aaamusic | On 03, Oct 2011

AAAmusic: For those who don’t already know your music, how would you describe your sound?

To me it’s an English folk roots sound…or at least my take on it. There are other elements that creep in, but essentially it’s an english folk roots sound.

AAAmusic: Your album features many talented musicians such as violinist Hannah Peel and Jez Wing on Night fishing, was this a big contribution to the album?

For sure. The album was produced by myself and Jez Wing and we worked very very closely throughout. The musicians we asked were all musicians that we both knew and I think we got it spot on. Drummer and percussionist Rob Allum I’d known from way back when he was in Billy Bragg’s Red Stars, around his Don’t Try This At Home album. Guitar player John Bennett I again knew from this period, slighty earlier,  when he and I played with Sid Griffin’s newly located to the UK band The Coal Porters. This was the early nineties and at that time The Coal Porters were very much A Long Ryders mark 2 outfit. In fact, both Rob and John and myself ended up in a Sid Griffin line up at one time. Both John and Rob went on to be in The High Llamas with Sean O’ Hagan, one of the finest bands around. Rob is also a member of The Turin Brakes with Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian, a band who would also play more than a minor role in the making of our record. But with all the musicians it was a question of style and we wanted to ensure that they would be sympathetic to what we were trying to achieve, and we put a lot of thought into who we wanted to ask.

 

Jez Wing and banjo player John Dowling were in a band called the Black Cat Theory from Cornwall, who I remembered from The Mike Harding Show for winning the 2000 BBC Young Folk Musician of the Year award. Coincidentally, I met them both separately. Jez I met when he and I supported Van Morrison in 2007 as part of China Crisis singer Gary Daly’s band. John Dowling literally ended up living round the corner from me for a time and we met through mutual friends, namely one of the double bass players we used on the album, slap bass player Russ Williams. John is an amazing player with a great musical ear and an approach to the banjo unlike anything I’ve heard before or since. He was the only European ever to have won the USA National Banjo Championships. Jez Wing has this folk, slightly progressive thing going on in his playing. It was important to me as a piano player not to play any piano on the record, though I do play one solo piano piece. Jez has a great ear for melody and his parts he made his own very quickly and very early on in the process….and they were all much better than anything I would have put down.

 

Hannah Peel was another player we felt very lucky to have had along. We were looking for a fiddle player that didn’t have too much of that bluegrass thing going on…bluegrass is very big round our way and rightly so, but it wasn’t a bluegrass thing that we wanted. Hannah has a very English sounding way of playing and her parts on the record are just perfect…I remember thinking how Vaughan Williams she sounded with her choice of notes and as it was an English sounding folk roots album we were making, she was perfect.

In the main, the double bass was played by a Jazz player called Harry Harrison and the cameo sax solo came from another old musician friend of mine, John Lewis.

 

Altogether it was very much a band effort and both Jez and I as producers considered every performance to be exemplary….just going to prove the old adage that the most talented people are always the most generous.

AAAmusic:    Do you feel that this album is a continuation from your previous albums or have you made a slight departure?

My first two records were self released projects that did as well as they could of at the time. The first in 2006, Muddyhead’s Land and Sea album, was a solo record but it had been a few years since I’d written any decent songs and the catalyst for it was Michael Hurley’s ‘Automatic Slim and the Fatboys’. The lead track from it, Miracle Cure, was played a number of times by Mark Radcliffe on his night time Radio 2 show and I remember thinking that that in itself was mission accomplished…that’s all I’d really set out to achieve. I love Mark Radcliffe from way back on Out on Blue Six. Our musical tastes are identical and he’s one of only a handful of broadcasters who have survived the dreadful dismantling of the airwaves that has taken place in recent times who’s opinion is really worth anything.I listen to his radio 6 show and go ‘yeah…yep…bloody well right Mark.’ I don’t know the guy at all, but he lives just up the road from me. I left the Land And Sea album in his pigeon hole at Oxford Road and he played it and it was a real moment for me. I don’t have any expectations any more so it’s the little victories that mean the most. Record number 2, 2007 True Believers and the Guises of the Weasel was again self released and had a moment or two of good things happen on it, mainly down to my good friend and producer / engineer Lance Thomas. Both these records were recorded at a residential studio called Bryn Derwen in Snowdonia. As much of a pleasure as they were to make, they were in hindsight stepping stones to where I am now.A track from each of those records has survived the live set. I picked up a lot of information about the recording process during this time and I became quickly fascinated with learning as much as I could from the talented people I found myself around. I went on tour with America at this time too and I was solo and bandless. Couldn’t believe how exhilarating that tour was for me. Invited on stage every night with Dewey and Gerry for the Horse encore was time standing still for me and they were so supportive and kind I think it gave me the confidence I needed to start over again. So that’s what I did. Came off that tour and started to get to work.

