Performance

Here at Muso’s Guide, we particularly enjoy introducing you to new bands. And today, we bring you another of our favourites, Performance – think of us as your ever-convivial host, as the lead singer Joe Stretch tells you a little bit more…

I’ve taken a crap in every toilet venue from The Lemon Tree in Aberdeen to The Joiners in Southampton. I sat on the seat or, if there was no seat or the seat was broken or had piss on it, then I hovered above the bowl. I did this at The Castle in Oldham, The Cluny in Newcastle, Fibbers in York. I did this all over England.

My name is Joe Stretch and I am the lead singer in a band called Performance, a three-piece, hailing from Manchester in the north-west of England. We formed around 2003 and signed a record deal with Polydor in December 2004. We were, in no particular order, a gambling addict, an anorexic, a drug addict and a depressive. We made pop music. I dropped out of university and signed the record contract with a Ladbrokes betting pen. Like everyone else, I regret nothing.

I am pleased to say we are no longer signed to Polydor. After our first album I went into hiding. I started writing novels. I’ve published a couple. I’m thinking about a third. The other two formed another band while I was away. Kiss in Cities, they’re called. I’m told they’re more poppy than Performance. In 2009 I broke up with my girlfriend and I ended up hanging round with those two a lot more.  We wondered what it would be like if we made another Performance record. So we did. And then we got a deal. So here we are. Back.

Our album is a mix of uplifting pop songs and down-trodden tales. It was recorded over the past year and is finally approaching something that we can be proud of. The other Joe in our band likens it to “….an upbeat melody here, a lyric about someone tearing your heart out here, and other things.” I’m inclined to agree, to a certain extend. There’s certainly more upbeat melodies.

And so we begin our pursuit, our trivial pursuit? Perhaps? But we begin nonetheless, with ‘The Living’, our first single from our second album Red Brick Heart. I hope you enjoy.

Life Without Buildings

Life Without Buildings leapt out of an art school corner of Glasgow at the turn of the millennium, and have since – passively – courted listeners who deem their debut (and only) LP Any Other City among the most precious in their collection. It’s not the sort of album to be absorbed immemorably, instead sticking like a giant earworm. The inner rumblings of singer Sue Tompkins are set against a spiky, coarse backing from the other three members of the band (Chris Evans, Will Bradley and Robert Johnston) and appeared, then, in short and mostly unnoticed bursts that may or may not have been happed upon via the release of three double A-sides and a fourth, distributed only in Australia. The internet wasn’t what it is now, so a quick blink and LwB were gone.

Why did the band break up? Did you consider doing one-off shows after the break-up?

RJ: We broke up because Sue didn’t want to do it anymore. She wanted to focus on visual art, and had never really bargained on being the singer in a band.

To put that in perspective, when the band began of course none of us really thought anyone would be interested, so there wasn’t anything at stake. As things went on, it started to feel a bit more pressurised, so we did some daft things like taking support gigs with larger bands because it would be ‘good for us’ and generally treating it more like a job than like fun (I take a large part of the responsibility for this!). If we had been a bit smarter about it we could probably have carried on a bit longer and tried to plough our own path rather than do things the way we thought they were ‘meant’ to be done. For Sue i think it turned from a laugh into being a commitment she’d never signed up for.

Having said all that, I’ve got no regrets about us splitting up. I think in a lot of ways it was the right time.

WB: I was happy with the new songs we had, and sad that we didn’t get them onto tape. But the band was never meant to last. We did everything we set out to do, and I think Sue’d already held on longer than she wanted to. On the last song we wrote, she was singing ‘Take me away from here’ over and over again. Still, it sounded great.

Would you ever consider reforming?

RJ: We haven’t considered reforming, really, or doing one-off gigs. For me that’s mainly because of the amount of work it takes to get good enough to play live — it seems a bit silly to spend months rehearsing only to do one gig! I guess never say never, but I don’t think the idea is foremost in anyone’s mind.

WB: I agree. Don’t look back. If the band worked at all it was because of what happened at a time and in a situation that has passed. Even if we reformed, which we won’t, we’d have to start again and figure out how to process everything that has happened in the meantime before we could make any useful noise, else we’d just end up as our own unwanted tribute act. So, no. Go and see something new.

What it was like playing with The Strokes at the Camden Monarch (now the Barfly) in Feb ‘01 at their first London headline gig, being bumped down (reports suggested this had been the case)?

