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I have shifted to Tumblr, for a bunch of reasons, but the main one is following the crowd like a total sheep. Nice one, Brad.

http://everysinglerevolution.tumblr.com/

Please follow me there, please.

Articles of 2010 Part X: The National

The National finally seemed to catch up with their own popularity and embrace it in 2010. Their record, High Violet, really brought further sympathisers to their cause and made them the sleeper success story of the year. Though their growing fanbase had not gone unnoticed in our circles, the general public only began to learn of this band who've been around since 2000. No complaints here, that's the way it is. I'm glad they've made an impact where most bands don't deserve to. They really do. So below is my November cover story for Playmusic Pickup, header and standfirst intact. Bryce Dessner is a talkative, eloquent chap, as are they all I believe. Read on, dear reader, read on...

Purple Patch

The National have turned their emotive, evocative music into a raging fire to which music fans across the world have finally been beckoned. High Violet represents the apex of their achievements so far, and guitarist Bryce Dessner sheds light on the incredible efforts needed to get there.

Ordinary, daily routine can be the source of as much misery as pleasure. The best music bridges the gap between the melancholy and the joyous, making it one and the same. The best songwriters take that which spans the two and build it from their perspective on life, either at home or away. In doing so it feels like they've somehow touched upon an unanswered question, provided a glint of hope when it feels there is none. The National have patiently been doing this since 1999, garnering a steady stream of accolades and success with each subsequent album. 2005's Alligator, 2007's Boxer and now this year's High Violet have all been lauded for their spacious, elegiac triumph, and it's only now that each one is being cherished by listeners on a grander scale. “There's something in our music,” says Bryce Dessner, co-guitarist with his brother Aaron, one of two pairs of brothers that make up four fifths of the band. “Obviously you could take away almost everything and Matt could sing over a full orchestra or just a solemn piano or a crazy techno beat maybe and you'd still be like 'oh, this is The National'.”

Matt Berninger, vocalist, lyricist and the sole non-musician, is a striking figure quite apart from his sandpaper, baritone voice. He certainly has foresight to craft songs of understated emotional intelligence and gravity. “I think the challenge with the songs is that obviously he sings in a limited range. I think we often get labelled as miserablist or dark rock because his voice is dark, it's like hearing a solo cello or something. The actual timbre of the voice is sombre even if he's actually singing about happy, ridiculous stuff, which often he is actually. There's a lot of humour in the songs, but because it has a slow, gravelly kind of sound to it it does invoke, as I always say to friends and journalists, 'fucking the heartstrings a little bit'.” With that kind of centrepoint around which to revolve, the band's job is all too clear.
“With the music, we've felt, especially live it happens, our job is to make the music dynamic and create arc and flow and make the song go somewhere. We're really sensitive to that and we've written great songs for the first minute and then they don't go anywhere and it doesn't last. Usually it's worked better for us to shade stuff in subtle ways and that's maybe why people call our music 'a grower' or maybe a harsher criticism is that it's boring. It does unfold slowly whereas we really wish sometimes we could be like The Darkness or something,” says Bryce, laughing. “The kind of wanky guitar solos and really over the top in your face stuff has never worked with what we do.”

Whether you take the screamed assault of Alligator era songs Mr November and Abel, the spiralling, brass-pounding anthem of Mistaken For Strangers or the dense, scrambling soundscapes of Terrible Love and Conversation 16, Bryce's point rings true. Colour, light, shade and subtlety are all necessary to trace the lines Matt has sketched for The National.
It's not necessarily a happy family all of the time. Bryce admits that “(Boxer) had been really hard to make and it was very contentious between us. We were disagreeing a fair amount on which direction we wanted to take.” Even a cursory listen to each album reveals a distinct difference in atmosphere, a result of the struggles between the band. Matt's extraordinary energy means that, despite his musical inability, the band are forced to trust his opinion and his obtuse descriptions. Though this is something they've learned to accept over the last decade.
“There is tension about that because sometimes he'll be like 'turn all the guitars up' and maybe he doesn't realise that the guitar is the only thing driving the harmony of the song. At the same time Matt is an incredibly gifted songwriter and we know that so he's right about 75% of the time. You've just gotta watch out for the 25% when he's totally full of it. But he tends to have good ideas probably because he doesn't play an instrument and because he doesn't have an attachment to anything he's played. 'Oh I love that guitar part' or 'oh I love that piano part I played'. That's what happens in bands full of heavy musicians and you get that problem of everyone wanting to hear what they did. It doesn't mean its good because you did it!” explains Bryce. “Sometimes it is limiting for us because he'll speak in non-musical metaphors about ideas he has but obviously we've been doing this for a while and it works and I think maybe Michael Stipe from REM works in a similar way. It's not so unique that he's the frontman and not playing an instrument. Its certainly good for us because otherwise I think a lot of bands that seem on paper to be collaborative, really are much less so. It's like one guy with a guitar who writes the song and he probably has the final say.”

They carve their way through acres of “sketches, which are demos of songs” to filter through the foliage sprouting from Aaron, Bryce, bassist Scott Devendorf and his brother Bryan playing drums, in order to strike gold.
“We have to give Matt a lot of music, and he'll listen to maybe 50 or 60 of these. I'll do a bunch, my brother probably does most of them and then Scott will do some and Bryan contributes to the rhythm but usually later once we know what we're working on, so it works like that and Matt might take one and go 'oh it's in the wrong key' or 'it's got to be faster' or 'I don't like the finger picking guitars, let's make it dirtier' or 'I like the B section' and it goes like that and goes back and forth and I'll make like 30 versions of the same thing,. Then once we know out of those that there's a song starting it'll probably go down to 25-30 of those that we can actually work out drum beats for and start to record basic ideas in the studio all together and that then goes to another level of Matt having to finish the lyrics. Then inevitably a bunch of those get tossed out as well and we get 15 or 20 that end up being finished songs.” The huge effort involved from each member in this process accounts for Bryce saying earlier in our transatlantic phone conversation that making an album is a “long and arduous” rigmarole. The results speak for themselves. High Violet churns, savages expectations and billows gently across a broiling soundscape. Terrible Love is somehow gentile and violent before physical tension is burst across an astounding jarring workout. Bloodbuzz Ohio recalls swarms of pain across fields, while Conversation 16 manages to expound the virtues of anxiety via an escalating, aural trauma. England is the most sublime, galloping classical piece they've done and Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks is practically gospel.

