Archive Interview #3 - The Sky At Night

This interview dates back to June 2005 and was the culmination of email correspondence between myself and Glasgow band The Sky At Night.

Hailing from Glasgow, The Sky At Night create lovely, woozy, dreamy, elegaic sounds, reminiscent of the likes of Galaxie 500, early Spiritualized and Sigur Ros. Determined to do things for themselves and on their terms, their self-made and produced, self-released "Hope For Dummies" LP is a gorgeous slice of melancholia and a shining example of how a DIY ethic can bear fruit if it's properly thought out and followed through. Answering the questions, put by myself and John Mackie via email, was vocalist/piano player David Thomson.

The LP was self-made and self-released. What made you decide to go down that route? Was it a concious decision to make it a nice package (as it were!), to take a bit more care with it and give the people who bought it something a bit more special?

DT - I think we wanted to make something quite personal that we`d been intimately involved with at every stage, from pressing play and record to handmaking the packaging, putting the Velcro on the sleeve and sticking the CD in. It wasn`t really in our minds to try and sell them or anything, it was more just for the satisfaction of creating the whole thing ourselves.

It honestly doesn’t show but I would guess the LP was recorded on a fairly tight budget. There are some really nice lush sounds on there. Were you able to take a bit of time and experiment or did you do most of the tracks live in the studio? Also how important to you is “the recording process” in general?

DT - I think the budget consisted of a couple of bottles of wine and a curry. Myself, Andrew and Moira spent a weekend huddled around a 16-track in Andrew's front room and recorded most of it, then added bits and bobs later. There are a lot of flaws on there, things we could have re-recorded ad nauseum but we did want to keep things as much as we`d played it originally rather than iron out the imperfections. I think that helped retain a certain sound to the record which I quite like. That, and shitloads of reverb, of course.

Are you going to continue to put your own records out, or will any future releases appear on a label somewhere? Obviously, putting your own records out gives you more freedom to do your own thing, but what do you see the advantages and disadvantages are of doing so?

DT - It`s looking like we might be getting some help with the record from a small label in the next few months (there are only so many cardboard sleeves we can make!) - although as nothing's certain we can`t really comment at the minute. However, having done things entirely ourselves it`s certainly proved that things can be done on a certain scale without a label, I don`t see us as being one of those bands who pin all their hopes and dreams on winning The Deal, as so many new bands still do.

Following on, listening to the LP and seeing you live, I think the music you play lends itself well to the addition of the extra instrumentation (pedal steel, trombone etc), was it always your intention to not be as rigid in your sound and be able to bring more things into the mix?

DT - At the moment we`re kind of building a "squad" to play the songs - everyone who`s joined in has added something, and, we`re always open to adding different sounds, we`re not afraid to experiment. I quite like the Lambchop approach, where they seem to have a big group of players to add to the songs and who basically seem to turn up when they can make it - nothing too formal, just a bunch of friends making nice-sounding music. We try to avoid having a set idea of how things should sound, which keeps it interesting for us, and, hopefully, for people who watch us.

I see you’re not of the opinion that “home taping is killing music” and that you’re pretty relaxed about people sharing your music (e.g. if I were to convert the tracks from your LP into MP3 files and send them to a friend on MSN Messenger). Have the likes of file sharing and general word-of-mouth about your LP helped you get it heard a lot more than it might have been? (a consequence being that people will want to buy it anyway so they can own it)

I think file sharing really ups the ante for bands. The bands that don`t put in the effort are the ones with something to fear - those who churn out albums or who tack some lame album tracks onto a hit single will be found out and will lose out. By converse, those who put in a lot of work, both in creating music and in everything else that goes with it - it's more important to give something that can`t be downloaded, be it a look or a feel, just something extra.

Basically, for bands who want to make money, file-sharing is a Bad Thing, but for bands who want their music to be heard it is a Good Thing, and I`m pretty certain we're the latter.

You have to be applauded for sticking to your guns through the booming heavy metal coming from upstairs when you played with Damon and Naomi. It provided a unique challenge which you rose to very well. How easy or otherwise do you find it, as a “quiet band”, to play when there is a lot of background noise going on either through crowd chatter or metal?

DT - Ach, I`m normally in such a blind panic onstage that I don`t notice anything! I think I find chatter more irritating as an audience member than as a band member, but I`d say we`d been pretty lucky, we generally have played to pretty polite audiences, but you have to understand at this level not everyone is necessarily there to see you, there's nothing worse than a band in a strop.

The incident at Barfly where you were put on against heavy metal from upstairs made me think about the quality of venues which exist in Glasgow and Edinburgh Do you feel there are enough decent places to play, particularly for new-ish bands? Also, situations can arise which make it hard for some bands to get a shot at playing decent gigs such as where promoters put on the same band in every support slot going! How easy do you find it to get gigs, either support slots or on your own? Have you ever put on your own shows?

