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| Spunk Interview - 1997 FLYING SAUCER ATTACK IS COMING AT YOU! Piloted by David and Rachel it's cruised and blinked its way out of the crop circled fields of Bristol at the speed of sound, leaving behind tracks of scorched earth and plenty of dumbfounded witnesses. Though Spunk was fortunate enough to be abducted on to the mother ship for some sonic assault and ambient bliss while having a chat over a cuppa. And what an amiable, passionate Alien David turned out to be... quick, as he was, to dispel the mystery his FSA is shrouded in; declaring he and Rachel are just ordinary people mucking with guitars, honestly. And no, their fuzz drowned cover of "The Drowners" wasn't a publicity stunt, it just had a nice guitar melody, that's all. So you've stopped off in London to see Peter Jeffries this week? Yeah, I saw him last night actually which was absolutely wonderful. At the moment I don't own a lot of records. You imagine people in the music game to own a lot of records but I don't really and I only get a hold of the ones I really love and at the moment the only thing I seem to find that really interests me is the New Zealand stuff. More so the Xpressway artists than Flying Nun? Yeah, definitely the Xpressway stuff. I haven't really investigated Flying Nun apart from the Tall Dwarfs and Chris Knox. Yeah, they've recently released his new record which is unbelievable. (laughs) Yeah isn't it just. And you know also that Peter Jeffries drummed with King Loser for a time, including on their first album? Did he really??? [hear upturned inflection]. Well I didn't know that. He's drummed on quite a few things and I've got quite a few singles... but I'm only learning about it through finding certain records... cos I don't own a CD player. Shame on you! [silence] Sorry??? Oh (laughs), well being a traditionalist and everything... I think it's quite fun to wait until you can find something on vinyl. Just over the last two years really I've begun to pick up all these records and I'm beginning to spot names that crop up over and over again and Peter Jeffries seems to crop up more than most, I do say; whether it be drumming or recording or indeed his own stuff with This Kind of Punishment. I just love that stuff, I really do... I'm not just saying that. Oh, go on! [silence] Sorry??? Don't worry Dave, I was just taking the piss... you're only saying that for a bit of indie cred. Oh, that's not very nice (laughs). No... the New Wave revival stuff that's popular over here at the moment... I mean, when I was ten or twelve and it was happening for real the first time it was fine. I still love listening to old Wire and Magazine records but just hearing it copied isn't that interesting to me. What is interesting, and this sounds like a really dumb thing to say, but if you're talking about the home recording scene, New Zealand seems to be this area where it's done better than anywhere else. I'm not supporting this 'You have to do home recordings' philosophy but the music just seems to be far more honest and more meaningful somehow... I know I'm not explaining myself very well. No, I understand and it's now that New Zealand bands are coming into their own. I mean a lot of them were recording that way long before it was popularised by American bands. Yeah that's very true. It means you make a different kind of music as well, I think. A couple of things I've done in the past which were never released... I ended up sitting in a studio and it's not the sort of environment where you can be yourself. You feel intimidated by a studio? Yeah definitely because in a studio you've got this time limit and... maybe some people work under that sort of pressure really well but if you do it at home on some portable equipment, you may end up spending the same amount of time but at least you can do it when the time feels right. I think the normal thing people do in a studio is go for the most simple way of doing something; y'know you put down the drums, put down the guitars... and it's like 'Oh well, there we go', whereas if you're doing it at home you can wipe half the stuff you've done and just keep a couple of the noises and then completely change it. It's like a painting where you just paint over it or scrub everything off and start again (laughs). And I can only assume the restrictions inherent in home recording techniques would force you to be more imaginative in a way. Definitely, definitely, that's for sure. I mean if you think back to... this is a rather stupid thing to say maybe, but early Elvis Presley stuff; that was done with one or maybe two microphones... and you get that wonderful energetic drum sound, y'know (laughs) which I don't think you get with twelve mics around the drum kit; you end up getting that terrible stadium rock thing. You don't see Flying Saucer Attack one day venturing into a studio to flesh out the sounds you make? Well, I don't know to tell you the truth. It depends on what we get up to next which I don't think Rachel or I really know. I mean someone like Smog, he's just done an album in a studio and it doesn't sound that different to his older stuff really. Having heard the