Interview with Planet Notion 06.12.11
The main man of Fixers, our delightful BOTW, gives a cracking interview with yours truly on the Oxford music scene, extra-musical influences and reveals more than one of his unusual habits. A great read! Why should people listen to your music as opposed to that of any other bands/artists? Amen. What a wonderful sermon, sir. I see you’re from the new Oxford music movement that includes the art collective Blessing Force. Oxford has throughout pop/rock music history been one of this country’s most integral scenes. Do you like that association or do you find it’s more of a restriction? When I was a kid I used to love Oasis simply because they had brash, anthemic songs which stuck in my head. Now that I am older I don’t care to reflect upon the supposed geographical connotations of which they validate themselves and the numerous overtly eloquent and long-winded press clippings adhering to that – I just listen to better music instead. What do you have to add to the expansive genre melange that is surf music/psychedelic pop? We just made a video with which we were wholly unsatisfied, despite our reservations from the outset. I guess this kind of bullshit doesn’t really adhere to the usual social idiosyncrasies; it’s not really about apportioning blame when things goes wrong for us – it’s about carrying on and getting them right again. It becomes hard when you start questioning the integrity of your own music and how it’s being contorted as it’s being marketed to people. As it happens we have made our own music video for Evil Carbs since and the reaction to it has been a lot more positive. Granted, the Youtube views pale in comparison but fuck it – it has dogs baking bread in it and is a million times closer to our aesthetic as a band. I hope this kind of explains my reservations expanding on the genre at the moment; I don’t want to disappoint anyone. Our album is recorded, we have four or five months before it is released and I am already thinking about new and far more exciting music. There is some cool stuff on the record but we haven’t got to the mountain yet with this one, this is just the beginning. I want to turn everything upside down for the post-album release; for me right now I want to feel foreboding. I guess we treat this as a feeling that our audience are going to been lulled into a point of relaxation momentarily but don’t get to comfy. In the words of Gena Davis – “be afraid, be very afraid.” Digital or analogue? How do you record? We usually record digital, either in recording studios or on Garageband or Logic. Once we have mixes we then record down onto tape cassette to get that warmth and warble which accompanies any cassette tape pre-1993. We don’t do it with all of our tracks but it features quite a lot on the album. I want to put our entire second record through this effect; in fact we might record our entire second record on a tape machine. I purchased two great old eight-track cassette tape recording consoles. You don’t see them very often but the are incredible pieces of kit and so easy to use. I admire the flexibility of digital production. I know a lot of people moan about it but I can turn Garageband on and record studio-competent songs in my bedroom which rules. Are you inspired by anything other than music i.e. Film? Art? Have you seen The Craft? I get inspired by all kinds of stuff. Right now, the constrictions of staggered releases on a record label provides me with a dilemma. I get stuck in this dark, twisted, lonely cave of ideas which are wholly reactionary to stuff we haven’t even released yet that I have already fallen out of love with. Don’t get me wrong, I have never felt so excited and fulfilled as at the moment we wrapped our album up in Septemeber. Nathaniel Lennox Jr, our producer that we work with, was incredible in every way. He is an old friend of ours, we have know each other forever, and being able to work together on a real album is pretty crazy. The last track on the album, ‘Good Night’, was recorded in his bedroom on an eight track tape-machine. It was late, wine had been drunk and I was falling asleep as I sang. It’s exciting working around Nathaniel though because you feel slightly intimidated by his persistence and his intolerance to distraction. He didn’t say “wake up and get the fuck on with it,” because he didn’t need to. Simply having him in the room results in you not allowing yourself to get to the point where you have to be told something like that. I listen to a lot of new popular music, there is some intense stuff but nothing that is blowing my chimney off. John Maus always bowls me over with his genius and I love Youth Lagoon and Niki & The Dove at the moment. Aside from a few other things, I have been diving exclusively into classical music and hip-hop. I’ve read various opinionated journalists and bands claiming that British music is at an all time high. I’m calling bullshit on this. Every band is an even more crass, limp appropriation of something that existed before, be it good or bad. I keep seeing the phrase “The UK answer to” or “The new…” and its just disheartening – no real musical evolution. I guess we’ve come along and been touted as a more accessible Animal Collective, I am starting to realise that our signing with a major label properly wasn’t such an anomaly after all. We fit into that bracket perfectly. Self awareness and full acknowledgement of this is going to make for an interesting journey post-debut album. I want the shit to hit the fan. Do you have any weird habits? I guess these are all quite self-conscious things which means I don’t necessarily find them that weird. People obviously tell me these things are weird, though. Are carbs evil? I thought they were meant to be like half of your