RJ: I don’t think we were bumped down, we were always going to be support, and by that point The Strokes were starting to really blow up, so it would have been silly to get uppity about it. All I really remember is breaking a string and the drummer out of The Strokes was nice (you may draw your own inferences about that last bit).

WB: We didn’t play with The Strokes in any meaningful way. It was a booking accident. Our record label were trying to reinvent themselves with an eye on the indie big-time. I remember watching them for a few minutes, then I remember leaving. Sometimes we really connected with brilliant bands we met on tour, like Ninety-Nine from Melbourne, or the Desert Hearts from Belfast, and a night became much more than the sum of its parts. But the Monarch gig was a category error. Whatever The Strokes were, in my mind at least we were a fundamentally different kind of thing to it. If we were where they were, then we were clearly in the wrong place.

Would you have played it any differently if you released Any Other City in 2009?

RJ:That’s really hard to say. Things have changed so much in terms of how music gets heard now — I suppose we really wouldn’t have needed a record company or any of that infrastructure. Certainly if there was anything I would do differently it would be to generally keep things closer to home, try to avoid the traditional music industry completely, not just do whatever gigs we got offered …

WB: I was always the one pushing the DIY ethic, reading the contracts with a magnifying glass and cursing the industry. Still, I was happy that we found a corner of the music business that gave us just enough support to record and tour, and the label fronted the cash that plugged our first record onto the radio and got it a couple of bad reviews in the music press. Without that backing – that hype, tiny as it was – I don’t think anybody outside of Glasgow would’ve known or cared, and though we had no ambition for world domination, of course we didn’t want our music to disappear without trace. So, whether we like it or not, we owe something to that system. Of course, I wish that whole system would die, that the music would win out through other channels and that artists didn’t have to sell themselves to labels, publishers and management. But, even in 2009, we’re not there yet.

Did you have any idea how well Live at Annandale would be received?

RJ: Well, we all really liked the record, so I suppose we had hopes that other folk would too. It got a nice response, but it hasn’t sold a lot! I’m pleased people didn’t think it was just a throwaway or a cash-in, because we spent a fair bit of time getting it ready and we all thought it represented something about the band that wasn’t on the album.

WB: We never planned to make a live album, and we had no idea that the Annandale gig was being recorded. But I’m glad that somebody did it.

What are you all up to now?

RJ: I’m a graphic designer, and I play a bit of music. Chris and Sue are visual artists. Sue still lives in Glasgow, same as me, and Chris is in Brussels.

WB: I’m a writer, and I also work with art. I played with a great pop-punk band called Correcto in Glasgow for a while, but I left to go and work, and play music, in San Francisco for a couple of years. And now I live in Oslo.

Is there any unreleased stuff hanging around that’s not been put out?

RJ: A bit. But things are generally unreleased because they’re not very good! I don’t think there’s anything else we would put out.

WB: There’s a BBC session, produced to make us sound like Hawkwind, and an Australian radio session where we’re jetlagged to the point of coma. A few C90s of rehearsal experiments recorded on a Walkman, and some very early demos we recorded ourselves. Nothing anybody needs to hear.

What were you listening to around the time of making AOC?

RJ: I was listening to a lot of American kind of post-rocky stuff and earlier post-punk stuff — things like Don Caballero, Mission of Burma. But we all had very wide tastes and a pretty keen ear for pop. Sue listened to TLC and lots of kind of RnB stuff. We used to put Fleetwood Mac on in the car when Will wasn’t around to tell us off. In terms of what fed into the band, it was quite a grab-bag, with a lot more classic rock’n'roll than you might think (we were quite often thinking of things like the Stones or the Who), bits of The Smiths, Fall, Krautrocky stuff, Velvets, Modern Lovers, Television. We wanted the music to have a rock’n'roll spirit, I think.

WB: Before Sue joined the band, we’d been into was happening in the techno scene – WARP, the new German records, Underground Resistance. So for a short time we even tried working with digital tools, three of us sat round a keyboard, but we soon found out that playing live instruments, and learning to play the way we wanted, was a shorter route to the feeling we were looking for. Neu!, Television, The Smiths, The Fall and the Stones were always there, but always disrupted by things like Missy Elliot and Autechre. We also got a lot from the post-rock and post-hardcore sounds of the Glasgow scene at the time, and from Sue’s fantastic refusal to be interested in anything other than the most mainstream music and the most esoteric literature. In the end, the sound of the band was shaped more by the dynamic, and the arguments, between the three of us in the rehearsal room, than by anything else. And then Sue had the final word. If she didn’t feel something when we played it, then it was out.