AAAmusic: The album features a great number of musicians, and is quite intricate, did it take long to make this record?

It did yeah but I had some text books to read, and I had some recording and mixing sessions to sit in on. I soaked up as much as I could and got as much advice as I could, namely from Lance Thomas and  Dave Wrench, who was in house at Bryn Derwen. I bought some mics…a pair of Neumann KM184s, an AKG C414 and a Coles 4038 and those are all the mics I used for the record, through a Focusrite ISA 428 or an RME Fireface 400, depending on the sound I was after. That was it. All into a bottom of the range white Macbook running Pro Tools. For one thing, there was no money to pay for a studio and I was coming round to the idea that quite why you would want to do that I was no longer sure. So I took my songs to Jez, the first being the title track Night Fishing, and he hopped right on board and we spent many a dark night and long hour locked away in an office building on a very quiet industrial area by the banks of the Mersey in Runcorn. We played and we arranged and I re-wrote and re-glued. I think at one point I got three songs out of one that we’d been kicking around in there. And that was how it went on….and on…Jez always picking out the best bits and labelling things and reminding me of bits I’d thrown away…and I’d record everything into a minidisc and I’d take it home and then come back with new stuff, or re-written stuff. Dorothy Hare happened because I went to make some tea and left the mini disc running. Later that night I heard what Jez had been playing whilst I was out of the room and I turned it into Dorothy Hare. Looking back it was a lot of hard work but brilliant, and Jez somehow had the energy to pull it all together and without a doubt without him, at that stage, I wouldn’t have written the record that I eventually wrote. I know I would have thrown a lot of it away. His enthusiasm and insistence that what we were doing here was making the best record

AAAmusic: You have already played with acts such as Roxy Music and The High Llamas, who would you most like to play a show with?;

Laura Marling maybe, The Low Anthem, Crosby Stills and Nash in October….The Imagined Village…We recently played with the Strawbs which was just great and it was really nice chatting to Dave Cousins for a few nights.  The Waterboys maybe, I always loved the way he recorded Fisherman’s Blues….all those great places and those great players…holed up in a house in Spiddal. It just sounded like the way to be doing it to me and that record oozes it from every pore. When I was playing piano for China Crisis we did a TV show in Galway that The Fisherman’s Waterboys also played at. Don’t think they’d been together for a while…this was the mid nineties. And I had a wander down and had a good look around at where it all went on, hung out with Anto Thistlethwaite in Galway for a while…I think it stayed with me and I tried to capture some of that on the Night Fishing record. Don’t remember making much of an impression on Mike though…think he asked me if my name was Eddie…I said no….what else could I do?…it’s not my name….Jez has a great Mike Scott story that makes me laugh out loud every time. And of course Kevin Wilkinson had a profound effect on all our lives.

AAAmusic:  Rather than record your album “Night Fishing” in a conventional studio, you recorded in deserted offices, do you think this adds another dimension to the album?

Oh my goodness me yes. I think it sounds better. I had this romantic idea that you’re out tramping through the land finding the right people to record…there was something about that that was very appealing….I remembered Diane Guggenheim had left New York in the mid-fifties and travelled around Ireland in search of old Irish Folk songs….on her travels she’d met Liam Clancy, took a shine to the poor bloke and took him with her. They visited Sarah Makem in the the north and Liam met upon Tommy Makem.…it’s a great story, though Liam’s relationship with Diane left him a little worse for wear. I alluded to that a little with Night Fishing, and being able to take the kit wherever I pleased was a huge part of how the Night Fishing record ended up sounding.The landscape is such a massive part of what it’s all about and we made as good a use of location as we could.  The whole thing really was a road trip…recorded out of the boot of a car.
Also not having the constraint of having to stick to studio deadlines, for the first time I took the time. The world wasn’t waiting for a record from me and so for example, Harry’s bass. Harry gave us some fantastic parts but I laboured long and hard and got them working with the songs as best I could. It was so worth it. Not sure in a studio environment you’d have done the same thing. Now, like a Kate Bush record, it doesn’t really sound like there’s’a note out place and that was the intention…not to make do. Amazing what happens when you spend that much time on a single and often overlooked instrument like the bass. You tend to stick to the rhythm aspect and it was important for us to get the bass parts singing.

