Glissando, in Glasgow’s Bar Bloc at the end of May. Ward replied, saying he wasn’t even sure what he was doing at the end of March never mind the end of May, but he would try to make it along. Being an enterprising sort, and excited by the chance to do some actual proper music editor stuff free of the constraints of major-label PR types, he also mentioned his position at this august rag, and said that Gizeh should feel free to add Brazen to its mailing list.
After some back and forth, it was discovered that Glissando’s label-mates Her Name Is Calla would be providing support at a gig Ward would be attending (The Twilight Sad’s King Tut’s show at the end of March) and that Knox, in his capacity as label-head/tour manager, would be travelling up with them. Fuelled by delusions of Our Band Could Be Your Life-inspired grandeur, interviews were set up, to take place a few hours before Calla took the stage; firstly with all four members of Her Name Is Calla - Tom Morris, Thom Corah, Michael Love and Adam Weikert - and secondly with Knox himself…
HER NAME IS CALLA
Brazen: So Rich forwarded me a copy of the new mini-album, The Heritage…
Tom Morris and Thom Corah (simultaneously): I’ve not got one of those yet! [laughter]
TC (mock-curious): What’s it like?
B: It’s sounding good, yeah. I felt really privileged getting it so quickly, he said it was only mastered in the past week or so?
TM: We finished it about Friday last week, or something like that, or Thursday.
TC: Still warm. Still warm from the CD player.
TM: Still not happy with it.
[momentary pause while this registers, then…]
TC: [laughing] Still not happy with it? What’s wrong with it now?!
TM: Don’t like it.
B: Do you think you’d go back and rework any of it?
TM: Haven’t got time now.
TC: I don’t think we’ll ever be happy with it.
Michael Love: If you do that, you’d end up just working on it forever and ever.
B: Like George Lucas.
ML: Yes.
TC: Yeah. We don’t wanna be George Lucas. Well, I don’t wanna speak for the band. Anyone else wanna be George Lucas?
TM: Nah, I’m alright.
TC: Mike?
ML: I’d quite like to be his assistant.
[met with quizzical looks from all present]
ML: ‘Cause he’s loaded! Imagine how much his assistants would get paid!
TM: I’d like to be his child and sole heir. I’d be quite up for that.
B: I’d imagine that’d be more lucrative than the assistant post.
ML: Yeah, wait a bit longer.
[general murmured assent]
B: The Heritage is a mini-album rather than a full-length album, right?
TC: Yes.
B: See, here’s the thing: the ‘mini-album’ is still fifty-one minutes long. How long’s the album going to be? It’s already, like, twice the length of a Lemonheads album.
[laughter]
TC: I think we’ll bring it out on DVD.
B: I think it’s the way to go. Triple-vinyl set.
TC: Yeah, we’re always trying to think of new formats we can invent to hold enough material.
B: You could refuse to release a physical recording and just go round people’s houses.
TC: That could be a lengthy process. I like it though.
ML: There is, like, a ten minute space and then there’s a bonus track kind of thing [on the mini-album], so…
TC: So it’s only forty minutes long!
B: It seems fairly in keeping with some of Rich’s own stuff with Glissando. Do you think there’s a specific kind of ‘sound’ being crafted at Gizeh?
TM: No, not at all.
B: Not at all?
TC: Well, not intentionally.
TM: The stuff on the mini-album will probably translate a lot differently live; it was just what we were able to do at the time we were recording, basically. It was just recorded in what was available to us, so we kind of had to tone some things down which we wouldn’t necessarily have liked to have done.
ML: But on the other side, there are things we can do there that we can’t do live.
TC: We made a few compromises. We expanded on small ideas and made bigger things out of them.
TM: It’s really old to us now. The mini-album is.
B: When was it recorded?
TM: It was recorded at the back end of last year and the start of January, and so the songs have changed quite a lot. The last track in particular on there is a lot different now, a lot more… it’s a lot rockier, basically. But no, I don’t think there’s a sound being crafted at all. I don’t know anything about Glissando’s album. I recorded it for them, but I didn’t listen to it.
[laughter]
TC: Apart from that, apart from the fact that you were there for the whole process, you didn’t know anything about it.
TM: Well, it’s not like we listen to the same music or…
B: I was really just thinking that because you’re both quite minimalist. There’s quite a lot of space in both recordings, I think.
TC: I think it’s perhaps, there are similarities in our musical sensibilities, and then perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Gizeh signed us.
TM: [The Heritage is] a bit different to our two singles from before.
TC: …well, it’s kind of similar to [past single] ‘Condor and River’, there are elements where it’s very sparse and very open.
ML: We saw it as dynamics - give the listener a chance to absorb what was going on, and they can try to make up their own minds about what the song’s about.
TC: Building atmosphere.
ML: Yeah. Creating mood.