How did you feel about the mixed reception to the record at the time?

RJ: There was one I think by the NME’s John Mulvey which was quite personally nasty about Sue. Then there was a kind of baffling one, for a single I think, which seemed like all sense had been edited out of it. At the time we got quite a lot of “the music’s OK but the what’s with the godawful singing?” kind of reviews, which I think we were expecting to some extent, but it was still quite disappointing — that people who supposedly knew something about music could be so resistant to something a tiny bit unconventional. And we thought it was particularly lazy that a lot of the initial comparisons were to female singers with high voices by whom we were clearly not remotely influenced. Then again, I think we all thought the NME was a dishrag anyway, so we didn’t care all that much.

WB: I remember one that said only mad people could like us. I was happy with that. Not long afterwards, we seemed to get a lot of guys coming to our gigs with fresh head wounds, like unstitched lobotomy scars.

Just how stream-of-consciousness was the lyric-writing?

RJ: I think only Sue could answer that properly, but it’s probably safe to say that the writing wasn’t really stream-of-consciousness at all. It was quite careful and quite refined. A lot of it had been done without ever thinking of the words as ‘lyrics’ — Sue had been writing for years and years before the band and continues to do so.

WB: She’s a genius, but beyond that she has killer timing. She was never in the wrong place, never on the wrong beat. So much preparation and then also so many freestyle calculations. Nobody but Sue could explain how she does what she does. She wrote, or typed, with stutters and repetitions and mistakes and weird lapses already included. And then, when she started working with the music she would remake the text all over again while she was singing, not just reading but jumping and cutting and changing until at some point she’d find the right shape, the right rhythm, and then it’s a song. Often she was quoting and collaging things, but then suddenly she seemed to be saying or singing certain words for the first time. The first time we really heard it in action, recording her voice for the demo that became the leanover, it was like watching a tightrope artist performing and willing them not to fall.

Were the songs written around Sue’s lyrics?

RJ: Well, see above, but no. We usually started with music, although things could change a bit when Sue came in.

WB: Rob, Chris and me would jam out more or less finished tracks, then Sue’d come down and listen. If she was feeling it, a song could come together very quickly, with maybe a few easy changes. If she wasn’t, the only option was to ditch the whole thing and start again.

What do you think about the growing fan base since you split?

RJ: It’s great. It’s really nice to feel like people get it. For me it’s amazing to feel like I can consider what we did as something within and contributing to the musical culture that I’ve been an obsessive fan of since I was a kid.

WB: It’s great that the record hasn’t entirely disappeared without trace, but I don’t see anything you could call a fan base, and I’m happy about that.

Mike Doughty

February 2nd 2010

“I want to be on you”.  Ron Burgundy’s “immortal words” are those chosen by Mike Doughty to sell himself to the British public.

Doughty, formerly of alt-rock band Soul Coughing, is pretty popular in the States, but relatively unknown here.  My question referred to selling himself to us in the style of a dating ad.  His witty answer, I come to realise, is standard.

The American singer-songwriter is a fairly open book, regularly tweeting (find him @mikedoughtyyeah) and blogging on his website, where he comments honestly on his day to day activities and thoughts on the happenings in the world; two recent tweets include “Lousy night. Crowd couldn’t have cared less” and “Salinger gone – perhaps we’ll at last hear his Rock Opera”.  Is it important for him to keep in touch with fans? “I think it ends up being important, but the reason I do it is just my general obsession with killing time online” he says. “I think my crowd feels pretty close to me because of the access I give to myself, but I don’t think it’s necessarily vital to being a musician these days”.

This openness has extended to a book about his previous life as a drug addict, which he’s in the process of writing.  Mike claims “writing prose is a lot more time consuming than song writing” and that “linear thinking”  is not his strength.  He’s currently struggling to write about his time with Soul Coughing, describing it as “pretty shitty”.
Another way his fans get to know about him is through the Question Jar, something passed round at his gigs where people can put questions in for him to answer.  He told me he’d not had it on this tour because his German wasn’t good enough to answer the questions – he’d been touring Germany and Switzerland for two weeks before playing London – and that he wished he’d brought it along for his gig at the Relentless Garage, but as it happened he ended up inviting the audience to shout out questions to him anyway.   There were a large amount of Americans in the crowd, many of them obviously long-time fans, as lots of the questions were, by Doughty’s admission, in-jokes regarding Dave Matthews (of the Dave Matthews Band; Doughty supported him in Soul Coughing, and is now signed to his record label) and various song lyrics. He claims the best questions he’s had to date are “Would you rather punch a kitten in the face or play Twister with Dick Cheney?” and “Have you ever considered a life as a Ghostbuster?” – unfortunately he didn’t tell me the answers to either.