Again, it comes back to effort. We've never had a problem playing a gig when we want to play a gig, either through promoters or venues or by organising our own shows, but as a wee band you can`t just wait for things to happen, because they never will. So, for example, we wanted to play a Christmas gig, so we roped in some pals (Lucky Luke, Evan J Crichton and The Savings and Loan), hired out Stereo, put up some lights and handed out a wee CD in a Christmas card, and it made for a really nice night, and it really wasn`t that much work- just a wee bit of get up and go. All you need to do is switch off your TV set and do something less boring instead...

As mentioned above, you recently played with D&N. Who would be on your dream list of bands to play or even tour with? These could be bands from the worlds of both reality and fantasy!

DT - Cripes…off the top of my head:

To play with: Red House Painters.

To tour with: Pavement.

My dad played drums with a band of young hopefuls in the 60s, so my fantasy line-up would be with them, to see who's band was best (I`m quietly confident)

Lastly, I’m guessing Patrick Moore hasn’t been in touch about the name! I take it his right-wing maniac political views may bar him from having the opportunity to add some virtuoso xylophone sounds to any future recordings?!

DT - We were, of course, unaware of Mr Moore`s political orientation when we named the band, although, in fairness, in terms of crinkly-foreheaded-TV-bigots he still ranks some way behind Kilroy and Big Ron, so that's at least something.

Archive Interview #2 - Superchunk

Who says you should never meet your heroes? This interview was originally published in 2004 and dates back to October 2001 when Superchunk, for the first time in a long while, came to Scotland as part of their tour for their “Here’s To Shutting Up” LP and yes, I was very excited.

Myself and John Mackie caught up with Mac McCaughan and the flitting in and out Laura Ballance at Glasgow’s King Tut's Wah Wah Hut.

I kicked off by asking about the long gap between visits.

MM: "I guess the main reason is the massive indifference in the crowds over here. Whenever we’ve come to do a tour in the last few years we’ve only done London and whenever we’ve tried to go beyond that it’s been a miserable night. The last time we tried to do Nottingham it was freezing cold and there was only 30 people in. It was one of those gigs where you’re playing but you’re thinking “what are we doing here?” It’s so expensive to come over here – the longer you make a tour, the more money you have to use so you want to maximise your time somewhere and for us that’s meant generally going somewhere where people want to see us. Our shows in London are always pretty good so we think maybe we should try to go outside of there, but it’s just never that good. This time it didn’t make sense to do a whole bunch of stuff in Europe and our booking agent wasn’t having the best of luck trying to do that anyway so we didn’t want to just do another tour of Spain so we’re trying to more UK stuff and we’re playing Ireland where we’ve never played as well."

It’s hard to say how many people will turn up tonight – I imagine it will be quite busy, I hope it would be at least.

MM: "As you say, it’s hard to know. Where we’re coming from we have no way to gauge. The record has just come out and it’s been a long time since we’ve been here which could mean people will be excited or it could mean people don’t care any more!"

I hope it’s the former. Moving onto the new record. How happy are you with it?

MM: "I’m really happy with it, I like it a lot. This record, even more than the last record, is a situation where we managed to do something a little different. If you were a fan of the band as opposed to a casual listener I think you would notice that it’s different. It wasn’t the most fun record to make, but I’m happy with it."

What was it like working with Brian Paulson (producer of 1994’s “Foolish”) again?

MM: "It was good. He’s good at taking a mess, which I think is what we had when we finished recording, and turning it into something that’s listenable."

An unfair question maybe, but how do you think he compares to Jim O’Rourke who produced your last record? ("Come Pick Me Up")

MM: "They’re both really fun to work with in that they’re both good at doing that same thing of being able to find a good space to put everything in a mix. They both have good ears basically, but in terms of working styles, I don’t know…"

LB: "I think that Jim almost seems a little more organised, which doesn’t seem like he would but he seemed to know where things were more than Brian. You know what I mean?"

MM: "Maybe. I don’t know, Brian’s a lot more willing to keep piling stuff on, Jim was into that to a certain extent, but Brian has his computer hooked up to his 24 track, he was like "oh we can keep putting stuff on here" which is kind of a scary proposition as there’s too much space to work with."

I’m not sure if this is the right word, but how much trust would you give to a producer if they are getting you to try things out?

MM: "I think it’s more like us saying what we want to do and then making it happen and when you get to the point where you just get stuck those are the guys you can ask “what do you think we should do with this?"

