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OK, I'm not going to ask you why you're called Long Fin Killie, but
are there any Kilmarnock supporters in the band?
L: No, I'm afraid not, we're all from around Perthshire.
Good, you answered carefully there, though I suppose
St. Johnstone are pretty neutral. For what it's worth, I've been very
impressed with the new LP---it seems to be the best of the three to
date. Are you aware of this yourselves that it's one of your better
works?
L: I think that the approach to it was really very very different so the
end product was also very very different. With the first 2 records
there was lots of the songs came out of basically a lot of
jamming...what we would do is practise in this place called
Jordanstone, there's this mansion house there owned by a lady by the
title of Lady Duncan of Jordanstone, she allows us to practise there
in her stone walled laundry, would you believe in the heart of the
Perthshire countryside for the last 8 years. So what we basically do
is go out there and jam and we'll record these 'grooves', if you like,
and take out the bits we like best about them and hammer them into the
shape of songs, very often the stuff we like most, certainly in the
past the largest wealth of contradictions in a song like, say, "Heads
of dead surfers", where the drums are vaguely tribal, vaguely
hip-hopish, classical-sounding violin, guitar that sounds like it's
sampled, bass that's played with a stick, 3 different types of voices,
on paper it just sounds like junk basically, it's thrown together, but
hopefully once it's arranged and set down and properly recorded you've
got something coherent, that sounds fresh in some ways I guess.... but
with "Amelia" we did it in 3 sessions.
It's a quite varied album I suppose, there's a drum'n'bass feel to
"Lipstick" (a surprise single for me), the other stuff is very free and
easy.
L: Well, "Lipstick" was a complete remix by Jamie and Grant at Chamber
Studio, it was nothing to do with the group certainly this was
entirely the point in the past when we've remixed stuff ourselves you
tend to get a little bit precious---d'you know what I mean?---and you
don't deconstruct as mercilessly as you might, so we got Jamie and
Grant to give us their take on it and as you say you get something
which sounds completely different.
Yes, it's a good contrast...so I wanted to ask why the LPs are named
after tragic heroes and heroines of history.
L: Well the first record was called "Houdini" for no other reason that
the key track on it, I think, was called "How I blew it with
Houdini"...I say key track because it seemed to encapsulate lots of
the elements of the other songs, and was quite long and, I daren't use
the word epic because it sounds a little grandiose, but it's very
long, you'll take my meaning I guess and when I started doing
interviews for the record journalists started pointing out to me that
they thought that it had a fitting metaphorical worth in that Houdini
was an escapologist, he was a magician, and in the same respect, he
was a slippery character if you like, they found that quality in the
music in that they weren't able to pin it down. I was obviously
flattered, I thought it was a nice idea. I called "Valentino" that to
show that it was a continuation in that respect musically, and
certainly lyrically as well, the concerns on "Houdini" are racism,
sexism, homophobia, the same on Valentino. "Amelia" is really taking on
that again, but is a departure musically.
You mentioned "Heads of dead surfers" earlier, do you think that
you're not so much pressured, but maybe you're trying to shake off the
classic track---big in the Festive 50, your best known song---to put
something else forward that's completely your own?
L: Well, certainly as far as the reviews went, MES references
started and ended with the first reviews we got for "Houdini".
So it's just me then? OK I'll shut up and in best time-honoured
chat show tradition let you plug your book.
L: Oh, crikey... I've written a book, it's called "Jelly Roll", about
a jazz band on a tour of the highlands of Scotland---one of them's
black, it's semi-, well, vaguely autobiographical, and it just charts
the ridiculous situations they get themselves into in the course of
this 9-date tour of Scotland.
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