TM: It’s good to be able to do things differently live anyway, I think. There doesn’t seem any point in recording a song exactly the way you play it live and vice versa. It’d get boring.
B: Do you think it’s playing the songs live that’s changed them since the recording?
TM: Some of the songs on there were basically written as they were recorded, so we were evolving the songs up to a point where the recording finished, and then the songs carried on evolving, if you know what I mean, even though the recording had finished. If we were gonna start recording it now, it’d be a lot different.
ML: It starts off in the studio, and that’s the first time it’s done, and then we have to do it live, so from the first live outing it’s different from its recorded version.
TC: And then it starts to take its evolution from there.
ML: The B-side to our last single was just recorded by these two [indicates Tom and Thom] one night, and then it came to the point where we’ve got to play it live, and we just ended up writing the song, sort of re-writing the song into a live version.
TM: Yeah, some things, sometimes you find it doesn’t… the way you’ve recorded it won’t carry live. Like that B-side these guys are talking about, it was really quite soft, and if we had sandwiched it in the middle of our set with a couple of rock songs then it wouldn’t really carry, so we had to kind of adapt it.
B: On the record it seems like the kind of thing that wouldn’t necessarily transfer easily to a live setting; it sounds like it needs the listener’s full attention, which must be hard in support slots when you’ve really got to try to grab an audience’s attention.
TC: [to the rest of the band] Do you think that’s something we’re aware of when we rock out when we do it live? I think we just like to rock out a bit.
TM: We like to rock out, yeah.
ML: Yeah, get our balls out.
TC: Yeah, but do we think we need to up the noise a bit more to get people’s attention? Is that a conscious thing?
ML: I think we enjoy the studio atmosphere and the live atmosphere for different reasons,
TM: They’re two different settings, y’know. Like on a recording, having things that you’ll be listening to for the fiftieth time and you’ll hear something which you haven’t heard before, which there should be plenty of on that CD. Then when you come to doing things live you’ve got it stripped down so four of you can pull off what you recorded.
ML: Yeah, you’ve got to adapt the multiple layers of the recording down to four guys on stage… hitting stuff.
TC: It was quite an issue with [The Heritage track] ‘[Motherfucker!] It’s Alive And It’s Bleeding’. I think it took us a few passes to get the instrumentation right on that.
TM: Some of the recordings started off as, like, me having a vague idea of what it should sound like and just recording it, with like a guitar track, and then others laid their tracks down and we thought ‘oh, okay, this is how we’re gonna work the song’, so if a part was already recorded then we’d work around that.
B: With something like that that’s predominantly instrumental, with pretty abstract lyrics that don’t make any reference to the title, does the title come first? Or do you just sort of think ‘hey, this sounds like a song that should be called ‘Motherfucker! It’s Alive And It’s Bleeding!’’?
[laughter]
TM: No, it’s… well, I don’t know how it came about, really. We must have just wrote it down on the same page as the lyrics, or whatever.
B: Do you find yourselves slipping into pre-determined roles in the band? It doesn’t sound like the kind of music where you can say ‘right, this is the guitarist, this is the bassist, this is the drummer’, it sounds like the kind of thing where maybe there’s a lot of coming and going between instruments.
ML: As far as the live set-up goes, we kind of all have our specific roles, but then in the recording, it’s sometimes just a case of ‘grab that and have a go with that’, then work it out later on. If someone’s got a melody and an idea, just put it down, regardless of what their main instrument is.
TM: We kind of all go in and… we’re all busy with our own personal lives as well, so sometimes we’re not all around to record at the same time. Some of us might work on a track on our own, and then the others come in a few days later and listen to what they’ve done. Like, Thom recorded - there’s a track in the middle that’s like a drone track, that was a really nice piano song that Thom composed and recorded, and I just fucked it up with some electronics. He didn’t know about it until we stuck it on the CD.
ML: I always said you had your Jonny Greenwood side.
TM: Yep. Just like that.
TC: [laughing] You and ‘the Jonny’.
TM: I call him ‘Greeny’, actually.
TC: Greeno.
TM: ‘Oi! Greeno! Get over ‘ere, forget about Thom Yorke!’
B: Yeah, speaking of Radiohead, since Rich got in touch through Last.fm I checked out Her Name Is Calla’s page on the site and was expecting charts full of Radiohead and all that kind of dark, brooding, experimental stuff, but… The Hoosiers were in the top ten?
TM: Oh, no, my wife uses the same computer, so she’s got a lot of her music on there, I get asked that all the time.
B: I was wondering. It didn’t seem to sit right.
TM: Yeah, I didn’t think about it when I put Last.fm on it, and my sister’s renting a room in my house as well so I’ve got my wife and my sister’s music on there, so there’s all sorts of fucking shit going on there. There’ll be like Aphex Twin or Spiritualized, and then you’ll get… fucking… Counting Crows.
