I Can Hear The Telephone is also out as a single this week with a Billy Childish lead vocal on the flipside - another Fogerty tune in Walking On The Water. Good stuff!
There haven't been many print/online interviews yet (I would love to hear what Mr Childish himself had to say about the recording/project) but there's a pretty good one today which talks about another new album on the cards - a single mic, Dan Of Green Gables style one. Proper release not cdr only please, Overlords of the music industry!
http://figure8magazine.co.uk/default/slaving-over-things-isnt-the-way-to-go-wave-pictures-interview/
‘Slaving Over Things Isn’t The Way To Go’: The Wave Pictures Interview.
This week Leicestershire formed three-piece The Wave Pictures, a group whose rough hewn music owes a heavy debt to bands like Television and The Modern Lovers, unleashes their latest album ‘Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon’.
For this, their fourteenth album in seventeen years, cult musician Billy Childish has come on board. Not only has he lent them his equipment, but he has also produced and co-authored the album, making the it a more of a collaborative piece.
So Figure 8 managed to chat to front man Dave Tattersall in an interview that was born out of rather chaotic circumstances. Delayed at first because the band were due to record a session for 6music, then later on the band found themselves stuck in Paris thanks to a fire in the channel tunnel. Finally the week after the fire, we took the time to chat to Dave about working with Billy, his cavalier attitude to writing and recording, and his love of country music.
The new album’s coming out in February. And I’ve noticed that Billy Childish is on there. In what capacity did you collaborate, because I know he lent some old equipment to you?
DT: It’s much more than that, Billy and I wrote all the songs together. I wrote the words and he wrote the music, I suppose. I mean we wrote them sitting side by side on his sofa. Yeah, he plays guitar on the record and he produced it basically. He mixed it, we used all his equipment. We used his studio. He did overdubs. There’s a total collaboration between Wave Pictures and Billy Childish. He’s someone that we’ve listened to for years. And we were doing something with Mark Riley, he’s a DJ on 6 Music, we were having a drink and he asked us what we were listening to at the moment.
And we said, “Oh, we’re listening to loads of Billy Childish.” And he said, “Oh I know Billy.” He speaks to Billy on the phone from time to time. I think they’ve never met in person, but he speaks to him on the phone. We said, “Well ask Billy if he’s interested in recording a band,” thinking nothing would come from it and we’ve never hear from him. And he just said yes, he wanted to do it. And he suggested writing the songs together as well.
And at that point, we didn’t know that this was going to be the next Wave Pictures album, we didn’t know what it was going to be. It was just a little project for its own sake. We’re working on stuff all the time and recording all the time. And so we just sort of went with it, yeah, let’s write the songs together, and then we used all his equipment, his guitars, everything. And then we just all loved it, Billy loved it. And then we just decided to release it. It’s a complete collaboration. It’s totally a one off sort of album for us.
I did actually read the press release and there’s a lot of talk of using a lot of old equipment. Was it recorded in a very old fashioned way?
DT: Yeah, I suppose you could say that. It was recorded onto tape and two microphones on the drums. The band playing live, live vocals and then a few overdubs. So a very ’60s way of recording. And that’s always how the Wave Pictures have approached things. We always want to play live in the room. You know, the modern thing is multi-tracking and doing everything separately. You track the drums first and then you put overdubs on. That’s how they make records nowadays, not to sound too much like an old man. But yeah, that’s got no appeal for us really.
You’ve always been a band that has never been too involved into the whole process of recording. Your music has always sounded a bit rough around the edges.
DT: That’s important to us. That’s sort of what we sort of like listening to as well. When you listen to records that are made that way, they sound very spontaneous and sort of timeless really. Whereas if you go with whatever the latest fashions are, everything sounds a bit dead really and a bit dated. And with that live thing, funny things happen. Little moments happen. And even if someone listening to it doesn’t register that that’s what they’re hearing, there’s a kind of freshness to it that we always want our recordings to have.
It reminds me of an interview with Graham Coxon that I read, back when he was doing his solo albums. People thought he was being a bit odd for doing stuff on analogue tape. And he said, “Well all these big pop records from the ’60s, Jimmy Hendrix, all that kind of stuff was done in one take on analogue tape, it’s not lo-fi.” Yeah, people seem to forget that.