There’s a song on the new album called "Art Class (Song for Yayoi Kusama)". For those not in the know, i.e. me, who is Yayoi Kusama, and why for her?

MM: "She is a Japanese conceptual artist, mostly active in the 60s and 70s, she’s still alive though. If you go on the internet, there’s some pretty good stuff you can read about her. She was good at presenting conflicts and the dichotomy of what you’re doing with your life – you’re serious about your art, but you’re also selling it so she’s an interesting character."

When you were over in Japan, were they interested in that over there?

MM: "A couple of people were. One writer brought me a postcard of an exhibit that she had been to in Tokyo, but she’s fairly underground there as well. She’s famous enough to have had exhibits and the Museum of Modern Art and stuff, but as for general public knowledge, I don’t think she’s that well known over there."

Earlier you touched on the fact that your profile in the UK is quite low, people have almost tended to write you off as The List (Edinburgh & Glasgow listings magazine) did by calling you "first wave grungers" or perceiving you as underachievers. That annoys me, I’m sure it would annoy you.

MM: "Yeah. When someone writes that it’s just so clear that they don’t listen to music. Saying "first wave grungers" and the fact that people would still use the word "grunge" to describe anything shows that they don’t give a shit. A writer like that is just taking the easiest way out when they don’t really want to listen to something or think about it or write about it. In terms of being underachievers, well in their mind who are the overachievers? If you do this for a job, for your life and you tour x amount of months of the year and you make records and do other stuff, what’s underachieving about that? If their conception is that we’ll make a record and sit around at home for a couple of years then they just have no idea what they’re talking about. For us, it doesn’t make any sense to pay attention to people like that. That’s one of the reasons we don’t come over here as much, people don’t seem to care about music, they care about fashion or some movement they can invent."

That’s the problem with the UK press at the moment – they’ve latched onto the bands from New York for example and everything else seems to be ignored. What more can you do?

MM: "It’s just stupid. Obviously there’s music fans here, but not enough to change the way the music industry works and not enough to make it worthwhile for us to come over. If there was a grant you could get for only being able to draw 10 people then we could come do a tour! It’s so expensive."

Speaking as an outsider it seems in the US and the way people write about bands there’s none of those cliques and intolerance of things that are different.

MM: "I think there’s a lot more respect afforded to bands. There’s still terrible writing everywhere though."

Indeed. I’d like to ask about Merge Records – how’s that doing at the moment?

MM: "Going good, things are busy as usual. Pretty much everything is out for the year – we did a record with The Clean that Matador did over here. There’s a Lambchop record that didn’t come out over here, a compilation of singles, remixes and b-sides. Right now we’re getting ready for next year – the David Kilgour record, we’re going to do a record with Imperial Teen, another Spoon record…"

LB: "And The Clientele."

MM: "Yeah, The Clientele, a band from London. We did their first record, a compilation of singles, that’s on Pointy over here. It’s doing well over there, they get great press and they came over and did a short tour and they’re doing really well."

You’ve probably been asked this before, but I’m interested in it. What’s the deal with Matador and Merge over here? Why aren’t your records coming out on Merge over here?

MM: "Just because we don’t have an office over here. Basically, all our records that we can license to overseas companies we try to because they do a better job if you’re a label who has an office. You can do a better job with a record in the UK if you have an office in the UK, being able to call the press and get distributors. For us to have it on Merge over here would mean just having it on import whereas Matador and previously City Slang can actually have someone working on it in the territory."

And with that we parted – if I remember rightly, we went to the 13th Note for veggie burgers and I imagine the band would have had what Jon Wurster calls "promoter pasta" for their dinner. It was wonderful to finally see them live later on that night, they were fantastic – some band called Idlewild were supporting so there was a bit of a crowd there. Thanks to Mac and Laura for taking the time out to chat – it was a pleasure and I hope it won’t be the same length of time between visits.

Archive Interview #1 - Owen Tromans

Originally published in 2004, this interview dates back to 2001. It took place around the time of Owen's first, self-released, album after the split of his previous band San Lorenzo (a much missed trio, reminiscent of Yo La Tengo, Eleventh Dream Day, Karate).

What were your immediate feelings after the San Lorenzo split? Was it something that always seemed likely to happen? Was it difficult to go from a band to a solo mindset?

OT: It was my decision to bring the band to an end. That doesn't mean that it was an easy decision to make though. I felt that we had reached a point where we had to either really push on and try to "make it", or call it a day and move on to something new. I couldn't have gone for it with San Lorenzo because my heart wasn't in it by the end. There would have been no point in us carrying on with me dragging my feet because that would have wasted everyone's time.