Mike’s here to promote his new album Sad Man Happy Man, which is a lot more stripped down compared to his previous work – mainly in response to his fans.  He said the last album, Golden Delicious, “was received as kind of a betrayal – they thought it was too fluffy. I’d been doing gigs with just my cello player, Scrap Livingston -pretty bare bones, so it was pretty natural just doing a record that was stripped down like that”.  This time, the response was a lot more positive, demonstrated at the sold-out gig by rapturous applause after every track and numerous encores.

Doughty was the embodiment of stripped down, wearing a plain black t-shirt and jeans, with only his guitar for company,  and he managed to engage and entertain the crowd for an hour and half.  The set was a chance to showcase the new tracks with old favourites like ‘27 Jennifers’, ‘Nectarine’, and the two songs probably most well known by his British fans – ‘Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well’ and ‘I Hear The Bells’ – both of which have been featured on various US TV shows, most notably Grey’s Anatomy.  Asked how he felt about TV syncs, he replied, “I watch too much TV to really complain about it as a sellout. I don’t think I’d give my music to booze or cigarette commercials, but other than that, I’m not bummed out by the association.”

Mike’s humour entertained the crowd just as much as his music, regularly ad-libbing funny lyrics – much to the audience’s amusement – and giving good banter between the songs.  Toward the end of the show, he stopped and said he was about to play the “fake last song”, instructed us to cheer loudly afterwards while he turned around and pretended to be surprised, before going into the ‘encore’.  But in actual fact, he ended up doing two real encores, in addition to the fake one – and the crowd still demanded more.

Mike Doughty hadn’t played in the UK for 10 years before this gig, but I suspect he’ll be back a lot sooner next time.  To paraphrase a certain Mr. Burgundy – I love Mike. Mikey, Mike, Mike…

The Wilderness Of Manitoba

We’re into January now which means, for some, more nights in to discover new music. Thankfully, we’re on hand (as ever) to guide you in the right direction – this time towards a breathtaking discovery in Canadian slowcore band, The Wilderness Of Manitoba. Their music is stripped back to a skeleton of stark and slowly-moving opuses, emotion bleeding through the grazes.

We took the band to one side and asked them a few questions which will familiarise you with the background as you fall in love with the music over at the MySpace.

It seems many of the songs written during times of massive personal change – how tough is it to perform the songs from Hymns of Love and Spirits – an EP written similarly to a monologue detailing an immense personal loss – live?
Will: I think that when songs are written from personal experiences, they are in some ways easier to perform because you’re never far away from the subject matter.  This can result in a more honest performance.
Scott: I agree, they were really honest songs which makes them still very relevant to all of us.  Playing them at the beginning was a way for me to confront head on the things i was feeling, and it is much easier to sing something to a crowd when they don’t know who you are really speaking to.

The Wilderness Of Manitoba

Your name partially comes from an idea that your music would suit the open space and wilderness of Manitoba. What’s your local scene like?
Scott: We consider ourselves incredibly fortunate, Toronto is a really exciting place to be creating music right now.  We’re helped and supported by people who are really close to us, and we’re incredibly inspired by the bands that live in our own neighbourhood.  there is a great network of people here who are all striving for the same things, and working really hard together to make it happen for everyone.
Stefan: Yeah, most of the people we hang out with play music, or put on shows or write about music. We all met through playing in various bands together. A lot of bands break out of it and end up touring the world, but it’s great to still see people like Feist or the guys from Broken Social Scene or Do Make Say Think still going to local shows and supporting the scene.
Melissa: While it would still be pretty cool to be playing in the middle of a forest, it’s great to be in a big city and to have so many supportive friends around us, giving us feedback and coming to our shows – we definitely feel blessed in that regard.