DT: Well that’s the good stuff. I think I read somewhere that Bob Dylan didn’t do any overdubs on any record until the 1980s. Every Dylan record you listen to, its people playing live in a room. No overdubs. And let alone multi-tracking, let alone recording everything one thing at a time. He didn’t even put anything on afterwards. When it was finished, it was finished. I think that’s the best way to make records or at least those are the type of records that I like to listen to. I don’t like to listen to the other kind of records.
And I think that stuff still sounds great. It sounds better than the stuff people are doing now. So it’s still something to aspire to. And especially if you can use tape, if you can use analogue tape, it just has its own quality. It adds a really great quality of sound. And digital is very good and you can do an awful lot with digital. I’m not like anti-digital all the way, or anything. But it’s much more exciting to use the big tape reels and the sound is warmer. Tape compresses things in a way that’s much more human. It sort of curves off the sound, whereas with digital you get lots of little blocks of sound, and it’s got a kind of coldness to it and a tape’s much warmer, yeah.
So is your approach to recording albums similar to the way you write material?
DT: Yeah… Not exactly. I think that they’re quite different things actually. But to some extent I have a slightly cavalier attitude towards both. Which is to say that my attitude is pretty much that I want to entertain myself and by writing or by recording, or by whatever I do, and I’ll worry later about whether I think it’s good or not. I’ll worry about that some other time. Or I’ll never worry about it. I’ll never judge it. It’s just for its own sake.
You never write a song thinking, “I should write a song like that.” Or “people like that other song, so I should write a song like that other song that they liked.” Or “I should write a song because it’ll be popular” or “I’ll write a song to be difficult.” You’re just writing for its own sake, for the sake of writing, which is just its own pleasure and then you’re recording just as its own pleasure. And then playing live is its own. They’re sort of self-serving things, I suppose.
They’re not done for the end result, making music. So that’s the same. But I also often think with lyrics, the best lyrics are just written very quickly. Often slaving over things isn’t the way to go. If you’re feeling inspired and you write something, even if it’s a bit silly, and a lot of my lyrics are very silly, I like to stick with it. They come from some strange place that’s interesting to me to revisit.
Yeah, it differs from songwriter to songwriter, because I was reading what somebody said about Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan-
DT: Yeah, that’s right, yeah.
Leonard Cohen can spend 15 years on a couplet-
DT: Yeah, the story is that Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan were talking and Bob Dylan said, “Oh, I like that song of yours.” And Leonard Cohen said, “Oh thank you very much. It took me four years to write that song.” And then Leonard Cohen says, “I like that song of yours.” And Bob Dylan says, “Oh thank you very much, it took me 15 minutes.” I don’t think that reflects badly on either of them. But they have very different talents, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.
Bob Dylan has got a very wayward brain and he’s obviously just capable of writing verse after verse after verse after verse very quickly. And there’s a spontaneity to everything that he does, and there’s sometimes an obtuseness, and a lack of meaning. Leonard Cohen is very precise. It’s much more like literature, he’s a poet in the first place. And the choice of words is much more pointed, I think, with Leonard Cohen. I love both of them very, very much. Personally, I’m not saying I’m as good as Bob Dylan, that’s for other people to say. But personally I’m more on the Bob Dylan side of it.
I like to just throw stuff up, throwing stuff up and then seeing what works later. And I don’t judge it. And I don’t think I should be the judge of it. I think other people should tell me “I like that song” or “why don’t you do that song?” or they don’t like this song, or whatever. That’s not on my mind at all. I just like doing it, if that makes sense. The end result is kind of boring to me. That’s the weird part of it. The fun part is the doing of it. It’s the making of the things. That’s the part I like.
I noticed the last album you did (‘City Awakenings’), was written on a US tour, do you feel that your albums are a snapshot of a time period?
DT: Yeah, to some extent, yeah. They do remind of the time that they were written and the things that were going on in my head, those times, yeah. I wouldn’t say that they’re autobiographical for the most part, and some things are made up completely, or some things are exactly what happened. It’s a total free-for-all. Basically I will do anything to fill up a blank page. That’s about the size of it (laughs).
I once read somewhere that you said that you don’t believe in writer’s block. Do you think having a similar sort of attitude- like always writing ideas, or continuously do something, is a good way of preventing writers block?
DT: Yeah, I think so. I think that writer’s block is something that- I always tell people, “Don’t sit down and try to write a song and think, ‘what have I got to say? What’s this song going to be about? What am I going to write?’” Then you’re just staring a blank bit of paper thinking about what you’re going to do, not actually doing it. And then you’ve got writer’s block basically. I think just write all the time, anything you can and worry about it later.