Also a factor was the order we decided to record in. The bass went on last. Rob Allum played and recorded his drums at Turin Brakes HQ in Brixton to no bass whatsoever…I know this isn’t a new thing, but it was just a decision we made and demonstrates how much attention we paid to detail…right down to the order we were going to record the players in, all carefully thought out as to what would affect what and in what way….like the way EQ works, cause and affect.  It just all worked for me, and though the record has plenty of mistakes and things about it that are less than perfect, when you’re not striving for perfection what you find is something that sounds very played and very natural, by people who are only listening to what you want them to hear…so they’re not reacting to things that you don’t want them to react to….Rob can’t react to Harry because he’s not on the tape or even in the same town. So they play a certain way…and in a  different way…what you’ve got to hope is that the plan works…and it did. I love how natural it sounds. In fact not one person on that record was in the same room as another, ever at any time.

AAAmusic:   Do you have a favourite track on the album, or one that you particularly enjoy playing live?

I like The Devil I Know on the album, which is the track that really doesn’t belong in there…but I remember recording it up in Langholm, Dumfriesshire…all the vocals and the guitars…and John Lewis played an exquisite sax solo into the Coles…actually in his kitchen into the Coles. I remember getting that home and thinking how great that could be. It was the first track I’d started to record for the record and the only one out of the initial bunch of songs I’d written, apart from night fishing, that survived. Night Fishing was the title of the LP before I even recorded a note, but the title track itself wasn’t recorded until mid-summer’s night this year, June 21st 2011.

AAAMusic:   What other bands or musicians have had the biggest influence on your sound?

I tend to try and detach myself. You’ve got to at least make it your thing…subconsciously there’s enough pulling at you from a lifetime of listening to all kinds of different music, which is what I’ve always done…and I like lots of different things. When I’m recording a record it’s my take on it all and I try not to immerse myself at all in the current crop of great artists that are around who are all doing loads better than me. It was when I started mixing the record that really I started referencing. I mixed on a pair of EB Acoustic EB-1s. I had the NS10s too but soon found myself just listening to the EB-1s. I had the vinyl LP covers up on the picture rail of the room I did the initial mixes in….it was then I tried to retain my focus and to remind myself of what we’d started out to do by referencing certain things. It’s a very solitary process mixing and for me as other worldly as it gets….the album covers helped to retain some of the original ideas…you can balls it up in the mix very easily. I had the first Crosby Stills and Nash album to remind me that the vocal harmony thing was this record’s raison d’être…I had Foxtrot and The Lamb Lies Down by Genesis….Richard Thompson and a Fairport record, Angel Delight I think…just to keep me the Englishness I wanted to preserve at all costs;  similarly, The Band Best Of vinyl cover where they look like they’re prospecting for gold, that because in a way I wanted to try and get an English version of everything that cover said to me; Nic Jones’ Penguin Eggs….because that reminded me that when you get a room of people at the top of their game all you got to do is press record. Also had Gene Clark’s No Other, for no other reason other than its bloody great, The High Llamas and, just to remind myself that there is no point striving for perfection or brilliance because you are never going to achieve it, Kate Bush …The Dreaming.

I’ve never been interested in being part of any music scene, in fact I avoid it at all costs. I listen to lots of new music but not all the time, particularly not whilst making a record….so it’s as close to being me as I could get and has nothing to do directly with anything else. It’s my take on it and it’s a folk album for no other reason other than because I say it is.

AAAmusic: Any upcoming album releases that you are looking forward to?

Most of them fall into my lap when the time is right, and most of the time I’m very glad they did. But generally I just wait for that to happen naturally.

AAAmusic:    Any plans for an upcoming UK tour or gigs you want to tell us about?

We are all looking forward immensely to getting out and playing, as often times as possible with a full seven piece band, though logistics at this stage often make that difficult for reasons geographical. But yes, throughout October and November.

 

Author: Ornal Lyons