daily diet. The song title was just kinda funny – we all like to think that we are reasonably choosey about what we eat but realistically, when we walk into a dressing room and there is a packet of biscuits and an apple, it’s a fight for who gets the biscuits. Love a biscuit, I do… What are the last few songs you put on your iPod? The Shirley Collins record is magnificent. The Albion Country Band was essentially Shirley’s then-husband Ashley Hutchings’ band and is an electric folk band from the seventies. It’s been associated with a lot of the major players in English folk; I think Nic Jones might be on the No Roses record. The electric instrumentation is a bit of a departure from a lot of the other folk I have been listening to at the moment, it’s an intense cross-pollination of traditional folk and contemporary instrumentation. And the Martin Carthy record is beautiful and is a collection of traditional folk songs; Dave Swarbrick plays some mean fiddle on it, too. What’s the best gig you’ve played this year? Green Door Store is a great new venue. It had a fresh, pop-up warehouse feel to it, but with a little more warmth, and it is beneath the train station. The show was great, lots of people dancing and getting sweaty – it felt like one big orgy of pop. Music people are saying that you’re ‘ones to watch’ in 2012. What are your plans and what are your ‘ones to watch’ that you could tip for 2012? My ones to watch for 2012 are Youth Lagoon, Clams Casino and Niki & The Dove. Everyone should listen to Sealings too. -Bronya FrancisBOTW Interview: Fixers
Jeez, good question. Perhaps go and listen to us as well as a bunch of other musicians/composers/artists. Flood yourself in as much music as you possibly can. Legally or illegally download anything that captures your interest whether it be genre specific, the aesthetic of the artwork or the title and band name alone. Just hunt as hard as you possibly can and never stop learning about music – confront your own comfortable musical confines and challenge them at all times. Thats my advice and I adhere to it brothers and sisters.
That is a fascinating question. The majority of times you see a question like this, it is within the opinionated context of Oxford being an outsider city as far as music is concerned – somewhere that hasn’t really made an effort to align its musical contributions into any kind of coherent aesthetic and in recently doing so has become a source of excitement. I don’t really entertain the notion that our music is reactionary in a geographical manner, that seems to be a purely journalistic suggestion.
Hm, it’s tough right now. It is hard to convey our aesthetic in a wholly authentic way at the moment. Once you sign to a large record label, everyone wants you to adhere to what they need but still wants you to do it for them. They will profess to be exited by our ideas but essentially our ideas are only good ideas if they adhere to the black and white ground rules of music marketing. I still make all of our band artwork but have found it so tough to adhere to all the idiosyncratic and mundane ways of formulaically furthering our marketing through the likes of making fonts bigger so they can be seen on iTunes and appearing in our own music videos. You can spend the entire year fighting for want you want but it’s draining. For every piece of artwork I have to amend and for every telephone call I have to have to defend that artwork, this is just precious time I could be writing songs.
The Craft is a great film. I saw it when it came out and I think I was a little to young to fully appreciate it. It’s fascinating how films like The Craft garner this great nostalgic aesthetic that is totally lost at the time of release, much like that of a Vangelis cassette tape. You watch that film now and its like watching Heathers or something – it’s fucking fun, man. I remember watching The Wicker Man in a field once; it was being projected backwards and upside down, I fell asleep and woke up at six in the morning.
I used to weigh eighteen stone. I dropped the carbs for about a year and a half and got down to twelve. At one point I was eleven stone which, being a 6’2″ male, made me look pretty eery. Alas, this isn’t Heat magazine so let’s not dwell on this shit. I was fat, I got thin – I am scared of getting fat again but fuck it, I still have all my old clothes and food tastes too good.
I put about four or five new albums on my iPod every week and at the moment I am entangled in traditional folk. The last two records I put on my iPod were No Roses by Shirley Collins & The Albion Country Band and Martin Carthy’s self-titled first album.
It’s a toss up between The Paradiso in Amsterdam and The Green Door Store in Brighton. They are my two favourite venues we have visited this year. The Paradiso is a converted ninetieth century church building that was used in the sixties and a meeting space for a liberal dutch religious group called the Vrije Gemeente. It has a large downstairs venue and a smaller upstairs venue and the backstage is almost Dali-esque in its small, winding staircases and narrow corridors. Infact, the backstage of The Paradiso reminds me of a dream I had when I was about sixteen: I was at a Neil Young concert where the backstage was a myriad of winding, upside down staircases. Somehow, I managed to offend Neil while he was onstage and I began to panic that he might be rather angry with me. It turned out he was a nice guy at the end of the dream.
We are touring with The Kaiser Chiefs in February and then heading over to America for a few shows which should be exciting. When we get back we are going to go straight into a full UK album tour. The album is coming out on my birthday actually, May 14th – I think we are playing in Cardiff that evening.
