It may come as no surprise but with the launch of a new Membranes album John Robb now has even more things to talk about. The all-giving “post post-punk band” are following up 2015’s critically acclaimed Dark Matter / Dark Energy and the truly brilliant remix of said album, Inner Space / Outer Space, with a new LP, What Nature Gives Nature Takes Away; on legendary label Cherry Red. The new record is - to use the seventeenth century adoption of an old, old term - a Leviathan; a crushingly powerful entity without master. And a relentlessly inquisitive, colourful beast that over repeated listen reveals a strong social sensibility and promises of brighter things. Chris Packham pops up at one point, too. It also rocks hard and loose, dipping deep into pop’s sweet tin; pulling out handfuls of much loved morsels. Maybe you catch a snippet of Pretty Things and remembrances of the finest, wildest English psych or psyched-out electro library sounds. Or Lemmy-driven burnouts that vie brashly for mastery aside Armand Schaubroeck cod-operatics. It’s unfashionably long too. The sort of thing that could outlast a Netflix binge.
We caught up a couple of times to talk about what was brewing in camp Membranes. The first time was over the Christmas and New Year break, in the enjoyably Gradgrindian lair of Salford’s 6DB studios; fortified by strong cups of tea made by the lugubrious Simon “Ding” Archer, who was charged with bringing a clear narrative to the band’s Loki-esque adventures. We chatted briefly in a snowbound Ljubljana, until a nasty flu and booze called time. We spent time riffing in Tallinn, Estonia, all the while to the backdrop of that country’s remarkable music scene. As usual none of these talks came to anything more than an extremely pleasant and informative chat between mates that meandered down many countercultural byways and cul-de-sacs. John, as open as ever and rattling out a thought-a-minute, has a talent for making the hours fly by without ever really dropping his street smarts. And realising that all of these chinwags would end up in yet another flurry of indecipherable patter, we decided to settle on that new fangled email thing to work out exactly what Mr Robb wanted to say about his band’s new record.
GIGWISE: John, to begin with; why is the record such a long one? It’s monstrous!
JR: Membranes can only work on an epic scale.
We cannot be timid.
We have to be grandiose.
There are loads of great bands making guitar/bass/drums missives and I love them all but we need to go further. Why not create a 16 track double album - a dark opera about nature, sex and death with a 20 piece choir on it? Someone compared the whole album to a Hieronymus Bosch painting and that, to me, is a perfect description.
The Membranes was always a big vision. When we used to make the noise records [e.g. 1988’s ‘Kick Ass… Godhead’] they were enormous and preposterous and full of a high decibel flamboyance. What we do now is a logical extension of that.
GIGWISE: OK let’s keep this rolling… You seem to like working with choirs, I’ve seen some of the live collaborations, which were just amazing but something I thought you couldn’t ever capture outside of a gig, but now you’ve got it on record...
JR: The choir is so huge and emotionally powerful that it matches the scale of sound of the eighties guitars. It also allows us to enter different places emotionally and musically. And the combined human voice is one of the highest states of sound possible.
...If you use a choir you are already working outside the box and a single album would be too tame an idea. You are right. It is ‘monstrous’. It’s meant to be monstrous! It’s a massive sprawling world to get lost in. A dense thicket of forest to be engulfed in full of dark atmospheres and unexpected twists.
We wanted to be bold. To take a gamble. To take a genuine artistic risk instead of just doing the same thing over and over. And we like having a huge scale of ambition [sic] and we were certainly not short of ideas. The idea was to create something off the scale, but if there hadn’t been enough songs or ideas it would not have happened on this level.
Breaking Boundaries...
For me the highest moments in life are those conversations when you are high on ideas and the walls come tumbling down and the words pour out. Those situations are so rare [you could have fooled me pal- editor] but when you get that insane chemical moment with another person that is when you are truly alive. The same goes for music - when you are high on ideas and full of the madness of possibility then it’s totally exhilarating. The restrictions are in other people’s heads. This is an album of ideas. People who say you can't have a record this long or you should not use a choir because that's not in the rules don’t get it.
Music is when boundaries are broken and there is a freedom. And if the freedom takes up four sides then so be it. I am my own worst critic and if any moment didn’t measure up it would not be on the album. It may seem weird but editing was one of the key parts of making this album. Stripping away to the core ideas was vital. But to tell the story of the ebb and flow of nature - it’s a dark and vicious battle to survive - and somehow splice it into your own life and your own loves and lusts and embraces is a big fucking subject! And the tension and release and the build up from one song to the next all make a strange and wild narrative that demanded this scale of sound and length of album.
GIGWISE: John, I’m back with more questions; now I have had a beer and some 20-20 insight... I wonder if you picked the studios with Ding for some psychic reason outside of his skills... it’s a place where myths are made…
We recorded most of the album at a studio in Yorkshire but we did all the mixing with Ding at 6DB studios and I can’t recommend him highly enough. Ding is a strange nocturnal creature who is terrified of daylight and had to adjust to the world of daylight that I like to occupy! But we found balancing point. His history gives you clues to where he is coming from - he toured the world with The Pixies and PJ Harvey and also the Fall, whose last ten albums he produced.
