The Goo 1
FEB-MAR 24 How did you assemble the band? I read
that your early shows were a little different. There was a regular gig down the road from me with Left, Right and Centre, a band with Noel Bridgeman (Skid Row), Ed Deane on guitar and John Querney on bass. I’d keep going to see them, and eventually, I’d be asked to play a few numbers, and then suddenly I was in the band. Later, I drafted them into The Devil’s Spine Band. We did our first shows in Galway with Alice making sculptures, the butoh dancers and totally improvised around some set music, and we’d have signals to go into different movements. We had one show that was six hours long, we fed the audience in the middle and everything. The record is a dense beast, and showcases some incredible variety. What can you tell me about the material? We had the guts of an album that resulted from this, and we very quickly put together a demo, just something to go with the show. I was never really happy with the end product, it was recorded quickly, and rough. So we revisited those, and new ideas started to spring, hence we kept adding to it. Eventually it became two albums, or one and a half albums. We remixed and remastered everything, re-recorded a lot of things from scratch. I wanted to keep some of the original elements too, some of the guitar parts, some of Noel’s parts. Once I decided to do it, it was fits and starts, and Covid put an end to what we were doing. So this is kind of a rebirth. I hear such a range of things across the material. From Ennio Morricone, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, even contemporary composers like Tyondai Braxton. Who were you drawing inspiration from when putting this project together? A dash of Ennio, of course. We’ve been said to be a little like David Lynch meets Captain Beefheart with Dolly Parton. A great deal of Tom Waits. I’m a big fan of ‘Odelay’ by Beck. The way it would hop around different styles. It does make it a bit of a pain trying to get radio play. But Bernard Clarke has been a great ally of ours, and it’s been a thrill to hear your hard work on ‘Blue Of The Night’. Can you shed some light on your musical background? You have been incredibly prolific, with swathes of material on Bandcamp. Well, there’s compilations, like ‘Audiotorium’, which is some of my theater work. I’ve written music for about a hundred plays.I went to piano lessons with the strangely named Harriet Officer, up to grade 7, but that’s as far as I went. But with Harriet, I would bring along the sheet music of Led Zeppelin, Small Faces, and I started to understand how chords worked. But I never went any farther than grade 7. Later, I had a band with Garvin Gallagher, who I still play with. We’d play originals, and stuff like Weather Report, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin and that sort of stuff. So over the years I put those things together, so I suppose that was my schooling. Were there any interesting pieces you discovered working on the record? An instrument or an approach you found particularly inspiring? Oh, I have a few things I’m looking at now. I managed to get a little studio. And I’m just looking at one piece of equipment called an Aquaphone. Talk about irony, his name is Richard Waters, so this came from San Francisco. He’s passed now, but he handmade these things. They’re quite primitive. Two trays with all these bronze tines that you can either bow, or strike. Or you can fill the thing with water. But bowed, with some long delay, you get some very interesting sounds, which they say you can communicate with dolphins with. I have a vast collection of old keyboards and samplers. Old vocoders. You name it, some old string machines, Yamaha CS20’s and CS40’s, which I used all of them across the record. Wildes work looms large in the lyrical and narrative content of the album. You mentioned that you were inspired by where he’d been? Yes. The other thing that would be important to say was we also used part of ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, but I also used some pieces from across Oscar Wilde’s work, some verbatim, some paraphrased. That idea came from what we associate with Oscar Wilde, this foggy, London, top-hats-and-all type in this place. You put that into the cowboy era, and it became enthralling to me. The record is pretty lavishly packaged, with some beautiful artwork, can you tell me about the cover? I like to expand upon visual ideas so I would have had a lot of input on that side of the project too. Working with Alice has been my guide to more conceptual and performance based art. That world is incredibly inspiring, for the music, and I hope that’s what comes across when people listen to it, that it might inspire some interesting pictures in their head. The Devil’s Spine Band’s debut album Arrows of the Golden Moon is out now. PAGE 39