“We never really have a plan. I think its hard enough to do what we do, have five people make music together that we all like. There's definitely thematic elements in the lyrics that become cohesive part of the whole record that Matt worked on for a long time. Musically my brother and I write a lot of the music and what we try and do is push the band in a new direction every time even if it's in the same palette of music that we normally work with. I started orchestrating some of the songs whereas, in the past it's been Padma Newsome. He did England, the big one as far as being orchestral, but a bunch of the others I did and as far as playing the guitar, the piano and being directly inside what the music is, maybe it is true that the orchestration is sort of glued closer to what the band is doing,” admits Bryce. Guitar distortion coils around inflamed strings, filling the songs with static charge, pianos pound into cello serenity and clarinets jostle with Bryan's astounding drum ricochets. It's an astounding use of traditional instruments within a modern setting.
“The sound on Terrible Love was kind of happenstance, a kind of combination of effects that makes that crazy, woolly sound of guitars. It was something we stumbled on and just did it and we were able to keep it. To me Boxer became really, really elegant and a very manicured kind of record and High Violet opens that up. If you listen closely there's looser guitar playing it's rough around the edge is some places.” Bryce says that working alongside Kim Deal from Pixies, her looser style and way of composing, really helped to keep parts more natural and improvised in the studio, hence the rough edges on songs that are full of grandeur. Bryce has also worked with his favourite composer Steve Reich on the latter's latest record Double Sextet/2x5, and Lee Ronaldo of Sonic Youth in the past, again citing each man's fascinating approaches to musicality bringing a lot of inspiration to The National. The beginning flux of Boxer's Fake Empire alone recalls Reich's phasing techniques.
“We're collaborative musicians by nature and that doesn't just mean within The National,” says Bryce. “I think if it was just within The National, we'd get quite claustrophobic. I don't know how much the music could evolve if we weren't constantly opening ourselves up to new things and hearing new things and seeing how other people write songs.”

A band like this isn't your typical indie success story. Yet they've sold out three nights at Brixton Academy, as well as playing a sold out Royal Albert Hall earlier this year, and that's without mentioning that the day before this interview, the band played in Madison, Wisconsin at President Obama's request before he spoke to students at the university.
As Bryce admits, they aren't likely to be recognised and mobbed on the street yet touring has become more comfortable thanks to being able to afford a crew, festival billing has risen meaning more time to play to fans and though promo schedules have become tiring now, the overall feeling is that the band have achieved what they have in the right way, slowly but surely. “A lot of our favourite bands existed off the radar for so many years. I would say certainly with the Pixies, their reunion tour was much bigger than they were back in the day and we laugh because Alligator was mentioned as a record of the decade in a lot of places that didn't even list it as a record of the year initially. So it's sort of a funny thing of what time does to music or whatever, but we certainly don't have any chips on our shoulder about not having had success earlier or anything.”
So unstar-like are they that Bryce describes Matt as a “home-person”, as he has a wife and child and really struggles when on tour. Not just that, but his writing is inspired by the everyday, by a real life back at home with his family. “A lot of our songs are about real life or maybe the way we relate to real life, because sometimes touring is surreal so I think getting off tour and going home and absorbing yourself into a daily existence around a more normal schedule is improtant for the songs, what's in the songs,” says Bryce. “I think Matt really needs to get home and soak up a normal life before he'll feel like making a new record.”

They may even have reached the apex of what they've been doing for over a decade with High Violet. Certainly the almost consistently flawless work contained on their last three records draws the kind of defeated-sounding optimism and flight in the face of fear to the very brink of it's intensity and sonic possibility.
“In a way we feel we've achieved something with High Violet and maybe it's a chapter that's kind of closing. I'm not saying we're gonna take a drastic left turn but it definitely feels like it's more open to us now because we've been refining a certain sound and maybe it'll shift next time.” Whatever steps they take, we'll always be able to celebrate the sorrow and the small victories we win everyday with these songs, or endure, as Matt Berninger puts it, the 'uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults.'

Brad Barrett

Articles of 2010 Part IX: The Dillinger Escape Plan

Yeah so I'm cheating with the alphabetical thing now. This should really have been further back, as should The Chap. Still, who cares. I'm not in a record store.

The Dillinger Escape Plan mesh brutality and finesse...and then crush them both. But with Option Paralysis, the winding, waltzing jazz flecks became more than just mere flourishes and the compelling evolution that came with Ire Works continued into their most fully formed work so far. Frontman Greg may be a compact powerhouse, but his mind is working overtime constantly, proving DEP to be one of the most forward-thinking, passionate bands in existence. Plus various members hang from ceilings while playing on occasion. Undeniable. "There has to be intent in everything", indeed.