Instantly you get his CV. His favourite band is Killing Joke. We are on the same page. He lives intense noise and bombastic beauty. He understands distortion but also understands the space between the instruments and the beauty of sound. We had a great working relationship. It could be a series of nods and hand waves was all that was needed. A million cups of tea and a sense of going in the same direction all were vital and also so rare in a recording environment, when often a studio would think they know better; or that you are some kind of wild annoyance.
But it wasn’t about noise. Although some moments are perfect and some of the heaviest bass sounds I’ve managed to get were chiselled to perfection. It was also about the aforementioned space and a stripping away of sound to make things breathe and create tension and release. Ding’s editing skills are sublime and he quickly chopped and nudged and made things sound concise and dangerous and took out all the fluff.
“Normal rock music, what’s that?”
To record this kind of music you really need to work with people who understand the nuances and the extremes and to understand the nature of the instrumentation. Normal rock music is built around guitar riffs but our post post-punk music is built around a bass and all instruments playing lead at the same time and it’s a special alchemist that makes sense of that. There is also a sense of claustrophobia created by that sort of space which is vital to these kind of musics.
The drums don’t just keep a beat - they can drive the songs - they can even be the melody in a way, they can take rhythmic excursions but they are not neatly tucked away in the background. In this kind of music they are meant to be heard. The guitar makes sounds and textures and somehow we have to thread a choir into all of that and it takes a very good engineer to make that all work.
GIGWISE: I wonder how far the LP was shaped by the studio...
JR: Yes, there is an element of that in there.
...We were brutal in our decisions and he was perfect in his execution and all the time the ghost of Mark E Smith hovered in the studio where he had spent the most of the last decade working in in a similar manner with Ding, sat in the swivel office chair demanding the impossible and getting it delivered like a head on plate by the brilliant and wild-eyed studio engineer.
GIGWISE: It’s also a very down-to-earth Lancashire “works” environment.
JR: Of course: it was psychic. Lancashire is full of the damp and psychic. The best decisions are made with instinct and a spectral incantation. It felt right to work in the studio in the heart of Manchester to create a record that is full of the damp-lore of Lancashire. We have always been a part of that mythology you talk about. There is an interesting dichotomy about making a thing of beauty in a down-to-earth environment. That sense of constructing a dark opera in the old rooms of an old Lancashire mill; that same sense of forging beauty from decay like Joy Division once did.
GIGWISE: So we are both bound fast by Dame Lancashire's apron strings. And the feminine side to the county has always struck me as very marked - which you maybe pick up on throughout the LP? I noticed a couple of references to the county...
JR: Lancashire is our heartland, although being from Blackpool my Lancashire is very different from your Accrington backdrop. But it’s the place that formed us - we cannot escape her clutches. On the surface it’s a very masculine county for good and ill but the matriarch is the core of the traditional culture - tough looking women with huge hearts surrounded by manboys.
Cruel Nature’s blessing...
...Lancashire is more of backdrop on the album though some songs reference the county directly. ‘A Murmuration Of Starlings On Blackpool Pier’ is a snapshot of the amazing clouds of starlings dancing their eternal dance over the windswept seaside beaches before congregating on the piers - reflecting, in a feathery way, the patterns of people as well dancing the eternal dance with the more earthy Blackpool life going on below them; like the couple fucking under the pier as the birds fly in our snapshots and memories of the town. I like the wonder of the local - it’s what makes (the BBC’s) Springwatch so great - the weird and wonderful creatures in your back garden and also the sheer drama of life, inches from your back door.
‘Mother Nature/Father Time’ references the sea which was so much part of my Lancashire backdrop. When we grew up in Blackpool the influence wasn’t the obvious one of the bright lights and the pounding fairground soundtrack - although that of course is in there; try the illuminations on acid! The big influence was the sea crashing against the concrete promenade at the bottom of our road and the howling wind - nature’s dark majesty was very much part of our trip and magic mushrooms were always big with us when we grew up in the seventies. They seemed so part of the backdrop that we never thought of them as an influence but when I look back at our music now it has a psychedelic feel to it - not a sixties trip - which I love but a darker, starker more seventies psychedelia and that, entwined with the dark and wild nature of the sea at the bottom of our road, and the howling wind and giant waves contrasted with neat little suburbia. That fault line between the two was our inspiration. The promenade; a flaking concrete line between temporary and permanent. The idea that on one side was well clipped lawns and the claustrophobia of the suburbia and on the other was this untamed ocean that was full of dark mystery - that has always been a part of our music to this day.
GIGWISE: What's with all the Janus-faced titles, or titles with a coda? ‘Demon Seed/Demon Flower’, the title-track and ‘The City Is An Animal (Nature Is Its Slave)’...