[huge gales of laughter from the rest of the band]
B: Counting Crows were number one in the ‘most listened to’ charts, I think.
TM: Yeah, I get quite a bit of shit about that from people, and if people don’t know me they must think ‘this guy is such a loser!’
B: I thought maybe you were just particularly fond of ‘Mr Jones’.
TM: I’ll show you my mp3 player if you want!
B: No, I believe you.
TC: I want proof! He’s a big fan of Counting Crows, that’s gotta go in the article. ‘Tom says ‘yes!’ to Counting Crows!’
B: ‘Tom endorses Adam Duritz’s hair.’
TM: I don’t think they really need my endorsement, do they?
B: How did you get the gig tonight? You’re touring with The Twilight Sad?
TM: We’re playing two nights and that’s it. We toured with iLiKETRAiNS and played here last year, and King Tut’s just invited us back for tonight, then we’ve got a gig with them tomorrow night in Aberdeen as well. They’re a great band to be playing with anyway. Really looking forward to seeing them tonight.
B: Then back home?
TM: Yeah, we’re going back to Leicester on Sunday, and then we’re going on tour about two weeks after.
TC: We were originally hoping to do a couple of Scottish dates as part of that two-week tour, but they just didn’t work out at all, they just came up and…
TM: Yeah, it didn’t really make sense to be coming back up in two weeks, because it cost more money than we had. But the last time we came to Scotland we had the best dates on the tour. The best crowds. Awesome. We played Newcastle one night, which was pretty crap, then from there straight up to Aberdeen and back down to Glasgow, and it was just awesome. Aberdeen in particular, we met these two girls that worked in another venue and they took us out to this club that had a crazy man dancing -
ML: He wasn’t crazy, though, he was deep sea diving…
TM: Oh yeah, he’d gone too far down, basically, and lost his marbles.
TC: A fifty year-old man just breakdancing on the floor. To Led Zeppelin.
TM: And I had those really nice trousers on, and did that rock skid that burned holes in the knees, remember? And you could see the burn, it was just going ‘tsscccchhhhh!’ at the hole, it was incredible.
ML: And then after that it was Edinburgh, which was brilliant.
TM: We just met some really cool people, and wanted to come back.
B: Did you play Glasgow last time?
TM: We played here [i.e. Tut’s], actually, just on the support slot with iLiKETRAiNS. It’s kind of how we got the gigs, from Aberdeen, because when we thought we were coming here on our own tour we just contacted the guys from the other support band in Aberdeen to sort of say ‘hey, we’re coming up to Scotland, do you guys wanna hook up for a gig?’, and it turned out one of them worked at Moshulu, and just said ‘do you guys wanna play this?’, which made sense. Worked out in our benefit, in the end.
B: Are you coming back sometime this year then, or is this it?
TM: Well we’re doing the tour, then the record’s coming out and we’re doing a couple more dates [ed: including, it later transpires, a Leeds show with a presumably-impressed Twilight Sad], and then we’re recording the album, the full-length. Don’t think it’ll come out until early next year though. Some thirty-second hits.
[laughter]
TC: Thirty seconds?
ML: We’re gonna go all Napalm Death.
B: I can smell the Colin Murray endorsement.
TM: To make it financially worthwhile for people we’ll just have to release quadruple A-sides, just so they’ve got two minutes of songs on there. It’s a bit of a cop-out, isn’t it, if you charge someone three quid for a single and it’s like thirty seconds. Just scream in the mike for thirty seconds.
TC: ‘Song one, done, in the bag’.
B: Call it ‘iPod Jingle’. Money in the bank.
TM: ‘iPod jingle’?
B: Yeah, do a Feist.
TC: Yeah, let’s do some songs for iPods!
B: There’s the album name right there - ‘Songs For iPods!’.
TC: Or ‘Let’s Copy Moby. Dot Com. To The Max.’
B: Right, well I think that’s us done here if you guys are alright with all that?
ML: Oh wait, this is our first interview with new drummer Adam.
Adam Weikert: Hence why I have nothing to say. It’s great I had the chance to say that, because otherwise it could just be like ‘oh, he wasn’t there’.
TC: Well, say something.
AW: I don’t have anything to say, I just play drums.
ML: You do… stuff. Other stuff!
B: Were you all mates before or was it just a kind of NME-ad situation?
AW: We were mates, yeah. Actually it’s quite weird, because I got about four offers to drum at once…
TC: Really? Are you gonna try and make us feel a bit honoured here?
AW: No.
ML: Good, we’re not.
[Massive laughter]
AW: And now I’m here.
TC: Bet your ego felt really good that day.
AW: It did, yeah.
TC: Then you realised you’d made the wrong decision and joined our band…
Her Name Is Calla's mini-album, The Heritage, is out now on Gizeh Records. Part Two of The Great Gizeh Records Interview Extravaganza - an interview with label head Richard Knox - will follow in the near-future.
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