The Dillinger Escape Plan

Almost nothing can prepare the uninitiated for the aural ferocity of The Dillinger Escape Plan. It truly is something to behold. Mere moments into their fourth longplayer, Option Paralysis, you’ve been lulled into a false sense of security with slinky, sleazy, clean chords. You’ll never trust anything ever again. The blazing intensity and complexity of the unexpected warring guitars, scattershot drums and Greg Puciato’s terrifying vocals all consume you immediately. Within a minute you’ve been tricked at least three times more: frenetic turns to hammering power chords which melt into clean tremolo strumming which lurches into eerie voices upon sweep-picked jazz scales. By the end of the fifth minute of Farewell, Mona Lisa, you’ve got an indelible choral refrain painted in your head and your expectations will never be the same again. You may have to take a breath before going any further. If this all sounds like hyperbole, try and remember the first time you heard something you’d never heard before; something so audacious, brave yet completely convincing in its power. You’ve just imagined what you’ll feel when you hear Option Paralysis for the first time.
“We’ve tapped into some creative artery that we need to fucking mine as much as we can because we feel like little kids right now,” says Greg, sitting opposite Playmusic at the unseemly hour of noon in the Camden Barfly venue where, later today, the band will play two shows: one in the afternoon and one in the evening. “We’ve had so much stress and inner turmoil. We started to believe the lie that we had to be fighting with one another to make something good and I do believe there has to be challenge and conflict but it shouldn’t have to be between us.” You’d give anything not to be the challenge or conflict in Greg’s way. He’s a striking figure, a short but stocky powerhouse whose figure can be seen throwing itself upon audience’s heads and hanging from light riggings by its legs. A man possessed by the pure energy of the music this quintet have somehow formulated against the odds.
“We’ve never had the same lineup between records. It’s crazy. Well, this is the best we’ve ever felt. This is the first time we haven’t been fighting a lot. This is the first time there hasn’t been some kind of stress on the horizon,” explains Greg. Dillinger’s potted history is renowned. Greg stepped into the vocalist role after a self titled mini LP, The Running Board EP, their debut proper Calculating Infinity and the Irony Is A Dead Scene EP with the inimitable vocal virtuoso Mike Patton. The result was Miss Machine, where Greg admirably altered the tone of the band for the better. 2007’s stunning Ire Works was marked by the departure of founding member and co-constructor Chris Pennie, leaving guitarist Ben Weinman as the only remaining original DEP conspirator. Though Gil Sharone stepped into his shoes for their third album, he was never considered a permanent member. “We knew that Gill wasn’t the permanent guy going into it. Even when we went into the tour we knew there would be an end we just didn’t know when it was going to be because he knew we knew everyone knew it was temporary.” Billy Rymer however has already earnt his stripes, collaborating with housemate Ben in the early stages of Option Paralysis. “They would wake up in the morning and start working on songs everyday so they formed more organically. They went in directions on their own instead of forcing yourself to write something. We actually ended up writing the record much faster than normal and to me I think its better. I think in the past we’ve been stuck on this thing where we need to take forever to write records to justify to ourselves that we worked hard. People being in a room together and listening to a million different variations on the fly, seeing what works and what doesn’t, instead of being in a bedroom by yourself thinking of how something will sound loud makes a big difference.”
These directions are both surprising and wholly welcome. After the electronic experiments that underpinned Ire Works in sound and writing process, we hear a greater sense of space, string arrangements and real tugs at the DEP signature sound. Yes it has those extreme time signatures, that incomprehensible fret work and Greg’s impassioned roar. But it also contains some of Greg’s most touching vocal performances and some exceptional ivory melodies from pianist Mike Garson. With these sonic lattices co opting the airwaves, it’s inconceivable how Greg still manages to make such a striking and integral impact within the songs, both lyrically and vocally. Part of it is down to an honest approach to writing words and melodies, as he explains.
“I have to have an emotional attachment otherwise I might as well just yell syllables and consonants and vowels. When I’m writing vocal parts I’ll write patterns before I have words. Kinda like scatting you know? And sometimes I actually get stuck on some of the vowel sounds so I find words that sound like gibberish that come out of my mouth but for the most part even if that’s the case the lyrics have to mean something to me. It’s my one chance every couple of years to really dig deep and get something good out of myself. It’s good for me to find more out about myself artistically to figure out what’s going on.”
For a band so replete with nourishment, to be able to express yourself vividly through a vocal performance must be an eye opener. Greg’s free-writing is often a “revelation” to himself. “Every time we’ve written an album, I’ve kinda peeled back layers of myself that I wasn’t aware of and it’s a good thing. That to me is the point. If there’s no honesty then art isn’t that interesting to me. If there’s no soul to something, what’s the point? That’s why I’ve never really understood trying to pick a certain topic and writing about it, especially in a style of music that is inherently very emotional. It seems to make more sense to give a shit about what you’re saying.”
Weirdly, this 'style of music' is often criticised by those who don’t really listen to it as being overly dramatic and that lyrics are lost amongst the noise of the delivery. It’s also what makes a lot of metal sound so awfully generic and throwaway at times. Yet, with torrents of emotion pouring forth from each element of the band, DEP never fall into that category.
“I’m less afraid of my own voice than I used to be and I think when you’re a kid it’s very easy to yell and scream. It’s what you want to do; you’re full of piss and venom. I think as you get older you start to realise you can be extremely effective in other ways. Way heavier and way more impactful than yelling all the time. Because when you start off screaming there’s really nowhere to go, you’re already at 10 so you can’t do anything but drop down and when you drop down its underwhelming so I’m starting to realise that if you keep your average around seven, it’s still pretty intense but you have room to go down to two or up to 10 and that’s way more interesting to me. I love screaming honestly but to me it’s not about trying to make vocals fit. Like I don’t wanna force screaming I don’t wanna force singing. As long as you’re comfortable with every tool in your arsenal it should all flow freely.”
It’s a far cry from composing, yet while Greg is insistent that thinking corrupts the original idea, there’s still a lot of work that goes into it. This isn’t ‘do what you feel’, this is ‘expell what you need to express’. There’s a difference.
“I try to write as fast as I really can then go back a day later and then be critical because it’s important to have that initial block of output to be pure and then later on you can refine it but that initial thing has to be to be like shooting it out of yourself.”
There’s so much to discuss – self-releasing their new record via their own label Party Smasher Inc., their dedication to the band meaning each member knows every detail from finances to t-shirt material, the need for perspective on work/life balance, their European tour of small venues as a treat for fans, reaching your thirties – but sticking to the core and heart of DEP is perhaps where we learn the most.
“The key for me now is to make sure things are honest,” says Greg. “Because I don’t ever want it to become consonants and vowels and not even know what’s coming out of my mouth. There has to be intent to everything.”

Articles of 2010 Part VIII: The Chap

So I've been told recently that I take criticism to heart, and that may be true but I never really see the point in seeking anyone's approval. I'm generally proud of what I do without being self-satisfied. There's always improvements to make, always tonnes to learn and that's the way it should be, otherwise why carry on? By the same token, I don't compare anything I write to anyone else because I don't see the point. However anyone who says in his bio, with all seriousness, that "he even rejects typical notions of creativity...and instead sees himself as one who simply reflects the earthly forces and realities that surround him," should probably look a bit deeper at himself and work out exactly the point when his head and anal passage become fused instead of criticising others.

