7 Fragen an die Wave Pictures

The Wave Pictures - Now You Are Pregnant from Anousonne Savanchomkeo on Vimeo.

Die permanent tourenden Wave Pictures (siehe auch hier) sind nach meinem Dafürhalten eine der aufregendsten Kapellen derzeit - nicht zuletzt der begnadeten Texte David Tattersalls wegen. Trotz des ständigen Unterweggsseins fand dieser freundlicherweise die Zeit, mir ein paar Fragen zu beantworten.

Interview

The Bashful Dodger: Good evening, Mr. Tattersall, thanks for taking the time! „Now You Are Pregnant“ is, from my point of view, one of your best songs, full of both lyrical and musical surprises and unexpected rhymes. It even has some anthemic traits, and yet, it has only been released as a single. But you are frequently playing it live. Is it ever going to end up on an album?


David Tattersall: We don't have any plans to ever put it on an album. It's a song that seems to one of our more popular ones. I'm glad that people like it, though it's never been one of my personal favourites.


Q: Your next release is a single with Jonny singing this song and „Sleepy Eyes“, both originally sung by Dave. Was Jonny involved in the writing process of the songs and is getting his share now, or has he been taking posession of the song little by little? Is there more Jonny-on-the-mic stuff to be expected in the future?


A: No, Jonny isn't involved with the writing of the songs, it is more that he takes certain ones over little by little. But he does a great job singing them. The Wave Pictures don't make plans about things like that. The first time Jonny sang that song it was quite spontaneous. We usually like to go into shows not knowing exactly what we are going to do. We don't write set lists or discuss the set. We just wing it. Just make it up as we go along really. So, maybe there will be more of Jonny singing in the future, maybe not. I guess that I will always sing most of the material because I write it, but it's nice to imagine Jonny being a kind of Doug Yule figure to my Lou Reed!


Q: I read some pretty informative liner notes to the „Instant Coffee Baby“ album on The Line Of Best Fit. Would you mind doing that about „Now You Are Pregnant“ for me?


A: Well, I can tell you I wrote it in about five minutes, it just came right out of me really fast. Songwriters say those are usually the best ones, but I have never noticed that. Sometimes the best ones are ones you work hard at for a while, and sometimes the best ones come easily. It's the same with bad ones, some come quick and some come slow! But Now You Are Pregnant I wrote in about five minutes. I already had lots of different pieces and I put them together really fast. I had lots of notes laid out in front of me. I had previously, about a month before, written a song called "Jonny Cash Died Today", on the day that Jonny Cash died. That was a rubbish song, but there it was. Then there were three other elements to the story I guess: one girl I knew who worked in a shoe shop, another girl who had gotten pregnant very young, and thirdly a drunk in a bar in Glasgow who went on and on about Elvis. At the time I wrote Now You Are Pregnant, I wasn't a fan of Elvis or Jonny Cash. I appreciate them both a bit more now, but I still must admit I'm a much bigger fan of Chuck Berry out of all the rock n' rollers. I also wasn't in love with anybody, it just makes for a better song if you say you are. I just put these different things together, as if the girl in the shoe shop and the pregnant girl were one girl and made up a song very very quickly. It took about the same length of time to write it as it takes to sing it. The funny thing about the chord sequence is that it is cut off. It lasts six bars, whereas a normal chord sequence would be four or eight, so it would resolve, but Now You Are Pregnant doesn't resolve, it just goes round and round. It's a nice song to play on the guitar. I like to play it on the guitar and for Jonny to sing it. He sings it beautifully, much better than me. I don't relate to that song particularly well. For me, it's not one of my best, simply because I don't much feel like that guy in that song! It doesn't have a lot of my personality in it. But people like it, so that's nice. I like it better with Jonny singing it, his version is my favourite ever recording of it; it suits him better. The funny thing is that everyone assumes these things are totally autobiographical. They aren't. They have bits and pieces of your life in them, of course, but never the whole truth. I suppose it just means it's a good song if people think it is true. A good song, for me, is a song that is true to itself, not true to life. And audiences can mistake a song that is true to itself for being true to life. That's OK. I do that, too, with other people's songs. It would be nice to think that Now You Are Pregnant, or any of my songs, was true to itself. One other thing: some friends at the time who were first to hear it said I shouldn't call it "Now You Are Pregnant" because they said it is a sad song and getting pregnant shouldn't be a sad thing. I said "no, it shouldn't, but it is sometimes!" So I kept the title. The idea of the title is that it makes sense of the whole song, of everything said in the second verse, even though I never sing "now you are pregnant", knowing that she is makes sense of the whole thing. It becomes that the protagonist is going after this girl to help her, this girl who is pregnant by another man, which is an altogether more interesting idea than if he was just going after her because he loved her. It's quite beautiful in a way. He never quite makes his mind up about it, though, and at the end of the song you don't know whether he is going to go or not, which is a nice ambiguity. I got the idea of a title you don't sing from a great song by The Mountain Goats called "No Children". The song is a husband singing about how he and his wife have grown to hate each other. It's very funny and also very bitter and sad and beautiful. He never sings "no children" or "we couldn't have children" or anything, but then you see the title and it gives this whole extra depth and layer of meaning to the song.