I’m really drawn to the almost stern decision not to speed things up in your songs – do you take nods from slowcore bands like Red House Painters, Low, Mark Eitzel etc? Or is it a subconscious thing? And do you have any plans (or indeed have you already?) to make songs that don’t follow that form?
Will: Personally speaking, I’ve always considered Red House Painters to be one of my favourite bands so it probably comes out automatically in parts of my songwriting.  I’m happy you’ve mentioned them!  The songs on Hymns called for a slower pace and stripped down approach from the beginning as they had never been written with drums in mind.  Some of our newer material calls for more percussion but I think we will always return to the slower stripped down method.

Heartbreak is key in your songs and the clear, natural sounding production evokes classic recordings from the 1960s such as Arlo Guthrie, The Kingston Trio – your classic 60s folk revivalists. But who or what are the main influences behind your sound?
Scott: We have many – for me, I love the old stuff.  CSNY, Simon and Garfunkel, The Band.  These bands for me were more than just their music, the collective spirit of all of the groups has probably been the most influential factor on the way that I write, and in the way we all live. Music as an extension of life.
Melissa: I think I’m in the same boat as Scott but you can add to that list Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake and maybe some old Pink Floyd (think songs like Grantchester Meadows, A Pillow of Winds, Fearless etc.). The first song we learned together as 4 members was CSNY’s Helplessly Hoping and we still sing it from time to time – they are definitely a big influence.

What are your plans for 2010? Any plans to hit the UK?
Will: We are playing the End Of The Road Festival in Dorset and are waiting to confirm other dates in the fall 2010!
Melissa: As you can tell, we’re pretty excited about playing the End of the Road Festival in September! We’ll also be releasing a full length album sometime in the spring so look out for that.

The songs, you’ve said, are written by all of you collaboratively. How naturally do they come about? Like the soaring harmonies on ‘Dreamcatchers’; do these things just fall into place?
Will: So far, the process has been everything falling into place.  We’ve been pretty lucky in this regard as everyone has been thinking along the same wavelength in terms of songwriting and arrangement.
Stefan: Being able to record stuff on the fly is also an asset. Someone writes a tune, records it and sends it to everyone, and by next practice it seems as if everyone has ideas on what to do with it.
Melissa: Some of the more complicated harmonies take some time to work out but for the most part, it’s a fun process and very satisfying once we get it so it does seem like a very natural thing.
Scott: ‘Dreamcatchers’ was a really fun song to record.  When we started we had no expectation of what would come, so I spent a lot of time treating my voice as an instrument, and became more comfortable with how my voice sounded, and what I could ask of myself, or get out of it.  Elise Legrow, a solo artist and lead singer of the local band, Whale Tooth, also made that song incredibly special.

‘Evening’ was written by Will’s mother, and the original 1960s version put on the EP – do you sometimes wish you were born into a different time, with different distribution of music?
Scott: I definitely used too, but the music coming out now is just so good to want to go back.
Melissa: It’s a tempting thought but I agree with Scott, it’s too good now to want to leave!

Do you produce your own material? And where did you record the EP? I have an image of a log cabin…
Will: We produce our own material and the EP was recorded in the basement of our house.  The image of a log cabin is definitely something to keep in mind as we have a detached barn space in the back where we regularly have bands come to perform.
Scott: It was in the barn behind our house where this band, or the idea that this band was even possible was really born.
Melissa: I wish we had a log cabin to record in. Maybe that’s something for the future.

Obviously having not seen you live, how does your stripped down sound fill the room?
Scott: By attracting quiet, respectful crowds and four people who really just love to sing with all their might.
Stefan: Not to mention the addition of banjo, cello, ukulele, singing bowls, loops, melodica, and various percussion – they also help.
Melissa: We’ve sung a number of times without the use of mics, in small venues, which gives things a really intimate feeling, but we do also play bigger venues with drums and the energy in that kind of show is nice too.

Listen here: http://www.myspace.com/thewildernessofmanitoba

Dimbleby and Capper

Don’t be fooled by the ampersand, for Dimbleby & Capper are just one. 22-year-old Laura Bettinson – who miraculously remains unsigned – produces witty, refreshing and sultry dark electronic pop. She certainly has a lot in common with artists like Goldfrapp and The Knife, but adds a more playful reality to the electro-pop tunes. Tipped by Radio1’s Huw Stephens, she featured on the ‘BBC Introducing’ stage backed by an entourage of masked musicians at this years Glastonbury. Laura will no doubt be riding the crest of 2010’s torrent of Microkorg toting electro-pop artists. To hear Dimbleby & Capper is to understand why. One visit to her MySpace page will have you humming to yourself for weeks.

