep Purple and The Darkness, penning songs under the tutelage of manager Laurie Mansworth, it was a giddy trip. Sadly, it all crumbled as Mansworth and the band parted company. In 2008, Heaven’s Basement was born, featuring a handful of Roadstar members, along with guitarist Sid Glover.
After a pair of well-reviewed, commercially-ignored EPs and numerous line-up changes, ‘Filthy Empire’ is the sound of men on a mission – chips on both shoulders, heads full of steam – aiming for the rock n roll high road. Producer John Feldmann [Papa Roach, Black Veil Brides] has done a wonderful job in turning the band’s boozy, brash live performances into an immediate, highly listenable record. The instruments wrestle for the foreground, yet all sound like they belong there; often threatening to tear holes in your speaker cones and come straight for your jugular.

‘Welcome Home’ wastes no time in ripping off its shirt and getting down to business. Buzzing like some Sunset Strip girl-chaser, it is as strong an opener as we have heard this side of ‘Appetite For Destruction’. New boy Aaron Buchanan’s pipes are given a serious workout, and if the token “muthaf***aaaa” turns the stomach a bit, it doesn’t hang around to cause any lasting damage. In second song ‘Fire, Fire’, the band hits its stride with a crushing riff that shakes its tush like Aerosmith without the make-up – mixing interesting dynamic shifts with a winning chorus, it is a real high point. As the wah-wah-soaked guitar solo and brief stop-time passage collapse into the final phases, between the hair-flailing you really do appreciate the subtleties Heaven’s Basement are capable of.

Conversely, single ‘Nothing Else To Lose’ sounds, despite its swagger, a little syrupy for our tastes. Cloying lyrics – “we are defiance” “we stand alone”­ – and the suitably “epic” unison lines veer dangerously close to the kind of FM radio rock already trodden to death by Nickelback et al. Fortunately at a trim three and a half minutes, the overall effect is rousing rather than toe-curling. ‘The Long Goodbye’ and ‘Be Somebody’ tread similarly thin ice, saved by their stadium-sized riffs and creative percussion.

Things take a slightly darker turn with ‘When The Lights Go Down In London’. Beginning on a dusty highway in the Deep South, its plaintive intro and verses is a welcome breather after the last three tracks, allowing guitarist Sid Glover to indulge his bluesy side and deliver a superb wall-of-sound solo. Elsewhere, ‘The Price We Pay’ showcases the band’s softer side. Replete with piano flourishes and a genuinely moving vocal line, this stripped-bare ballad is the record’s real surprise: it doesn’t feel like the “requisite slow one” found on so many rock records – it belongs here, standing as a singular achievement. We round things out with ‘Executioner’s Day’ – a song originally recorded four years ago with previous singer Richie Hevanz – an early fan favourite; it is a strong song considering its lack of sonic diversity, but does not quite match the 2009 EP version.

All in all, ‘Filthy Empire’ covers a lot of ground, and there is a satisfying tension between their thoroughly British grit and obvious transatlantic influences. Where the FM rock clichés rear their heads, a massive riff creeps up and bites them on the back of the neck before too many “woah woahs” ensue. They may have lost the melodic boogie of their previous guise, but are now in possession of an exuberance honed only through determination and years of hard work; Heaven’s Basement sound vital, alive and on occasion, brilliant.

One&Other

I implore you to support this wonderful independent magazine!

My writer's profile can be found here: http://www.oneandother.com/authors/jonathan-cridford/

Coming up...

I have several articles in the works for the coming week. The first of these is sure to provoke debate; that most contentious of topics between physical and digital music collections. I am excited about One&Other publishing this, as my editor has been raving about it since it landed in his inbox the other day - whether this is through genuine interest or the level of public comment it will surely generate I am not certain.

Other than that, I have put together a short preview of Yeah Yeah Yeahs' return to the UK, and the serious backlash at the release of their frankly horrific new album cover. Head-scratching delights all round! Next weekend, I shall be sitting down to talk to ambient guitar legend Robin Guthrie, before his gig in York.

Later on this month, I will be reviewing my most anticipated release, the second album from Australia's Empire of the Sun; I cannot describe how excited I am about this one.

Portasound - 'Sacrifice'

Well, I am back - a poorly laptop has been something of an inhibition - and I now present my first published review for Leeds-based music rag Soundsphere:

http://www.soundspheremag.com/?p=25419

London synth quintet Portasound return this month with their follow-up to ‘The Second Renaissance’ EP, and a filmic sense of purpose. Released on Blood and Biscuits – the sort of ultra-cool DIY label that thrives on the talents of young left-field collectives – this collection of oddball pieces comes lovingly packaged in the kind of sleeve born to reside on a collector’s shelf.


‘Sacrifice’, in the band’s own words, was to carry “the atmosphere of some of our favourite dystopian films and novels with the energy of a live electronic band”. Within seconds, images of blaring lights, endless speeding tunnels, space exploration and Kingdom Come flash before you. There is a sense of ‘been here before’, of course, with Martin Ware-era Human League amongst others peddling similar – albeit poppier – works. In truth, however, this release is no throwback; with a polished sound and glorious stereo mix that bounces from ear to ear, this is thoroughly modern record.

Opener ‘Time Lost’ plots a voyage into the unknown, into psychedelic territories recalling everything from the Floyd’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ to Giorgio Moroder’s pioneering synth explorations; it is strange and amorphous, yet retains enough familiars to draw the strands together. The manic finale is as danceable as it gets, with James Dow’s incessant vocal phrases breaking before the sprawling ‘Procession’. Its initial march is entrancing, the off-beat drums set against a simple bass line and steadily building melodies. A sudden drop and things chance tack completely – fuzzed synth notes contort with minor-key guitar stabs as if from some unearthed dark-wave bootleg – it really is visual, watching some beautifully horrific scene unfold as you drift away into nothingness.

Third track ‘Furore’ is upbeat by comparison, yet is still rife with curve-balls – its stop-time middle-eight provides just enough variation to keep things interesting amidst the tunnels and flashing lights hurtling past. Coda ‘Ascension’ begins as a far, distant cousin of Tangerine Dream’s ‘Ricochet’, underscored by stark guitar shards into a far more unwieldy beast. Things really begin to take off and before long you’re leaving your headphones behind you and traversing the outer-reaches of your imagination, up and around the final frontiers and touching down again as the mix begins to fade.

Portasound have created something rather remarkable here – a 20 minute aural journey across the gulf of space, through J G Ballard’s dystopian futures and back again. Each of the four pieces has much to commend them, but ‘Sacrifice’ needs to be digested as a whole: a continuous, grinding cinematic adventure that will confound and intrigue with repeated listens. Making appearances across the country with Wave Machines and label mates Gallops, be sure to catch there travelling futurisms in a venue near you.