record, it would have been simpler to have done it in the studio cause it's quite complicated in places. But it still sounds like Smog, which is heartening. He's a real genius, I think. It must be a buzz then for you to be released in America by Drag City. Well yeah, that's a real honour as far as I'm concerned and I'm not just saying that as showbiz speak or anything. Drag City constantly manage to put out records that are really wonderful. So you've got the Xpressway people and then the Drag City people and it all just seems to have that extra special something about it. When they said they were interested in doing something with us it really was a dream come true. I mean when something like that happens, you kinda think, 'well we must be doing something right'. (laughs) And I got a letter from Bruce Russell the other day, cos I wrote a letter to him saying 'I'm sorry for writing to you but I felt compelled to say how much I love all your stuff and you probably don't know who I am and think I'm really dumb' and he wrote back saying he actually did know who I was (laughs) and was really pleased to hear from me and had been meaning to write to me. And to me, when there's people that you really admire and when they're willing to talk to you... And whether it be also if someone comes up to you and says 'I heard you're new album and I think it's really special... things like that are really nice, they're far more important than how many sales you get and that side of things, I think. Cos it's all about trying to communicate, really. You don't necessarily know exactly what you're trying to communicate but you know you're trying to communicate something. I think people that do music or painting rather than for career reasons; if they were honest they'd say that; that they don't necessarily know what they're trying to say. So it's important to me when someone comes up and lets me know I am communicating something. Hopefully you'll still have that attitude when you're a big famous star, Dave. (laughs) Well people accuse us of either being famous stars or going to be but we're just interested in trying to make another good record, that's what our ambition is rather than being media types or something. Is it your intention to maintain a certain mysterious and elusive air about Flying Saucer Attack like its namesake? In regards to the band's backlog of rare and obscure singles. (laughs) Well everything is actually available at the moment with that singles compilation 'Distance'; that's all the stuff people say is rare and collectable. We've never really operated as a band; being only two people and just doing it at home, so when you start out you don't want to make more than five hundred of anything cause you don't know whether you're going to sell fifty. It wasn't a deliberate thing to put out rare records and certainly the last few releases have been issued in reasonable numbers like the 'Land Beyond The Sun' single, 'Distance', the new album 'Further' and the very new single on Planet Records. Planet Records? That's a very aptly named label for you guys. (laughs) Yeah it is. It's a coincidence. They actually put out Rachel's other band Movietone. Have you heard of a band called Crescent? No, I haven't. You will! Are they great? They bloody well are (laughs). They're from Bristol the same as Movietone, and ourselves. We all knew each other as friends and now these bands have come out of that, well not out of that... It just so happens that there's three bands that involve people that knew each other anyway. It's all a bit strange really. But Crescent have done two singles on Planet already and are just about to release an album which is very, very good. How would you describe their music? It's very dark. Very emotionally powerful. It's got this kind of sparseness to it that's difficult to explain really. It's quite something, nonetheless. So yeah, our new single will be on that label too. Have you heard the new album? Yeah, it's brilliant. And I'm not just saying that... (laughs) No, no, no, anyone saying something like that (laughs). It's just that obviously it's slightly different music to what we've done before and some people probably think that we've sold out or... Well I will say it's less abrasive than your previous releases. Well I like a bit of this and a bit of that. I mean talking about Xpressway you can get some of the most abrasive music with like the Dead C and then you've got some of the most beautiful music with This Kind Of Punishment or Sandra Belor. With 'Land Beyond The Sun', I wanted to do a song that was as abrasive as possible, really. But then with the new album I wanted to do something that was coming from a different area because I do like quite a bit of acoustic music. I'm not a great fan, but y'know the obvious names... Oh yeah, OK Dave... Nick Drake! His name is always dropped in reviews of FSA but I can't for the life of me hear him in your music? See the thing is Nick Drake could play the guitar properly (bellow laugh). The only one who sounds like Nick Drake is Nick Drake. Though do you hear him as much as other people seem to? Well we all wish we were as good as Nick Drake but I don't think anyone