Anyway, The Chap are fucking amazing and need far more attention than I can give them. But at least I'm doing something.

The Chap

Pop music should be mined, explored and retrieved from an array of wild ideas. Some of the best songs ever have been the result of madcap ideas: slashing speaker cones a la The Kinks or nicking Kerry King from Slayer like the Beastie Boys. This bravery doesn't often extend to entire catalogues of work though. The Chap's version of pop music is formed from a constant disregard for formulas and playing safe. That's why their four albums are all sublime yet inextricably weaved works of eccentric sounds and noises.
“On this one and the previous album, we were aiming at writing some very shiny, straight forward pop music. In both cases (Mega Breakfast more than Well Done Europe), some of that old screetchy chap magic kept sneaking back in and made it all a lot less commercial than originally intended. We just can’t help ourselves! On Mega Breakfast, the poppiness was intended to sound quite sick and misplaced, which I think it ended up doing to quite an extent. On Well Done Europe, we allowed ourselves to be a bit warmer or - dare I say it - heartfelt with it.” Heartfelt? Weirdly, Well Done Europe sounds less sardonic and as if it's striving to capture some delightful melodic suss the band have hitherto thrown to the wind.
“When we start trying to make an idea into a song, we often go through a long process of rejection of ideas until we find a concept we want to go with. In the old days, these concepts usually consisted of trying to subvert the traditional pop song format by recording stuff really badly and trying to think of the least likely reference to juxtapose the initial recording with. These days, the subversion seems to stem more from the realisation that we have become characterised as this lo fi weirdo underground group and are consequently trying to make everything sound as slick as our budget home studio set-up allows. But in a slightly wrong and unsettling way.” The Chap seem concerned with deconstruction. Even Your Friend, for instance, has a typically deadpan female vocal, some innocuous warped sounds in the background and a steady beat. This soon gets co-opted by huge sampled choral crescendos, twisted, muffled voices, an almost freeform bassline before it all collides into a choppy, anthemic chorus. It's bewildering and brilliant. The amount of throwaway innovation is reminiscent of the approach recently reformed 90s eccentrics Pavement had, unafraid to plunge songs into gallons of awkward ideas.
It's extremely difficult to divide The Chap's musical direction from their consistently intriguing and hilarious lyrical stance. This is without mentioning the pop culture references such as the snippet of Dancing In The Dark by Springsteen in Well Done You. Consider this gem: 'Well done you, you've really really got the hang of it/that's excellent stuff there..../we're really glad to have you with us/I know you were struggling at first/but soon you tackled it head on/and that was quite a feat considering..' Somehow the languishing and deadpan delivery of the vocals seems to overlap with the slick, ambiguous feel and texture of the music. “As with the musical content, we try to come up with something unusual. We will sometimes come up with a concept or just write down phrases which spring to mind by free association. The lyrics are very important, but not necessarily in a way of a particular meaning. That said, more recently, we have started writing songs which actually have an easily indentifiable meaning, like We Work In Bars or Chalet Chalet.”
This patchwork approach goes hand in hand with their similarly sewn musical ouvre. The result is that The Chap's output is distinctive and a refreshing dunk into the oft murky waters of independently weaved pop music. Legendary sonic crackpot Frank Zappa once asked whether humour belongs in music – naturally he had already answered yes to his own question – and it seems ludicrous, in light of bands such as The Chap, that such a question need be asked.
“After making quite a conscious decision to have almost only straight forward song structures on Well Done Europe, we are planning to come back soon with a classic chap style album… I think we’ve just about had it with trying to be Fleetwood Mac all the time! ‘Cause we’re not!” They may not be Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, but to deny them their little niche for not following the accepted rules – including striving for hooks in places where most fear to tread, perhaps because they might appear less serious and committed – would not only be unfair but actually extremely short sighted.

Brad Barrett

Articles Part VII: Portico Quartet

Currently in limbo, the only way to retain normality is to continue writing about my own writing. Well meta. Here's the seventh article I was most proud of from last year.
With the re-release of their fantastic second album, Isla, last year Portico Quartet deserved a second shot at wider acclaim. Their instrumental, resonating ambient-flecked jazz suits a certain mood - partially melancholy but hopeful anyway. The perfect antidote to overly skronky or intricate meanderings, their sound is built around one instrument - one that you'd be forgiven for thinking was unnecessary in any other place. But within their context, it more than makes sense - it's almost the instrument's entire purpose. And how many musical groups are capable of that?


Portico Quartet

Rarely do we find an artist’s entire output inspired by and reliant on a fairly unfamiliar instrument. Joanna Newsom’s harp is perhaps the only exception we can think of here. The East London-based Portico Quartet are not only one of those rarities but an astonishing discovery in their own right as well. The band’s second album Isla, released in autumn last year, is an exceptional work bereft of cliché and imbued with an exceptional command of jazz and ‘world’ music instruments to craft a gripping, gooseflesh-inducing sound.
The story itself is a suitably heartening one. Nick Mulvey discovered the hang at the WOMAD music festival. “I heard the sound first and saw a crowd of people and just loved the sound of it. It wasn’t like anything I’d heard before. Very quickly I forced my way to the front of the queue and had a go and found that I could play it, not because of any particular gift, but it’s a very intuitive instrument so I could play it instantly.” This rudimentary-looking pitted steel UFO is a Swiss made alien object, with a bewitching sound. Portico Quartet’s elegant yet riveting soundscapes are formed from the simple sculpted steel drum noise through which treated saxophone and double bass swarm and penetrate.
“I’ll put a hang pattern together that has a nice pocket of space and then maybe an inherent tension like it’s asking a question. Then Duncan (Bellamy – drummer) locks in very quickly just using the bell of his hi hat and I know already this is going to go somewhere because we’re already making a nice sound and he’s only using a fraction of his kit, he’s still got all the rest to play yet. Milo (Fitzpatrick – double bass) might have a little lick on the bass and if it catches very quickly we all slot into place around it and usually a groove forms and we’re all jamming on the groove and then we’d then sculpt a tune out of it, pull stuff back and Jack Wylie (saxophone) will find a melody. The second album was largely how can we push beyond this method. Part of the thing is we think textually rather than develop the harmonies like a jazz pianist might, it’s about textures and sound worlds.”

