Richard Davies

A Mole Comes Up From Underground

Songwriter Richard Davies, who's made a a name for himself in the indie- underground with his bands the Moles and Cardinal, has been compared to fabulous songwriters and arrangers from days gone by-- everyone from Brian Wilson to Phil Spector to David Bowie. From the horse's mouth, which artists actually influenced him? "Who do you think?" Davies quips back at me on the phone from Australia. John Lennon, whose attention to lyrical detail, lithe songwriting style and unusual phrasing I hear in new Davies' new album, There's Never Been A Crowd Like This (Flydaddy), comes to mind. "I was a very big fan of the Beatles, like everybody, I suppose," Davies agrees. "But the funny thing is that this record was done on the tape machine that he did his last record on. And it broke; as soon as I finished recording, the machine broke down. So I was the last person to use the bloody thing. It was an old studio two-inch tape thing that he did the Double Fantasy record on. That was one of the biggest reasons that I'd recorded in the studio. When they told me that, I thought, 'That;s just too nostalgic for words, I've got to record here'...Yeah, he really was a big example, as a person as much as a musician. And that's the thing. It's-- I hope the feeling that people get is the person that they're hearing as much as the actual sounds that they're hearing. That seems to be a feature of anything that I've been doing, whether it's a garage band or whether it's an orchestrated thing, or if it's a stripped-down guitar-and-piano thing."

With that last phrase, he neatly sums up the ground he's covered with the Moles, Cardinal and his solo work, respectively. But There's Never Been A Crowd... marks a breaking point with his past in a notable way: like a '50s crooner, Davies merely sang (and played harmonica) on this record, delegating the guitar, piano, bass and trumpet details to session musicians, who played under his watchful eye. One of the main reasons for hiring out musicians was that Davies can't play the piano, the poignant tones of which figure prominently on the album's spare arrangements. "I wrote the stuff, but I can't actually play piano at all. I don't know what the chords are called or anything," he admits. "So I had to get somebody to do it, because I would've been in there for six weeks trying to record a song, and I obviously couldn't afford that."

But the act of turning over parts of his songs led to a clarity of understanding in his own development as an artist. "I'm slowly discovering that I have certain roles and certain functions as a musician, things that sit well with me, things that I'm good at, and the main thing about that is writing songs," Davies reveals. "I'm happy enough to accept that. I think the punk thing of doing everything yourself, for me anyway, is not necessarily something I have the desire to stick with permanently. I understand the ethic of it very well, because the first two records were done exactly like that: You know, think of something, record it very quickly, and do it all yourself, and I understand that ethic. But I'm also [now] understanding that you can delegate things, and that the sounds that you end up with can be just as interesting and valid."

Written by Lydia Anderson, CMJ New Music Monthly, July 1996.

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