So on the American tour, for instance, I just wrote, and wrote, and wrote. I filled a notebook while we were driving around and turned it into songs later when I got home. And now that isn’t the only way to do it. The great thing about making music is that there’s just a million different ways that you can go at it. And a lot of very talented people I know, they write in very different ways than me. And that’s fine. But I would have thought that you can avoid writer’s block by not putting that kind of pressure on yourself. That’s what I think.
I feel like writer’s block is a sort of an ego problem where you kind of think, “I should write something really great. I’m really great and I must write something really great and what will it be?” And you sort of start tearing yourself up. The trick is just to make stuff up all the time. And not to question too much whether it’s good or bad. I think that the part of your brain that’s a critic, if you like, that sort of thinks, “Oh, that’s not right,” that part of your brain needs to shut up when you’re making a song.
You make up the song, and then by all means once you’ve finished it and you’ve recorded it and you play it, then you switch on the critical part of your brain and think, “Oh, that’s not quite right” or “that doesn’t work” or whatever. Do you know what I mean? It’s kind of necessary- I think it’s necessary to not be too critical, really, and to just do it and other people could well say, “Well that’s why you’re rubbish” and I have to say, “Fair enough.” I just do it because it’s fun to do. It’s not because I expect anything else afterwards.
Over the past few years you’ve toured the US quite a bit. I’m curious, what cities you usually get the best reception in?
DT: New York is very good. Chicago was good. San Francisco was good. The cities that you’d expect, I suppose. Touring America overall was extremely hard. We were lucky because the last tour was the long tour. And we were in a van with Allo Darlin’. And Allo Darlin’ is just the nicest bunch of guys that you could meet, really. And they made it into a great trip. Things I’ll remember for the rest of my life very fondly.
But the reality of touring America is that without having had a hit out there, or even a particularly glowing pitchfork review or a song in a film, or any of those kind of things that you need, it’s backbreaking work and it costs you loads of money. Touring America costs us money, and our living is touring. We make a living from touring and playing in small clubs in Germany and Spain and the UK and France and stuff. We can’t really afford to do it. America is very, very hard. And it costs so much just to get there, with visas and everything.
And then traveling around, you can’t even play. It’s such a strange country really. We can tour Germany for three weeks. You can’t tour Texas for three weeks. You play one city in each state. So you’re driving nine, ten hours every day, playing all the capital cities of each state. It’s backbreaking work, really, America unless you’re one of those lucky people who happens to have had some sort of a hit going out and it’s some kind of a buzz. But basically we can play to, I don’t know, 300 people in New York but as soon as you get outside of that, when you get down south or whatever, you might play to nobody or 20 people, or whatever.
So you drive nine hours, you play to nobody. You drive nine hours, you play to nobody. And it all costs money. So America is very, very tough. And it’s a very strange country, really strange. In Europe, we’re used to so much variety in such a small space. We’re used to the difference between Paris and Berlin and Madrid and Milan and Switzerland, Austria. You know we’re used to a tremendous amount of variety and history in a very small part of the world.
America, which is vast, is all the same. It’s all exactly the same. Every city looks the same. They’re all built on the same grids for cars. So it’s a very lonely, and sort of strange country when you get out about in it. As much as I love New York, I love Chicago, I love San Francisco, it’s a totally different experience if you’re in Baton Rouge or Orlando, Florida or whatever. America is very, very homogeneous.
It doesn’t actually surprise me that you said New York was quite a good place to play, because a lot of your influences come from there. People like Television, Jonathan Richmond- even though I think he was a transplant to New York.
DT: Yeah, and The Velvet Underground, I guess in the first place. Dylan is another New York transplant like Jonathan Richmond. He’s not from there, but you kind of associate him with New York. I do anyway. Yeah, I love New York. New York’s one of the best cities I’ve ever been to. I’ve got a lot of friends there. We always play great shows there. I think New York is very different than America. America is a different kettle of fish from New York, really. You can walk around New York. It still feels like a pedestrian’s city. You can’t walk around Los Angeles. It’s just for cars. Nobody’s walking. Absolutely nobody’s walking.
When I was at University a lecturer was telling us about the first time he went to Los Angeles, he waited on the pavement and people just looked at him like he’d been beamed down from another planet.