Their balance of composition and improvisation leads not only to incredible studio takes but sophisticated, sensual and haunting live deviations. It was this other worldly sound which brought them from casual busking as students to playing a sold out Barbican in London back in March.
“We’d had one jam in our student halls of residence and everyone, all the students hanging around were like ‘that’s wicked’ so we thought ‘fuck it let’s go down Southbank’ and the response was really overwhelming and we made £300 in a couple of hours. The next Saturday we made more and a festival promoter from Italy walked past and loved it. We started to meet people in the media who were walking down and our repertoire began to solidify, so it was just became a good place to play. I think after the first week we invested one months earnings into an industrial CD burner, went to a mates private studio, recorded four or five of the first tracks and then printed up about 100 copies. We went to the Southbank the next day and shifted all of them for a fiver. Next week we did 200 copies and suddenly we’re making a grand a weekend for five hours work. So we quit all our bar jobs and we were making much better money much easier playing the music we really love. The whole thing, in a way, encouraged itself. We never had any intention. We feel really lucky about it.”

From these humble beginnings, three or four years later, Portico Quartet are working with renowned producer John Leckie. Far from the Muse and Radiohead records he’s known for, Leckie has worked with a huge amount of different music (the India Soundpad project covered by PMP last year for instance). He contacted the band’s new record label Real World, owned by Peter Gabriel, after he heard them play the Mercury Music Prize ceremony for which their debut Knee Deep In The North Sea was nominated. On the same week John contacted Real World, Real World were attempting to contact him for the same reason.
“Having the rock background was really useful for us because we wanted a slightly more muscular sound on the second album,” explains Nick. “We wanted someone who had made a hundred second albums and wasn’t 25 years old and not someone who would interfere in our process too much or at all because we know what we want to do musically.” John Leckie turned out to be the perfect choice.
The proof is contained on Isla, which captures the scintillating results of hard work, inspiration and creativity. In following nothing other than their love of music, Portico Quartet have stumbled upon that remarkably elusive tryst which blossoms from unexpected meeting to rewarding romance. Listening is all it takes to hear why.

Brad Barrett

Articles of 2010 Part VI: Frank Turner

After three years of trying, I finally managed to get Frank Turner a cover with Playmusic. This is significant because we've both been long term supporters of each other. It just so happens that Kerrang! beat us, which is just the way it goes. I shouldn't have to spout on about what FT means to my friends and I, how his lyrics saved one of my friend's life, to the point where he now lives with someone he truly loves somewhere in the American continent, how his music has affected myself and always reminds me of home, especially now I'm in Germany. His cover rates alongside my Sonic Youth one in personal victories and that is a huge deal. So without further blathering, here's the cover I produced in August 2010. May it be the second of many others for possibly the hardest working man in music today (apart from Peter Andre of course).

Meeting up with Frank Turner and having a chat has become a yearly occurrence. We're too busy for anything more. In the past six months folk-rock songwriter Frank has visited Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China and Israel all for the first time, toured America a bit, headlined his first festival and supported Green Day at Wembly Stadium. He has reached this plateau in just under five years; since September 2005, in fact, when he first took his sadly departed first and only acoustic guitar out on the road and proceeded to never look back.
“I'm gonna get a tiny bit defensive now and even get a bit of my pride out on show,” he warns while supping a pint of golden nectar in a Notting Hill beer garden towards the end of our interview. “It's just funny because there is a folk punk thing, particularly in America. But in the UK five years ago, people thought I was fucking mental when I said this was what I was gonna do and retrospectively even I think I was mental as well. I don't wanna sound prissy about this but it wasn't the obvious move. So, yes, I do feel vindicated about that.”

Ask Frank what has been most fulfilling about his rise to headlining venues like Brixton Academy, which he will do in December, he'll explain that it's the publicly perceived sense that his rise “isn't a fabricated or a flash in the pan thing”. He admits with blunt honesty that he has never hidden his roots and never wanted to. “I can't claim and don't see the point of claiming and will never claim to be working class in anything that I do in my life with the possible exception of the way I've gone about my career which is that I've done this through graft and I'm proud of that fact. It's the one bit of blue collar in my life.” For a man rapidly approaching his 1000th show in five years, this is no overstatement. Playmusic, in all its guises, has followed Frank from his early shows at tiny acoustic clubs like Monkey Chews in Chalk Farm, open mic nights at The Snooty Fox in Canonbury and three shows at the local Tunbridge Wells Forum. The gig count is well into double figures but that's only roughly about 2-3% of his actual gigging schedule. Which perhaps puts his work rate into perspective for even the most sceptical of you.

Between that time he has also released three full-length albums, an armful of EPs, split singles – all collected on The First Three Years - and two DVDs plus a live recording of his triumphant Shepherd's Bush Empire show in 2009. He's also contributed to several tribute albums (the highlight of which is the excellent Mark Mulcahy tribute album made to raise funds to help the American songwriter raise his family and continue to make music after the death of his wife), been added to countless compilations and has guested on records by Chris T-T and The Dawn Chorus of late. Prolific just about covers it and with a new EP out November, there's no shortage of songs in the Turner canon it seems. “One of the things that drives me to write as much as I can and tour as much as I can, is, to be very specific about it, Bob Dylan in the late seventies. If even Bob Dylan can run out of juice then everyone's gonna run out and that makes me hammer it for all its worth. Of course, if I run out of songs than I'll just coast, tour and not release new material,” he adds, laughing.