Q: How do you select the songs that are going to be on an album? In the case of „We Dress Up Like Snowmen“ and the above-mentioned song, you opted to put them out as a 7“ and „I Shall Be A Ditchdigger“ from the last album is a pretty old song by your standards which had to wait until the fourth album...


A: It's usually new things I've written and maybe something old (like Ditchdigger) that has become new to us again after such a long gap, or something that we want people to hear who have never had a chance to. Then you're looking for the right ten or twelve songs out of the twenty or so you have recorded to create a unified whole - the album - which also has the best variety or the best feeling. Sometimes you pick a song and put it on an album because the guitar solo is great. Sometimes it's the right mood, sometimes it it the lyrics. It varies. Another reason we did those older songs was to get Jonny Helm on them. On the original, older versions it was a different drummer. And we were playing them live at the time and wanted a recording with Jonny on it. We like to do so many songs, I've written hundreds since I was about fifteen. "Sleepy Eye" on the new seven inch, I wrote when I was 16 years old. I'm 27 now! It's nice to keep as much going though, I'm proud of all of it, proud we have a big repertoire. It's nice to go on stage and know you can do so many different songs, and then to sing what you really feel. It's a very nice, nostalgic kind of feeling to hear Jonny sing a song I wrote that long ago. Then again, it's also important to keep doing new songs, and we have about twenty totally new songs we haven't released yet that we'll also be playing at new shows. It's good, I like the really old and the really new. I like the stuff in between the least! You have to wait for things to get old again, so that they become new again to me.


Q: You are all good musicians who are playing together all the time, but your recordings always have this certain edge of spontaneity. How do you manage to preserve this while many bands sound too professional on recordings? Do you do it all live, book a studio for one or two days and done you are?


A: Well, bands don't play the way we like, or sound the way we like any more. To my ears, the way we sound is a human sound. You can hear each of us playing our instruments, and you can hear us responding to each other, you can even hear the strings of our guitars. That's what I like to hear. Like The Velvet Underground's third album or John Wesley Harding by Dylan, or even things like field recordings and live albums, or older things from the thirties and forties. John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Joseph Spence, Django Reinhardt. I don't really enjoy modern music because mostly it sounds fake to me. It sounds like a computer churning out robot music. Bands, too; not just pop but modern indie-rock is a pile of shit. It's very inhuman. It's people turning themselves into machines, because machines are perceived to better since they don't make mistakes. But it's not a sound of love. Machines cannot love! Humans make mistakes and are fragile but they are also warm and vital. I know that all sounds like a lot of bullshit! But it is what I hear. You can hear the technology taking over and replacing the human being. Because when you hear a Kings of Leon album, say, you hear a snare drum set through a computer to trigger off forty other snares perfectly in sync, it is neither the sound of one man drumming, nor of forty men drumming (which could never be perfectly in sync), it is the sound only a machine could make. It is the same with the guitars, they put hundreds on there, until it doesn't sound like a human with a guitar anymore. It's totally fake and unemotional to my ears. We record each of the players and try to get something rough and natural and something that feels and sounds like people in a room. You close your eyes and you can picture us in the room, you can hear the room and imagine where we are all stood. That's what happens if you listen to my favourite records, to "Tonight's The Night" by Neil Young or to Jimmy Reed or whatever, and that's what we aspire to. Ensemble playing. For me, something went wrong with recording in the mid seventies and it's never been good since. We're trying to swim against the current and I know most people don't agree with us. It's not to be retro or what have you, it's not a pose, it's just the sound we like to hear. I like it rough and ready. That moves me more. We always record live and we always do it quickly and we're looking for something, some spark you can't get any other way. You know, "Brown Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison, "La Bamba" by Ritchie Valens, "Like A Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan, "I'm Straight" by The Modern Lovers... that's the ideal! That's a bunch of guys in a room and they made magic! It's all done live and I always hope I'll go back through to the control room and hear something like those records, but we've never managed it yet! But we'll keep going at it and maybe one day we'll get something that great.


Q: You've been touring and recording a lot, it actually seems like you're on the road almost all year. When you're not recording. Do you even have time to write and practise new songs?


A: Oh yeah, we work up things in sound checks and so forth. We have new stuff all the time. We like doing what we do. You find a way.


Q: This year, the Stanley Brinks & The Wave Pictures album was released, a Wave Pictures album and a David Tattersall solo album (with Freschard playing the drums, if my information is right). What's up next? New collaborations? A break from touring?

A: We are working on two Wave Pictures albums, one recorded by Darren Hayman, and one recorded partly in Leeds and partly in London. I hope to get both of them out over the next 18 months or so. And I made an album with Howard Hughes called "The Lobster Boat". Howard is the lead singer of French band Coming Soon. He and I made an album together. It's a really strong album, we are both very proud of it. I play some slide guitar on it, which I was happy to do again since I haven't played slide guitar for years. Ry Cooder style! We made that and that will be released in the upcoming year as well. Also, there is another new album of Stanley Brinks and The Wave Pictures called "Another One Just Like That", which I think is even better than "Stanley Brinks and The Wave Pictures". His songs are amazing, it's a great album. So we've got a lot of good things going on.


The Bashful Dodger: Thank you for this interview, Sir!


David Tattersall: Thanks.