Dimbleby & Capper will be launching her new EP at The Social in London on the 12th January. Here’s what happened when we caught up with her…

Tell our readers a little about yourself, Laura.
I’ve been living in South East London for the past 3/4 years, but I originally hail from the Midlands, specifically a village called Dunchurch where I spent most of my childhood. I moved to London in late 2006 to study at Goldsmiths university and I’ve been here ever since.

How did you get started making music?
I started writing my own songs when I was around 16, and they very traditional piano and vocal based. On my move to London, I needed to find a way to condense my equipment into literally a suitcase, as London tubes and stage pianos were definitely not friends. So that’s when I started working with beats and loops and took on a whole new approach to writing. Using the loopstation enabled me to generate enough sound to write more dynamic, beat driven songs, and the combination of the electronic DIY samples and my traditional songwriting roots/voice made for an intriguing duo – Dimbleby & Capper.

What artists do you think helped mould your sound?
Everything and anything. When i was growing up i listened to a lot of Motown, Doo-wop, ’60s girl groups and bands right through to Smashing Pumpkins, The Crocketts, Weezer, Mates of State, Rilo Kiley, Ani Di Franco and Beck in my mid-teens – only in the last few years did I fall back to Bjork, Kate Bush, The Knife, Silver Apples, Little Dragon, Blondie, Camille. It’s all in there somewhere. Along the way I have no doubt that I’ve taken a part of every phase with me and smushed it into a song.

What inspired the name?
THE question of my career so far. HA. Dimbleby & Capper- at the risk of sounding like an absolute wanker – was not so much a name as a…concept? Eeek I said it. It was the joining of two things, the feeling of being pulled in two directions; the girl, the machine (loopstation) but then working together to make something stick. There’s a schizophrenic approach to the music – the lyrics will jump erratically from one place to another, some times with no connection. It’s this cut-up approach, the loops, the samples, lyrics – the idea that each have their own agenda and I’m only the voice/face pulling them together. That’s what Dimbleby & Capper is about. The name fell out of a hat.

What would you say so far has the pinnacle of your musical career?
Glastonbury 2009 was definitely a high point but I think I prefered our show at Latitude. Doing the BBC Maida Vale session for Huw Stephens at Radio 1 was another amazing experience and something I would love to do again some time.

We’re dying to know, where did you get that top you wore on stage at Glasto this year?
As a child of the Blue Peter generation, let’s just say it was something I’d made earlier. A conglomeration of gaffer tape and my body. It was a two fingers up to the amount of (usually male…sorry!) techies that have been genuinely taken a-back when I rock up to a gig, plug all my wires in and actually know how to use my equipment. I’ll take your techie tape young Sir and a-stick it to my hairless chest. Because. I. Can. The DIY nature of my music bleeds into my image – the gaffer tape was representin’ innit.

What do you have planned for 2010?
The debut EP is coming out in January and will be available as download and 7″ vinyl, which is very exciting for me as it’s completely home-cooked and something a little bit different to the songs people have heard before. I’m looking forward to playing a lot of exciting shows with the band and I’m also part of a ongoing project with some incredible musicians from LA – separate from D&C but just as important to me – which I hope will make some headway in 2010. Then I will need money to record the D&C album.

Amanda Palmer

Muso’s Guide met up with Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls to talk about Twitter and getting dropped…

Muso’s Guide: You blog and use Twitter a lot; it feels like you share a lot of very personal stuff. Do you hold anything back? Does there need to be any mystery to keep fans intrigued?

Amanda Palmer: I hold things back that could possibly harm others. But no, I think deliberate intrigue is not my forte. I’ll leave that to PJ Harvey.

MG: The WKAP tour was a bit of a marathon. How did that feel - would you tour an album in that way again?

AP: No. I am never going to do the same thing twice – it’d be boring.

MG: So… dating Neil Gaiman, what’s that like?

AP: It’s… awesome.

MG: Songs like ‘Girl Anachronism’ and ‘Runs in the Family’ have very intricate rapid-fire lyrics. How does this work when you’re writing? Do the lyrics tend to come to you in a burst, or do you spend a long time chipping away at them?

AP: No, not a long time. The best songs come in very fast and manic bursts.

MG: What’s good about the music industry today, and what annoys you?

AP: What’s good is the democracy that’s been made available by the Internet. What annoys me is the old system refusing to see the light.