“I want to see it as a way into the new album,” Frank says of the new five track EP. “I'm quite confident in the stockpile of songs I've got at the moment and its almost quite hard to choose what songs are gonna go on the EP rather than the record but I think its important to stress that it's not gonna be second class songs on the EP. The lead track is gonna be I Still Believe which is rapidly turning into a live favourite.” Frank's recent iTunes Festival performance at the Roundhouse included this huge, jaunty singalong. With lyrics espousing the virtues of rock and roll, a choral echo primed for arenas and a central lyric that goes 'I still believe (I still believe)/In the need for guitar and drums and desperate poetry', its no surprise that about its first UK outing at a last minute secret show at The Flowerpot in Kentish Town Frank says “the crowd response to it was totally overwhelming, more for any new song I've ever had”. Nevertheless, while he is aware of the importance of meshing his passionate lyricism with indelible hooks, something he's incredibly adept at, it's not necessarily the most fulfilling of his oeuvre for him.
“That was an easy song for me to write. I can already tell you what my favourite song on the next record is going to be and it's not going to be a crowd favourite and we probably won't play it more than once live”, he admits. “It's just got an incredibly dense and complicated set of lyrics that took me forever and its the closest I've ever felt that I've got to writing poetry in my life. I just spent ages on meter and rhythm and rhyming structure. This is not a gripe in anyway but I always felt like people hone in on the more simplistic stuff, with the notable exception of 'Prufrock' which is a crowd favourite and one of the best sets of words I've ever turned out. I'm just geeky about words,” he says, shrugging.

Frank has made no secret of his adoration and continuous research into English folk music, another subject he can be incredibly 'geeky' about. He points to his suitcase – awaiting its trip to Canada the very next morning - which has a volume detailing the history of English folk songs during our conversation. He has also recorded a version of Barbara Allen, first mentioned as a Scottish folk song in Samuel Pepys diary, as well as performing it completely acapella at Shepherd's Bush Empire. This may well have started a trend. “I've been writing a few acapella songs recently. I also found this old myth which is a folk tale from the New Forest, which is just down the road from where I'm from. William II, was killed in a hunting accident in the forest and there's a local myth that his father William the Conqueror stole commoner John the Blacksmith's land for royal hunting grounds and John the Blacksmith laid a curse on the King and said 'I'll kill your son for stealing my land.' I'm just trying to turn that into a traditional song.” Frank also isn't shy about his libertarian political standpoint. Songs like Sons of Liberty should make that really clear. Discussing everything from government funded lobby/charity groups and his distaste for such a practice to the real Robin Hood being a tax-hating worker, its easy to get Frank onto a tangent which eludes an answer entirely, while showing how much he thinks, reads, absorbs and consequently, has to say. The topic of place spreads from “a slight obsession with Ernest Hemingway and this idea of collecting experience,” to the possibility of playing prison shows around London and even the Alternative USO, for US soldiers at military bases and even Afghanistan. He references Kerouac's On The Road and being asked by an American customs official on the phone if he was “the singer in Million Dead”. These tangents are triggered simply by his need to express his love of new experiences and returning to his own country.
“In the last couple of days I've just finished a song about rivers and England. Even when talking about something else, when there comes a time to mention a city or a place, without wanting to sound like Lily Allen, (mocking singing voice)'al fresco, Tesco', I'd rather drop Manchester or Exeter into a song. I probably go more to Denver than I do Exeter but Exeter sounds more relevant to me. I completely agree with you that a sense of place is fascinating and really important and that's one of the many things that attracts me to folk music generally. When I go to other places I'm always super interested in how people live, how other people work and I think it makes me appreciate my own cultural and political identity a little more.”
It's an issue that dominates the media, arts and, yes, songwriting and it's genuinely refreshing to have an increasingly popular musician approach the matter from both a personal and educated standpoint.

Perhaps the biggest shift from his defiantly solo beginnings, and one that originally caused a schism between fans, has been the introduction of his band. They comprise of three members of Oxford band Dive Dive – bassist Tarrant Anderson, guitarist Ben Lloyd and drummer Nigel Powell – and keys player/multi-instrumentalist Matt Nasir. Though they've been present since the first full band show in Oxford's Port Mahon on 20th January 2007, with Matt joining in October of 2008, third album Poetry of the Deed is the first to have the whole band recording their parts in the studio at the same time. “I still say this is MY project and I have done this,” proclaims Frank. “(But) there are one or two songs I don't like and/or can't do solo already, though I have to say I'm slightly annoyed by that because I do like the idea that there's always a solo version of the song that I can play.”
Though Frank refutes the idea that he couldn't imagine his songs without the other musician's contributions, he's very stringent on one point: “I certainly don't want to play with any other musicians any time soon,” he says. “We've actually legally bound ourselves to each other quite recently which I'm very happy about and I was keen to do. There's a strength to the paradigm of one man and his guitar which is important, and there is a reason I'm doing this under my own name and not in a band and all the rest of it, so I don't want to lose sight of any of that but they are important to what I do, particularly to the live show now.” Yet, there have been challenges along the way. Not least the balance between being the four guys in Frank's backing band, and turning into a band with equal billing to Frank himself. His rather cynical but hilarious nickname given to him by the band is 'the product', which aptly distinguishes their roles.
“In the annals of rock and roll, there's not that many well-known established backing bands. There's E Street, there's Crazy Horse but its a delicate balance and I think its great that the guys in the band have got that now. I'm more than happy and comfortable to talk about them in interviews and introduce them on stage and I like that its got to a point where people know them by name. Fans are like 'hey it's Nigel' backstage.”

Inevitably, for a man wanting to distance himself from previous working practices in hardcore and rock bands, there has been a certain amount of “headbutting”when working on new material. “We're still learning. See, one of my reservations about Poetry of the Deed as a record is that I got overly carried away with recording with a band. I think arrangement wise it just kinda goes like that,” he says moving his hand upon an invisible horizontal conveyor belt. “Whereas Love Ire and Song and Sleep Is For the Week have a lot more peaks and troughs. I think part of the reason for that is I was like 'I've got a band in the studio! Everybody play all the time, on everything!' and I think for the next record I'm now less worried saying to a band member, 'hey, you know what? You're not playing on this one'. I feel like we're reaching an equilibrium now and I would love to look back like Springsteen at, say, Born To Run through to Born In The USA, where there's that string of great E-Street band records. I'd love to look from Poetry of the Deed through to whatever album in the same way...”

