Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. What do Napalm Death (in 1987), Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Black Dog have in common?
I’ll give you a clue: Guns ‘N’ Roses can be added to the list.
The answer, as I’m sure you’ll have guessed, is that each act includes only one of their original line-up: Nicholas Bullen, Gary Rossington, Ken Downie and Axl Rose, respectively. It begs the question: When is a band not a band?
While Napalm Death’s perpetually shifting personnel was a defining characteristic of the band’s early career, the circus of collaborators Axl surrounded himself with resulted in greatly diminishing returns. I never liked Lynyrd Skynyrd much.
Since Ken Downie embarked on The Black Dog’s third incarnation with Richard and Martin Dust in 2002, they have been more productive than ever. Following 2008’s Radio Scarecrow and last year’s Further Vexations, they’ve just released an excellent new album called Music For Real Airports, and recorded a brilliant mix for FACT. I caught up with Martin to talk about the new album, the north, and the idea of a band as a kind of ephemeral concept.
“I understood that [Eno] were pitching it at a utopian vision, but for us it just seemed so out of place, like something from a sci-fi film.”
So what inspired Music For Real Airports?
“In ’79, when I first heard Music For Airports by Brian Eno, I remember reading a great article about it and it sounded so fantastic conceptually.
“I remember listening to it and being incredibly disappointed. Because of my punk background spent living and working up north I don’t think there were much realism in there. I understood that he were pitching it at a utopian vision, but for us it just seemed so out of place, like something from a sci-fi film.”
How long have you been working on the album?
“Since we started touring we’ve had mobile recorders. We’ve been capturing sounds in airports and on the way to airports with a view to using them and just been working on it in the background.
“What we try to do is, if you imagine a central fulcrum on a see-saw, take a real dystopian view of airports and take Brian Eno’s utopian view and then slightly move in between both. I think there’s a lot of joy to be had in airports, but socially and politically they’re a microcosm of what’s happening in society inasmuch that everyone surrenders their lives and pays for that privilege.”
How do you intend for that to be reflected in the music?
“I think to document the whole thing from start to finish: from the M1 to the business car park at Heathrow. A lot of the music, because we spend so much time in them, was actually written in airports using Ableton and a portable keyboard. So we wanted to make something more realistic and something that everybody could recognise.
“We played a lot of the tracks to people we know who don’t really listen to electronic music, and because it contained sounds that were familiar, it struck a chord with them. I think we wanted to make and reflect something back that was a more political reply to Brian Eno really – something that people could recognise and understand after they’ve spent nine hours under strip lights.”
“I think we wanted to make and reflect something back that was a more political reply to Brian Eno really – something that people could recognise and understand after they’ve spent nine hours under strip lights.”
What were you listening to while you were recording the album?
“Usually when we’re writing music we tend not to listen to anybody, or listen to noise artists simply because there’s no melody to get into your head. After a week of working on a track you can find that it’s somebody else’s.
“Playing in clubs really doesn’t present an opportunity to do all the music we’ve been writing, but it’s been interesting. As an artist you don’t really have much control over what you write and if you feel like writing ambient stuff then that’s what happens.”
Noise artists. Anyone in particular?
“Kind of a mix really: Stockhausen, Terry Riley, early Throbbing Gristle, Julia Wolfe, Aaron Martin, new people like Peter Broderick and Dakota Suite. New music’s pretty exciting I think. There are a lot of good artists out there.
“We’ve just spent a couple of weeks listening to UK Funky, trying to make head or tail of it.”
What did you think?
“Part of me thinks: “Am I just getting really old, or does this sound like my first track on an M1?”
“I think some of the sound palettes they use, well, I’m not sure if they’re joking or not. It’s an interesting development, like dubstep. In a year and a half’s time, when everybody’s stopped copying each other it’ll be interesting.
“One of the things that we were discussing this afternoon is that a lot of it feels a bit too polished. The best stuff sounds very similar in construction to grime. When grime first appeared there was a real punky energy to that, but with the UKF stuff it feels a bit too polished and a bit too forced.
“Two of us worked in the game industry for 15 years so we’re used to hearing really shit pad sounds and 8-bit sounds, even 2-bit sounds because we used to work on SNES and Omegas so it’s really odd that a culture that wasn’t exposed to those machines is using them now because it’s new to them.”
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