MG: In London’s Union Chapel, the subject of a musical within Mr. Gaiman came up… quip or prophecy?

AP: Both, probably.

MG: To labour the point, would any such musical have the eight-foot bride in it?

AP: That would be a very quiet musical.

MG: The Dresden Dolls played the inauguration party at the 9:30 Club - are you still on indefinite hiatus?

AP: Yep.

MG: “Please drop me”: is this getting through, do you think? If they do, what will you do?

AP: I think it’s getting through. And if so, I will have a party on the internet and invite the whole world.

MG: You’ve worked with Ben Folds, covered ‘Murder by Death’ and ‘Momus’, co-written with Neil Gaiman… who else would you love to work with?

AP: I would love to work with Improv Everywhere, the group that’s been doing theatrical flash-mobs all over the globe. They are my heroes.

MG: Belly-love… a fad or here to stay?

AP: Here to stay unless you get all of the beer in the world out of my reach.

MG: You were writing songs throughout the tour. Is an another album on the way, and where do you go creatively when you’re Amanda Palmer and someone already killed you?

AP: Ah, have you ever heard Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’? Genius, pure genius.

They reveal that they wouldn’t buy the new LCD Soundsystem single (even though they do rather enjoy it), and we find out a lot about diaper-changing! Keep watching…

Video by Tim Boddy.

Muso's Guide presents... Canadian Blast

Spiral Beach are sonic rebels unafraid of breaking all the rules and having a party in the process! The band’s love of exploring different sounds and song structures is offset by their sophisticated sense of melody and elaborate vocal harmonies. And what’s more, we’re putting them in two weeks today! Spiral Beach are headlining our London Queen of Hoxton show on Tuesday November 24, playing alongside Hey Rosetta!, The Argument And How It Started and Redbluegreen.

The band has spent the last three years touring across the the United States and Canada with bands like the Hidden Cameras, The Go! Team and Tokyo Police Club, as well as performing in the UK in 2008 to celebrate the release of the ‘Voodoo’ single. They have also gained a devoted following in their hometown of Toronto thanks to their innovative live performances, putting on DIY all-ages shows in unusual venues such as art galleries, theatres, loft spaces and outdoor parks, which often feature audience participation and interactive visual projections.

The band has released two albums on Sparks Music in North America, 2007’s  Ball (recorded by ex-Hidden Cameras and Arcade Fire member Michael Olsen) and their most recent album The Only Really Thing.

Are you looking forward to returning to the UK?

Yes of course!! It’s been over a year since we were in London, we can’t wait to be back!

Your wildly audacious songs seem to have got even bolder and grander three albums down the line. How do you contain yourselves in the studio?

For The Only Really Thing we put a lot more time into working in the studio – our last album Ball was recorded live off the floor in a barn over just a couple of weekends. This time around we spent pretty much the whole winter holed up in Mike Olsen’s basement experimenting with different sounds, sampling, overdubbing etc… we ended up building a lot of the sound effects from scratch and them sampling our own record when it came to playing it live! It’s very important to us that the band be able to reproduce all the sounds you hear on the album.

The influences in your music seem wide-ranging. You described Ball as “Frankenstein on ecstasy”, and The Only Really Thing as Frankenstein on ecstasy in a Bollywood movie from 1968″. How would you describe the live show and what can we expect?

We’ve always really loved the sound of those Bollywood compilations from the 60s and 70s… there’s something about the multi-textured collage kind of feel that kind of connected with what we were doing anyway, so we made a conscious decision to use those records as a direct reference for recording the album – we thought it would be interesting since most of those artists were emulating western psychedelic bands originally, and here were are these kids from Toronto kind of reversing it, like a ping-pong effect.

What music are you guys all into?

We listen to pretty much everything that’s out there, my iTunes is on shuffle all the time… right now there’s some really great bands coming out of Toronto who we’ve gotten to play with, like DD/MM/YYYY and Slim Twig, definitely gotta check them out…

From the clips we’ve seen of your frantic, exciting performances, it’s going to be some spectacular. But do you write for performance?

We’ve always thought of us as being a visual band, so we try to make each show as exciting as possible for the audience… because of the logistics involved we can’t bring our projectionist over to the UK, but you can check out some of his work here.

Canada’s definitely produced some gems over the past few years. Were you Hidden Cameras fans before Mike Olsen became your producer?