JR: Not as two faced as the Roman deity! But maybe a link to spring and renewal and the powerful rebirth of nature? I like titles that collide with each other and the way half phrases or part sentences collide and create new meanings. ‘Demon Seed’ is, of course, a reference to Baudelaire and the dark and magical side of nature - the idea of the attraction of the flower and yet its real voluptuous purpose on display. In ‘City As An Animal...’ I like the idea of the whole city being a greedy organism on its own, eating and fucking and sweating and shitting and spreading out everywhere in its huge sprawling mass enslaving the nature that is already there. Although that (nature) escapes and somehow re-colonises the city; like the badgers and foxes in every garden and the peregrine falcons in the centre of Manchester. The concrete may have won the battle but nature will always win the war despite seeming enslaved; catchy eh!
GIGWISE: It is a very psychedelic and secretive record in places, very White Noise or Ruth White in places.
JR: Yes - a perfect description! I’ve always loved psychedelic music; not as in paisley shirts but music that takes you beyond a reality. Music that paints pictures and creates moods and atmospheres. Pretty amazing you reference Ruth White there; not a direct influence but I would definitely take that as a nod to some of the soundscapes. And it’s interesting you pick up on the electronic music twist on the album, not the key part of the whole but there are plenty of electronic moments. We made full use of Ding’s great collection of Moogs in the studio. The atmospheres those old keyboards create are spellbinding. Sometimes you make music to catch a colour or an atmosphere and keyboards are great at doing that. I guess with secretive you mean layers of mystery in the album, nooks and crannies of sound and atmosphere that exist just beyond the initial layers of music?
GIGWISE: I like the new sleeve artwork by the way, the heavy Gothic suggestiveness that's also got a wee hint of camp in it - you've done this recently with your last release, with the famous Henry Fuseli painting. What were you trying to convey this time?
JR: I love old art. It drips strange, archaic and antique atmospheres that are eternal themes; ones that also reflect the atmosphere of the music. Its depth is astonishing as well as the command of light and emotion. The painting on the album cover is by Valentine Cameron Prinsep and it’s called ‘At The First Touch Of Winter Summer Fades Away’. As soon as I saw it I knew it was the album cover. Even the title was perfect, capturing the themes of the album - nature, decay, the seasons, life and death. And the painting also has an erotic twist to it - just like the album. Prinsep is a fairly obscure English painter from the later part of the 19th century and his work has such an odd atmosphere. There is is that Victorian dalliance with the spirit world in his stark and bold colours and particularly in this painting the entwining of nature, death and sex - eternal and powerful themes that we love. And full of Baudelairian petals and a faint whiff of erotica; kinda like the album!
GIGWISE: Though tracks like ‘Monkey See Monkey Do’ are informed by a million things it feels, and bear no, or little relation to the record; outside that it's a catchy title. Or am I wrong?
JR: That track (real title Snow Monkey) does actually fit - it’s about the Snow Monkeys in Japan sitting around the steaming pools - only the elite are allowed in the pool and the other monkeys have to sit around watch in the freezing cold snow - they only started doing this after the Second World War as well. The subject matter makes the track the most direct political song on the album but with the inevitable twist!
GIGWISE: I want to ask you about how getting older informs music. Because you're pretty open in your music writing, I notice a more mystic John Robb, interested in the nature of things rather than the John Robb kicking his heels in a tatty seaside town.
JR: Age is fascinating. It’s the marker of the sprint to the grave! Death is hidden in the UK. It always comes as a shock and never as part of life and the eternal clicking wheel of birth, life and death. For me there has always an internal battle between the stark reality of science and its eternal questioning combined with its wonderment and also the captivating power of the mystic. You can feel things wherever you go whether it’s in ritual spaces or certain atmospheres in buildings - that damp danger, that primal rush, mystic is the trees - silently alive and full of pulsating energy, mystic is in the wild wind and storms, mystic is the consciousness and our minuscule corner of the endless universe, mystic is in the the thing makes this collections of atoms feel something. Mystic can also be in a piece of music.
GIGWISE: I mean I wasn't really planning on asking all this but then Keith Flint sadly passed away - nearly exactly my age - and I thought, how do people reshape a lifestyle that *should* - in conventional generational terms - be behind them. There is still a peer, or societal pressure to shut up for older people I think...
JR: Yes! We have to defy the slump! I’m not ready for the armchair and the box sets. I still want to go forward and embrace. Of course it gets harder. But the challenge is everything. It’s easy to stay anchored in the past - it’s warm and cosy and the battles were great and make great anecdotes but I still crave new adventures. I think that peer pressure is changing just because the generations are getting older - it used to be old hippies, then old punks then old ravers.
...But there is space now to live this Robin Hood outlaw life and the type of grief you got when younger for not taking the easy path just continues into old age - but whoever stepped out just to get approval?
--
‘What Nature Gives Nature Takes Away’ is out 7 June, 2019. Watch out for a lot of gigs in the UK and Europe this coming summer and autumn.