We were always going to split one day I guess and we made the decision never to replace members or anything because SL was about the particular interaction between us. To put it in context, even before SL started in '97 I had been in a band with Nick and Liz for years. I mean Nick had been playing drums with me since he was 14! It was time for me to do new things with new people, which may seem an odd thing to say when we had just played some of our best gigs and recorded some of our best tracks but its just the way I felt.

When I found out that Alan from Bearos Records wanted to release a CD compilation of all our singles and some unreleased stuff, it gave things a sense of closure and reinforced my feeling that I had done the right thing. That record will be out in the Autumn and will be called "The Sea is a Map". It has 6 unreleased tracks on it and 7 songs from our single releases. The only apprehension I had about the split was that I thought the stuff that we had recorded this year wasn't going to be available for people to hear. Now that those songs are going to be out there on an album I feel a lot better, they are great songs and great performances that were recorded very well. One of those songs, a track called "Mirror Witch", is the first song of ours that I haven't been able to find a fault with. Normally I pick SL recordings to pieces but it was very difficult to do that with the final stuff on "The Sea is a Map".

I got good at switching between solo and band mindsets over the years, getting a feel for which songs would sound better within which context. Although I did feel strange after the split it was also very liberating. Now the band is finished the "side project" feel of my solo stuff has gone and I can focus on it properly for awhile. I would also like to get a band together soon, in fact there is a whole load of different things I'd like to try with music.

The LP - first of all, how happy are you with it? Was it always in your mind to record a solo LP, even if San Lorenzo had continued? Were you always in two modes of writing songs, I can't put it any better than "Owen" songs and "San Lorenzo" songs. Was it difficult to combine the two?

OT: I am very happy with the solo LP, I can listen to it all the way through without picking out faults and getting stressed, which is rare for me! The album was finished while San Lorenzo was still going and the two were completely separate so yeah, it was always going to happen. Like I say, I often had two different mindsets when writing songs but sometimes it would be unclear whether the track should be for San Lorenzo or my own projects until it was written and demoed. "Firefly" from the new SL album is a good example. It sounds like a solo track but lyrically it really complemented another song on the album, "Ocean", so I thought it should be included.

I always ask people who have stark, acoustic songs with more personal lyrics on albums this as it interests me, so bear with me! Do you find it hard to do such songs knowing strangers are going to be listening?

OT: No, that doesn't concern me. I mean the records are supposed to be listened to. There have been some really personal songs that I have recorded but decided not to put out because they are just for me. Equally some of my songs are very distant and not personal at all, some are stories or interpretations of things that are quite removed from my life. The songs that are personal are usually either about my beliefs or stuff that has happened to me. It's not always completely obvious but every song is about something or represents something, even if it's just a feeling or a memory.

What I like about the album is that it's not just you and your acoustic guitar - I take it you wanted to make the album as varied as possible? Are you the type of person who wants to try other things and not be content with one particular style?

OT: I did want the album to be varied, but it was a very natural process; I wasn't struggling to make each song different from the last with the seven tracks that were recorded specifically for "Box of Tapes" during 2000. Also the fact that the other half of the record was selected from masses of recordings dating back to the start of 1997, couldn't help but add to the variety. I suppose the way you write and play changes over time, it doesn't necessarily get better or worse, it just changes as you change.
I do like trying different stuff with music. Nothing New Ever Works was supposed to be this all-encompassing album of music that I loved. That was way over-ambitious and we didn't have the time, cash, or know-how to get exactly what we wanted, so the album turned out differently but still good and definitely varied.

The album didn't come out on Gringo - any particular reason for that, or just that it's your baby and you wanted to see the whole thing through yourself? Go on, dish the dirt - what's it really like being involved with the Gringo "empire". I won't tell anyone, promise!

OT: There definitely was a feeling that the record was my thing and it was just logical that I should put it out after doing nearly everything else. If it was to come out on another label it wouldn't have been Gringo because they have lots of other cool stuff coming out and that is keeping them very busy. Also Gringo are very keen on people supporting their records with live stuff, it's part of the whole feel of the label that the bands go out and represent their release with live shows. I am doing a few solo gigs but I want to wait until I have a band before I commit to lots of shows.

Gringo are a great label and although I don't have any formal involvement with what they do I'm always going to be interested because some of my best friends are there.

End with ye olde favourite of your hopes and plans for the future. Are you continuing in a solo stylee, or can you see yourself being involved in a band again?

OT: I guess I am going to have to focus on my Uni work for a little while because I have a dissertation deadline looming! As for music I should be going "into the studio" soon to put down a couple of tracks for a solo seven-inch. I'd like to get a band together and do a ROCK album at some point but I'm in no rush so there will probably be another solo LP before that. But I guess nothing is ever definite with me! In the immediate future look out for San Lorenzo's "The Sea is a Map" on Bearos Records.