A week ago at time of writing, Frank won the Kerrang! No Half Measures award, formally the Spirit of Independence award which has seemingly been renamed specifically for him. I don't think there's many who would argue with the sentiment and, as a final example of why he deserves this recognition, Frank tackles my query on just why he considers himself an entertainer rather than an artist. “I don't think there's anything more pretentious than referring to yourself as an artist. I think other people can decide whether what you do is art. Obviously what I do is songwriting and in a broader sense I'm an entertainer. There are people who are very snobby about the term entertainer. Off the top of my head (political activist punk band and one of Frank and my favourite bands as younger men) Propagandhi said: 'It seems we're only here to entertain.' And I think 'ONLY entertain?'. See, you can tie yourself in with travelling players and vaudeville and anyone who has got up on a stage and tried to make people feel better about their life. I actually happen to think that's a very noble tradition to be a part of. So if someone else wants to describe what I do as art, that's fine I'm just not gonna get involved. It's not really for me to say. Actually, I don't think it's for anyone to say except when I'm dead, or at least, older. I think Born To Run is art and I think first of all, we can judge this more than Springsteen can and second we can judge it because it has survived the passage of time and it has become a cultural landmark, in a way. I don't wanna stand here and say I engage in art. I engage in songwriting which might cumulatively become art. I certainly think that of all the tests to establish whether something is art or not, the test of time is a pretty strong one. Townes Van Zandt was really not popular in the day but he has endured and the reason he's endured is because he was a fabulous artist. I know it sounds like a self absorbed thing to be concerned about, but first of all I don't like the connotations of the word artist because the kind of people who describe themselves as artists are cunts. But, also, I'm really bothered about reclaiming the term entertainer. I have this mental image of the old luvvie getting up to play a pantomime dame for the 700th time at the age of 75 and saying 'my public need me' and you know what, they fucking do. And its not because you're saving the world, but because everyone needs to have their mind taken off things. Life is horrible and entertainment and friends are God's compensation. Loudon Wainwright does that for me. He's a consummate entertainer. He tells jokes and tells stories and plays songs and gets the crowd on side and I really like picturing myself like him. I'd love to be Neil Young, doing stadium shows when I'm 60 years old but if I'm like Loudon, who is still just on the road and got enough of a crowd to pay his petrol and the hotel, I'm in.” I've said it before, and I'll continue to say it: this country needs Frank Turner; his band, his energy, his attitude, his guitar, his voice and his desperate poetry. Because if there's anyone in music who can inspire you to do the very best you can and disregard the bloated ambitions of wannabe rock stars, it's him.

Articles of 2010 Part V: Field Music

Part five of my alphabetical retrospective of interview features I wrote for Playmusic last year continues with the return - in a collective sense - of Field Music. The brothers Brewis are essentially Field Music. Andrew Moore may play drums, but it seems the trio format was always dispensable. The second self-titled album was entirely written and recorded by the Sunderland pair after they separated their efforts into two projects: namely School of Language and The Week That Was, though they both played on each other's 'solo' records.
The point is that this musical collective is fluid, not confined to the band format and the results have always been some of the consistently brilliant guitar pop in the UK. Below is the result of two inspiring phone conversations with the two men and they remain two of my favourite musicians to talk to, to quiz and to challenge. That they were so well rewarded by the UK press upon their return fills me with a lot of satisfaction. They are two of the few who truly deserve every good thing that comes their way.

What’s your motivation for making music? Have you ever questioned why you are doing and how you are doing it? Are you afraid of cracking open that particular Pandora’s Box for fear of what may spring out at you? The reason for asking, for even getting those though processes churning, is that Field Music’s new double album – their finest work to date – was born almost directly from the consequences of those questions.

The way to purify the music making process is to strip away any distracting notions that pervade upon your creative intentions. Peter and David Brewis halted Field Music’s progress after 2007’s Tones of Town because of a myriad of reasons but the one they both seem to agree on is this: “Wait a minute! We’ve accidentally become a band!” Peter exclaims, mirroring his thoughts after completing their second record. “We were in the same sort of game as Kaiser Chiefs or Bloc Party. We didn’t ever see ourselves as that sort of thing. It wasn’t really the kind of music we listen to but we felt like we needed to try and be successful because we ended up in that game and I think we just thought: let’s just stop. Let’s not do Field Music anymore.”

The result was not the loss of a promising and dedicated pop band, but rather the production of two more excellent records the following year: the laptop-rock groove of School of Language, helmed by David, and the ambitious orchestral concept album The Week That Was, led by Peter. These two releases proved David’s point that “within the sphere of indie band music, it seems like a lot of people care more about bands than the music and being in a band gets in the way of making interesting music. For us that’s a definite no no.”

With such undeniably diverse output from the same team members, albeit under the guise of solo projects, the decision to go back to Field Music feels less of a surprise and more like returning to a blueprint with a permanent black marker and some fresh designs. The critically-acclaimed album Field Music (Measure) refuses to adhere to preconceptions of what a double album should be. It does not run together smoothly. It doesn’t stick with a theme. It doesn’t even stick to a single genre with everything from funk, “musical nonsense” and found sound improvisation creeping in. “You always need something to begin with like ‘why are we actually making a record?’ It’s not to make any money because we’re never gonna do that. It’s not to be famous because we’re not interested in that. So what it is that we want to do? We’d been listening to Tusk and the White album and Physical Graffitti and things like that so we really though ‘wouldn’t it be really good fun and a good challenge to try and make a really long record?’ I think we just wanted to confuse ourselves a bit and try and make something a bit sprawling really, something that doesn’t make that much sense.” Peter’s honesty here is mirrored by his brother. Modest ambitions, a sense that music is not just their passion but something to be enjoyed and, perhaps most of all, as suggested by his own question, the need to remain true to the core of their songwriting experiences.
“We were of the mindset of: ‘oh I’ve got this piece of music and though I’ve not heard any Pink Floyd albums I think it sounds like Pink Floyd but shall we put it on the album anyway?’ ‘Yes let’s do it!’ ‘I’ve got this song and it’s got this really kind of daft bluesy guitar riff which we would’ve never done before. Shall we put it on the album anyway?’ ‘Is it good?’ ‘I think so.’ ‘Yes then we’ll put it on!’ There was no attempt to make it seamlessly smooth and coherent.”

