ELECTRICITY:
Peter Jefferies on Peter Jefferies
What follows is a transcription of a profile on Peter Jefferies that aired on Radio New Zealand in February of 1998. The tape was sent out with Peter Jefferies latest solo album, Substatic, as an audio bio. I liked the piece enough to play it on my radio show on WMNF in Tampa. I also felt it was a better interview than I'd be able to get if I tried to do one myself. So with the proper respects paid to the good people at Radio New Zealand, here is Peter Jefferies story in his own words. Any errors are likely to be mine in the transcribing. Some editing has been done for lenght and clarity. - Bob Pomeroy
BEGININGS
Me and my brother Graeme started playing music on instruments that actually made a proper sound, as opposed to cardboard ones that we made up, when we were 12, 13, something like that. We had a high school band, but the first band that was worthy of any kind of remembering was the Nocturnal Projections. That started in 1981 and played mostly in New Plymouth (New Zealand). We were living n this house in the country where we could make as much noise as we wanted, any time of day or night. No one cared.
So we wrote and wrote and played New Plymouth every week. Eventually we went up to Auckland and started making records. We made two or three records and played around New Zealand a lot. We were a live band who made a few records.
That band broke up in 83. Then me and Graeme got a band called This Kind of Punishment going. That was more of a recording band. In fact it made its first two records without ever playing live. It only played 14 times in the entire four years it was going. It made four records and a live tape came out eventually on Xpressway. When we made the last This Kind of Punishment record (In The Same Room), Graeme and I knew it was going to be our last record together. It was an attempt to pull tougher all the strands into one final record that we could put the thing down and walk away from and not be wishing that we'd done this or that. The songs "Don't Go and "Words Fail Me" were by the Nocturnal Projections. We tried to get versions that sounded like what the Nocturnals sounded like when they played in big halls, not like we sounded in a studio with lots of effects. We did those two songs in this wonderful big building that Graeme was living in. We recorded them out on a big stairwell and got this amazing natural echo. We just got a way more natural sound. "Words fail Me" was the last song, on the last This Kind of Punishment record. If any song summed up the whole thing, it was that one. It also summed up the Nocturnal Projections.
ON RECORDING
I learnt to try to make it as real as you can by making those Nocturnal Projections records in big studios. They became more and more affected and less and less like us. This Kind of Punishment used 4 track recorders in its lounge and stuff. We used no effects at all. We used no mixing board for the first record. I don't say you have to make it as raw as that, but try to get some humanity in it. Try to catch, like the magic take. Get it when it's fresh. Maybe when you almost don't quite know what you're doing, if you can.
There are times when you have to be prepared to do it over and over again and drive yourself nuts to get the magic take. There are two songs I was involved in recording that went to obsessive lengths to get the right take. One was "Randolph's Going Home," that I did with Shane Carter. I literally spent eight or nine hours trying to get the drums right. Shane spent just hours getting the vocals. We never lost the commitment because we were dedicated to that song, but it took hours getting it right.
The other was "The Fate of the Human Carbine." That was the first song I ever wrote with Robbie Muir. That came out as a single on Xpressway. It got picked up by Ajax Records in America. While both songs got attention, I think it was "Carbine" more than any other that broke me in America. It got me to the point where I was making number one on college radio play lists, on some stations.
Getting good reviews and getting released in America sort of opened the door that the album "Last Great Challenge in a Dull World" was able it walk through. When me and Robbie recorded that, we didn't know it was going to do me so many favors a few years down the track We did know what we wanted from the song. The picking on the recorded version of the song is all done with just his fingers. It is very complicated and very hard to play. We stayed up all night trying to get that first track; that acoustic guitar track that everything was going to go over. I have this theory that if you get a good first track, everything else will be great. If you don't, you'll always be playing to your mistakes. Robbie tracked that guitar line over fifty times until he got it just perfect. After he got it that good, the rest of it just flew together. I'm grateful that he did it because that's the song that did the job.
SOLO
Bob Dylan once said that the songs are already there and I just wrote them down. The last line on the last song on the "Last Great Challenge in a Dull World" goes, "I'm a tape recorder talking to a telephone line listening." I don't know where the songs come from. They come form somewhere. I don't feel that I write them per se. I feel like a radio set who just happens to be tuned in some kind of of way that I pick this stuff up. There is a certain amount of revision or working things into the music that I'm consciously doing later. That spark of where the idea comes from, I just pick it up.
The nearest that I got to describing it was in the second verse of "Electricity." I'm epileptic. Epilepsy and whatever happens to me when I write, there's very little difference. I think Chris Knox has said this too. He's epileptic also. I remember reading somewhere once that he said it's not much different from writing a song. I really understood what he means. The song "Electricity" deals with a power blackout and relates it to my personal electricity. Apparently I have a lot of electricity in my body. That part of me that can go the wrong way and make me blackout, also seems to be the part that in some way receives the songs. As such, I try not to tamper with it.