DT: Yeah, it’s a very, very strange feeling. A lot of those cities, Los Angeles is like that, Miami is like that, Seattle. Well, Seattle may be less so. But a lot of the cities, there’s no centre. You feel as if you’re always on the outskirts of the city. A mate of mine moved to San Diego and he really likes it. He’s happy there but I couldn’t imagine living in somewhere like San Diego. I’ve got to say. You’ve got to drive basically. You don’t feel like you’ve ever arrived anywhere if you’re on foot. You’re always next to a big road. It’s a very strange country, America, because I’m so in love with American culture, films and books and especially music.
Almost all the music that I really love is American music. And going back to the blues and jazz and things like that and as you say Television, The Velvet Underground. But god, country music. All the things that I love, I was very excited about going there. But I would think twice about doing a tour like that again. What I could imagine doing again is flying over and doing New York and then flying over and playing Los Angeles, or something like that and coming home. It was six weeks of the hardest kind of touring, really hard touring.
Sleeping on people’s floors and then driving nine hours before sound check and losing money all the while that you’re doing it. It’s not something that I can afford to do every year, basically. I can only just afford to live as it is, touring Europe, which is very close and very pleasant. And you see a lot of great cities and you can travel around one country and play everywhere in that country, doing like two hour, three hour drives every day. Maybe you do one or two five hour drives, that’s okay. I don’t mind that. But I could live without nine hours a day and playing for no people.
It’s funny you brought up country music. Listening to your music, I wouldn’t have thought you’d be into that.
DT: You wouldn’t have thought?
Yeah
DT: No, I’m a huge country music fan. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean I love all the sort of roots music of America. I love the blues and the thing with country music, the narratives that you have in those songs, a lot of story songs, which are very compelling and very sort of existential actually, and very simple in how they can tell you a whole story in three minutes. And you really feel like the character is real. I mean I understand that a lot of people just don’t like the sound of country music, they don’t like the twangy guitars and the warbling voices and all that.
I love all that. I love the sound of it in the first place. But then also I guess I sort of really like that sense of character that Townes Van Zandt is singing, or Hank Williams or Waylon Jennings or Willy Nelson or Johnny Cash, or whatever. If they say “I walked into the bar” you believe that they walked into a bar. You’re just like, okay, you walked into a bar. What happened next? Whereas with soul music, which I also like, it’s not like that. If Wilson Pickett screams “I walked into a bar” you don’t actually believe him. The words he’s saying are more like they’re just dressing the music really. And that’s true of rock.
I like that country, I guess, the lyrics come first I think. I think the music is there to support the lyric. I like it that way round. I like it the other way around, too, but the rock thing or the soul thing, pop thing is more like the words are just dressing the music. I guess that’s the thing that really excites me about it.
Well there’s a radio station near me, and one guy on there plays all that commercial stuff. That was all I knew until I started getting into people like Townes Van Zandt and Gram Parsons.
DT: Yeah, Gram Parsons as well. There’s an awful lot of terrible country music. You can get really misled. But that’s true of anything. You can hear Guns N’ Roses and think that bands with guitars were terrible, you know? You don’t really find the good stuff straight away. But yeah, Hank Williams, Townes Van Zandt, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn. That’s all just great stuff and totally real, I think. Completely honest and real. Garth Brooks is crap. There’s crap everywhere. Crap country does rather seem to dominate people’s view of country. I know, it’s a shame.
So you’re touring around the release of the album. What plans have you got after that? Are you working on any material?
DT: Yeah, we’re doing some recording at the end of this month, at the end of January before we go on tour. I imagine that we’ll just keep on doing stuff. The next big session is the end of January. I’ve written an album and I’d like to record it into one microphone, like the Billie Holiday thing I was telling you about with all acoustic instruments. Acoustic guitars, acoustic bass. Paul Rains from Allo Darlin’s going to play on it. Got a couple of friends doing percussion and things like that. So I think that should be really nice. I mean that’s the thing that I’m really looking forward to is making that recording at the end of January. And then we go on tour after that. After that, I’m not sure.
Okay, well it’s been great talking with you, Dave.
DT: Yeah, thanks. Sorry again about all the long wait and everything.
Yeah, thanks
DT: Pleasure
Okay, have a nice day
DT: Yeah, you too, mate. Cheers
Alright, bye
DT: Bye
Words by Matthew Shearn.
‘Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon’ is out now on Moshi Moshi.