Of course, siblings in musical collaborations have a long rock history. As we’ve already covered in several short paragraphs, you’d expect by now that Field Music have very little in common with the Gallaghers and Davies’ of this stereotypical and outland musical world.
“I think we’re inspired by each other’s better songs. Peter brings in a song and I’m like ‘oh that’s great I wish I’d done something like that’. It may be slightly easier for us in that, well, we love each other! Sometimes we get pretty frustrated with each other but that competitiveness is never, ever a negative thing. It’s always tinged with pride and with love,” gushes David.
“Whoever writes the song, that’s the person who is in charge. It’s more difficult when we’re mixing and doing the mastering and deciding on track order because that’s when the democracy gets tested,” explains Peter. “We trust each other’s intentions and, it sounds really pretentious but, maybe also each others vision. Dave knows what he’s doing. If he needs me then he’ll ask me. If he can play something better than I can than he’ll do it himself and that’s fine. Some tracks I’m hardly on and some tracks Dave’s hardly on. In fact one of the tracks Let’s Write a Book…I went on holiday for a few days over the summer and I got back to the studio and Dave’s like: ’Hey I’ve recorded this song. Whaddya think?’ And I thought ‘Ah what?!’ To me that’s probably the best song on the record and I’m not on it.”
Nevertheless, there’s hardly a hint of jealousy, especially as Peter rationalises it by comparing the making of their new record to other classics: “I think Paul McCArtney played 90% of the instruments on the White Album, and probably Lyndsey Buckingham played 70% on Tusk. You start to think that’s fine. It’s important we enjoy the process. We’ve not enjoyed making records before. We tried to make sure everyone was involved all the time and now we just don’t bother. We’re fine getting on with things.”

Field Music (Measure) is an inspiring work. It’s a collection of twenty songs linked only by the Brewis’ and their studio. There were no rules laid down except for the one David expresses early on during our phone interview: “We wanna be able to make the best music we can make and operate in a way that conforms to our principles about music and our principles about how things should be.” From the exquisite merging of tinglingly picked acoustic guitar and regal string refrains on Measure to the bewildering “dissonant harmony” funk of Let’s Write A Book, there’s nothing here that doesn’t manage to capture those lofty goals. The result is armfuls of memorable melodies and a range of expressions which stretch from poignant all the way to celebratory.

Field Music’s key workspace is their studio to the point where David says that “our approach to making records is entirely formed by always recording ourselves.” It seems that self recording has been so essential to Field Music’s ethos that it’s inconceivable that they could work any other way. “I can’t imagine me not knowing how I wanted something to sound and I think really what we’ve found out over the years is we can pick up enough of the technical skills required to do whatever we need to do in an independent way much faster than we can explain to someone else what we’re trying to do. And that’s been made even more stark because there are so few new records we’re interested in. So it’s not like ‘oh I love the sound of that record. I want to work with that person because I think he’ll understand what we do’. There aren’t really any examples of that. The records that we like the sound of are usually stylistically a long way away from what we do. Of course we couldn’t afford a producer, so it’s completely theoretical anyway,” says David.
As well as saving money you don’t have in the long-run, ‘home’ recording has myriad benefits from the skills you develop to being able to realising the soundscape in your head in your own time. Field Music clearly relish the opportunity to craft the sounds they want within the confines of their own studio, as David explains. “Every song we keep trying to find a better way of doing something or we’ll have an idea and you’ll have to go through the quite fun process of figuring out technically how we can do that with our fairly limited resources. That’s something which entirely comes from recording ourselves. Also, coming form a point of really limited technical expertise, we don’t really know the proper ways of doing anything and most of the recording techniques that we use that I really like are, in one sense or another, against the rules. We record most things in ways that are unlike what you’d see in most of the studios that we could ever afford.”
Both David and Peter record ideas on their laptops, using software to compose before bringing those ideas to fruition in their studio. Not all the sounds on Field Music (Measure) are from instruments either. The last four songs on the fourth side – the Brewis’ always think in terms of vinyl with all their records – utilise sounds Peter recorded outside, including at his favourite café in his hometown of Sunderland. “It comes from an idea of improvisation when in our general every day lives people move around, they shiuffle their feet, they make noises they drive their cars they whistle they mutter away they beep their horns - there’s no such thing as an unmusical sound and that’s because everything has I suppose what you’d call a gesture. Rather than just having a pitch or a rhythm it has a movement to it, a certain shape and a dynamic to the sound. Those things aren’t really made by accident I don’t think. They’re made by physical things that we’re doing. In that loose sense the idea was that people are making music that I could accompany on piano or marimba or with strings.”

With refreshing approaches like these, a free spirit sense to recording thanks to their own studio and that constant guiding passion of principles throughout, it’s no real surprise that Playmusic considers Field Music one of the finest pop bands of the last decade. Similarly, it’s very hard to argue with David’s sentiments when he unexpectedly, but justifiably, let’s rip about a few untruths about music which Field Music are fundamentally opposed to. “There’s a real sheen of dishonesty which runs through the music business, which is distasteful because pop music sells itself by its authenticity. There’s fuck all of that as far as I can see. Authenticity has become like a genre rather than having anything deep seeded to it and musicians up and down the land are completely deluding themselves that they are honest and that they just ‘do what they feel’. When people say ‘I just do what I feel’ it means ‘I don’t want to think about it because I probably won’t like what it is’. I want to define us as being against that. It especially galls me that people associate not thinking about stuff as being authentic. ‘We don’t think about what we do, we just do it.’ Well for a start that’s not how thought works. It’s certainly not how my creative process works yet there’s this whole mythology around just ‘doing what you feel’ and not thinking about it coz that just spoils it. Well, what that mostly equates to is people repeating themselves, deluding themselves and making very sub-standard copies of whatever was most prevalent when they were 18. Obviously when I put it in those kind of propaganda terms it doesn’t sound like a very good idea.”

Field Music balance intelligence and intuition, understand that great accomplishments come from hard work, not some outdated notion of spiritual guidance and refuse to let anything get in the way of a good song. They understand that “the whole act of recording music is pretty contrived and ridiculous” which is why their new record is elaborate, open minded and, yes, in places just slightly ridiculous. Hardly ever does a musical duo come along that is so aware of what they want to do, why they want to do it and are so riddled with conviction on how they are going to do it. So, please, make the most of what we’ve got and hopefully you’ll be inspired enough to follow your own path too.