is going to be. I mean, you're right there's no real comparison. I just think it's a journalistic thing when you've got an acoustic and a vocal... and they say 'Well it's not overtly folky so let's compare it to Nick drake' which is an absolute lie, really. Yeah it is. If someone who'd never heard FSA before was to read a review comparing you to Nick Drake and then go out and buy your record they'd be in for a shock. (snigger) You know I'd like to think there was some of his spirit maybe... certainly in the new album... but nonetheless if you can kind of give some hint that this is the kind of music you love then that's a nice thing to do. Possibly one comparison could be that there's definitely a simple beauty to the music of both FSA and Nick Drake. Y'know beauty in music is what I seek. I mean music can be very abrasive or dark but even then there can still be a beauty in it, I think that's crucial. It can be upbeat or downbeat and still have a beauty in there... like Joy Division did and that was quite distressing music with the history and all. Same with Popal Zoo. So when you say that about our music, it's nice to hear you say that. With the music I love or the painters that I love, it's in there somewhere... you can't kind of describe why. It's an extra element that's just there. You keep referring to painting as an art form, are you inspired by paintings as much as music with FSA? I don't know whether FSA is inspired by art but yeah my interest in painting... or painters rather is probably as great as my interest in music. And I'm sure you can guess what kind of painting I like (laughs). Impressionistic? Yeah yeah yeah. That kind of washy finish? Some of that and some of the more harder German expressionism. You're kind of quite mental looking landscape painting, really (laughs). That's what you'd expect, cos I don't see trying to do painting as that different from trying to do music, funnily enough. 'Lo-fi', 'ambient', 'noiseniks', 'folk' are some of the terms being bandied about by the press in regards to your music. Do they sit well with you? I like 'noiseniks', I think that's quite funny. The lo-fi thing; I don't understand... what 'lo-fi' means in terms of anybody anyway, unless there are people that do stuff that's pretty clean sounding and then turn it into a bit of a mess. As I said earlier I don't think the reason we avoid studios is because of that kind of lo-fi affectation. A lot of the tracks we've recorded have appeared when we were trying to record something else and that's not going to happen in a studio. We often lay down a track for a song that doesn't work out but then we keep a bit of it and it develops into something completely different. Yeah, considering your live shows are generally improvisational, how much is improvised when you record and how much do you already have mapped out? Well the sounds I hear in my head aren't usually the ones I try and get down on tape. Maybe half the stuff we've put out has come about from just adding to a sound and letting it evolve. Can I just backtrack slightly and get you to tell Spunk about Rachel's Movietone project. Oh right, yeah. Well FSA and Crescent and Movietone � none of the three bands sound remotely like each other. Movietone are fairly indescribable... and Crescent, to tell the truth. But Rachel and her friend Kate are the main people in the band. [long silence] I can't really explain what they're like; they have guitar, drum and vocal but they don't sound like your typical band or anything... their sound is very sparse and reverby... it's kinda magical stuff, really. What roles do you and Rachel play in FSA? It's changing at the moment, really. Rachel's starting to write songs and stuff and her guitar playing is getting pretty good. The best stuff we've done I think is when both of us have been heavily involved, it doesn't really matter who did most of the playing or whatever. It's a combined thing, for sure. We just muddle on as best we can (laughs). I don't mean to sound so vague and evasive about it but it leaves things more open to chance not having a sort of drawn out formula. And it allows you to keep the mysterious persona in tact. There's not a lot to give away, that's the thing. We're just two fairly ordinary people trying with this stuff; we're not trying to be any sort of career band. It's a very straightforward explanation, really. It's amazing then the type of purple prose and phrasing backflips the press print in an effort to describe FSA. (laughs). I mean if you were talking to me and I was in one of these other bands at the moment I'd probably say 'well I'm very keen on the mod thing and I grew up listening to the Small Faces blah blah blah...'. So if you asked them the sort of questions you're asking me, they'd just say we're playing at being mods or new wave people whereas we're just trying to be ourselves you see and that is far more difficult to talk about. I mean when I say what we do is simple and straight forward, it's by no means easy. Y'know, it's absolutely tortuous doing the music sometimes (laughs)... but it has to be done... I feel we have to try to do it. [K] |
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