"On an Unknown Beach" took me a very long time to write. The basic song got written in a few hours, but it was about six lines of the lyrics that weren't right. Over about a six month period I gradually, bit, by bit by bit, managed to get them right. I didn't even want to touch the music until I got the lyric right because it rests pretty heavily on the lyric. When I finally got it, I tried out the tune I'd been saving for it and it didn't fit. Then I had a set of lyrics kicking around.
Awhile later I was actually writing another song, "Chain Reaction" I think it was. The tape I was fiddling around with, for some reason, when I finished whatever I was doing cut onto a little piece of music. I only got about ten seconds of this chunk of music from something else that I'd been doing, but I could tell straight away that it was a perfect fit for"On an Unknown Beach." I sat down and worked out that first little chord pattern and it just wrote itself. It took a half an hour to finish it up after that.
2 FOOT FLAME
I've been living in Vancouver, Canada and Austin, Texas. I met Jean Smith from Mecca Normal when we were both playing in Europe at a festival. We got on extremely well. We toured America a few months after that. I opened for Mecca Normal. Then Jean came over here and lived in Dunedin for about four months. Then we went and toured Europe again. We got our band 2 Foot Flame going while we were in Dunedin. Michael Morely from the Dead C joined in. Jean took the tapes to Matador who then put it out. We found that out about half way through the European tour. I was, `Oh Great! We've got a deal with Matador!' So I moved to Canada.
We got a very fine Penthouse apartment there. Did a lot of writing and recording of stuff. I worked for Mecca Normal. I drummed for them and produced for them. Jean produced my
solo album Elevator Madness. We found an extremely sympathetic studio and the guy who engineered it Mark Harness is a genius. He stopped recording bands ages ago. For some reason, he was prepared to record me and Jean and David Lester from Mecca Normal. He let us bring in all the stuff or write material in the studio. We had no idea what we were doing. We'd be muttering around for a couple of hours driving him nuts, and then suddenly we'd do three songs in the space of ten minutes. So we never knew what was going to happen, and he let us do all that. Normally, big studio guys are so fussy in their approach, but this guy wasn't. So we did a whole bunch of recording in that two year period.
Elevator Madness is an option that you get on a pinball game that me and Jean used to play a lot. There are only two of these pinball games in all of Vancouver and one of them was at the 7 11 right across the street from our apartment. Elevator madness is multi-ball. It's when you get a whole pile of balls rolling at you. The lyrics are a bit off the top of my head. It's just meant to be loud and fiery, but not negative. The last bit of it, "this game is one of many. It's not easy but it's all right" That is the message. It's just a big noisy song.
Then I came back to New Zealand. Not necessarily because I completely wanted to but, because I couldn't get the necessary Visas to stay in Canada any more. We'd finished the second 2 Foot Flame album, Ultra Drowning before I left Canada. Literally, the last moment. We went in to play the finished master at 12 o'clock and I had to be on a plane at three. That's how close we cut it, but we got it done.
Then I came back here and got stranded for four or five months. I lost my share of the apartment in Canada. Jean and I didn't lose the band, which is kind of interesting. We lovers for the two years I was in Canada. Normally when that stops, everything goes to bits. I was living in another country, but it didn't stop us, which is pretty amazing.
On a lot of the new songs I play the piano and the drums at the same time. It's a pianodrum. The piano runs through a distortion unit and delay into an amp. I have a kick drum which I use with my left foot, I play the keyboard with my left hand and the snare drum with my right. There is a mic over my left shoulder that I sing into. Sometimes I just use the kick drum and use two hands on the keyboard.
The first time I ever did it was in Wellington and had an excruciating headache by the time I finished the show. I'd make a mistake on the keyboard and I have to take my hand off, and my foot would stop working. It was like my body didn't know what to do. One day it dawned on me that it was a new instrument. Like when I sit down to play the drums, I'm not playing a drum and a drum and another drum and a cymbal. It's a drum kit. It's one thing. The brain thinks it's one thing, not nine things. When that dawned on me, it was a new instrument, everything including the microphone over my shoulder that I had to sing into, is all one instrument. When I saw it as one thing, I stopped and I was able to play it.
Jean plays the guitar. She has a really unusual guitar style and she sings. So we have three instruments blasting away and she's singing and I'm sing as well. We sound like a four piece band but there are only two of us. At the risk of sounding immodest, nobody's ever seen a band like 2 Foot Flame. Two people doing all that. It gets a little hard to believe seeing it live, but it just is.
EPILOGUE
Peter's latest release, Substatic, was not covered in the Radio New Zealand profile. Jefferies was in the middle of recording this disc when the profile was first broadcast. Sustatic is a collection of five instrumental tracks that with Peter playing most instruments with some help from Michael Hill and Anita Galitis. The music is highly rhythmic and is built around repeating patterns. It reminds me a little of early Phillip Glass records to a certain extent, but with a much earthier, grounded sound. The disc is builds on sounds that Jefferies has been using for years, but takes them in a new direction. It will be very interesting to see where Peter Jefferies goes from here.