We’ve actually gone on tour with the Hidden Cameras three times now across Canada and the US… they’re definitely one of our favourite bands, me and my brother Airick ended up playing with them almost every show! I think it’s both amazing and hilarious that people are starting to recognize Canada as a country where everyone plays in an awesome indie band… living in downtown Toronto it actually kind of feels like that sometimes…

What are your greatest influences? Where did the fascination with Bollywood come from? And what happens next?

We’ve played in this band almost seven years now with the same four members, so we’ve discovered all kinds of music together… we’re working on a couple of different projects right now that we’re really excited about; I’m writing insane techno-punk songs with Karoline Lebrun in montreal (she’s the one who originally introduced us to all this Bollywood craziness) and Airick is actually bringing over some cassettes to the London show of his solo stuff that he’s just finished – ask him about them! It’s incredible stuff, sounds like Throbbing Gristle covering Syd Barrett or something.

Get your tickets now for Muso’s Guide presents… Canadian Blast at the Queen of Hoxton on Tuesday 24 by clicking anywhere in this sentence.

Free Energy

Free Energy rock Muso’s Guide’s socks. Their show at the Barfly a few weeks ago left me completely astounded – have a read here.

We employed them temporarily to review the singles out this week, so you can get to know them a little bit better. And we even got them to review their label boss James Murphy’s new single! Yes, they’re on DFA, and yes this was a leak at the time but check it out, it’s the first time they ever heard ‘Bye Bye Bayou’!

Relax, grab a beer, light a fag [Ed - no, don't!], take it easy, do as they do…

LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Bye Bye Bayou’:

Fenech Soler’s ‘Lies’:

‘You Got Your Head’ by Cosmo Jarvis:

‘Brother Sport’ by Animal Collective:

BEAK>

It’s an enviable prospect having some of Bristol’s finest musicians as label mates, especially when you happen to run the label they belong to. This was the position Geoff Barrow found himself in one Christmas in 2007 at the Invada label Christmas party, The Invada Acid Tests.

It was at this party that Geoff, Billy Fuller of Fuzz Against Junk and Matt Williams of Team Brick came together to jam, with Barrow on drums, Fuller on Bass and Williams playing clarinet. In January of this year with space in their schedules, the trio came together once again to record what would be BEAK>’s debut album.

Today, BEAK>’s bassist Billy Fuller has allowed some time to discuss the album. When I speak to Billy, he and the band are in the process of putting the finishing touches to 500 limited edition BEAK> box sets. “We wanted to do something a little bit special in this age of downloading where you just grab it and stick it on your iPod. I’m an avid record collector and I think there are still people out there who like products. A physical thing that looks nice. The box set is like the Beak fans instant collectors box.”

For the recording, BEAK> limited themselves to a time frame of 12 days. With no overdubs or edits, the debut marks a significant change to the way Barrow and co normally go about recording. “Very little production went into it. We’d basically hit record and go for it. ‘Blackwell’ is the very first moment we played together. When we finished playing we went into the control room and put up the faders and that was pretty much the sound really. To keep it fresh. So many records today sound over produced. We wanted to make some music that sounded like it was coming from the space it was made in.”

While Barrow has often let his influences permeate the music he makes, he was keen to keep Beak’s recordings as democratic and organic as possible. “Lots of people have mentioned that you can hear Krautrock in there, and we all like that music, but I don’t think we consciously did that. On the first day we went into the studio Geoff had a CD by The Plastic People of the Universe called Egon Bondy’s, Happy Heart’s Club Band. I think that record just had a murky quality to it, like it could had been made in any time or place, and I think the sound of it maybe leaked over onto the record.”

The band has recently returned from doing shows in Berlin and Paris. Despite appearing on a few occasions in Bristol, this is the first time they’ve played on anything resembling a tour. “The songs are sounding better live. We didn’t know how it was going to be because the album was improvised. Maybe we’ll end up being like Marmite. I think people will either love us or they’ll hate us. I don’t think anyone will just think we’re ok. I think that’s the worst thing anyone can say about your music is that it’s just ok.”

For those who are currently enjoying BEAK>’s new offering the band look set to release more material in the future. “The three of us are really enjoying it. We’re gonna do some more stuff. We’ve been talking about doing a set of 4 EPs that will then count as a second album and then just move straight on to album number three. Then we’d never have to do the difficult second album!”

I leave Billy be, as I’m informed that stencilling 500 pizza boxes is quite a long-winded process. Look out for BEAK> who are touring this December.