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Politics, for many of us, is this slippery slithering slope that we rarely chose to meander down for fear of sliding into the deep dark depths of ‘grown up’ conversation. For most of us, this is a world we music types do not titter too close to the brink of, afraid once swallowed into the blessed fray, we may never return. Gravenhurst, aka Nick Talbot, is not one to shy away from political discussions as Gigwise finds out. In fact, his blog is full of cruxes of the political kind.
Gravenhurst have been around for a while, signed to Warp a few years back, but were (confusingly) not always a band; the namesake was up until recently the alias of Talbot. In order to develop the band into something ‘louder’, Talbot promptly dumped his solo project and formed a band with members from several other Bristol based outfits. The current line up includes Talbot, Dave Collingwood (Drums), Robin Allender (Bass/electronics) and Alex Wilkins (Guitar/electronics).
When we chat to Talbot, we find him elusive and intelligent, unwilling to comment on the meaning of his new song, ‘Hollow Men’ but not for political reasons. “If it were political I’d tell you… it is about brain washing but not within society, more like a family.” The video for the song is a visual Orwellian nightmare, assumedly influenced by Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis', and would seem to ‘untrained’ eyes to be a social commentary on capitalist society.
Talbot comments: “The thing with the video is… I’ve been quite disappointed with videos in the past. They often take the lyrical content of the song and use it as the literal narrative of the video. So if you write a song about going to the shop to buy an orange, they make you a video about going to the shop to buy an orange…. (With ‘Hollow Men’) I gave the people who made the video an instrumental track without lyrics and refused to tell them what the song was about, for them to make something out of it.” So no intentional revolutionary tactics at play here then? Talbot assures us that he doesn’t want to make some Banksyesque social comment by spraying “bring down capitalism” on pavements; he’s not a socialist.
His blog is explicitly political criticising the government for everything from ID cards to immigration. Talbot calls a stall holder at Glastonbury bearing a Che Guevara flag, a ‘hippie fascist’. He does admit that he feels that music and politics should be kept separate, as there is a tendency for artists to make political comments in songs, which, what with them lasting all of three and a half minutes on MTV, usually means artists say something simplistic or stupid, and the world is a far more complex domain. Yes, it is! Talbot prefers to write music about the human condition, insisting that it’s better to employ symbols and metaphors to express emotion.
Talking of metaphors, we hear on the gravevine (see what we did there?), that if the esteemed psychoanalyst of sorts, Carl Jung, was into indie-pop, he’d be a big fan of Gravenhurst’s. Are Freud and Lacan excluded as imaginary psychoanalytic fans? “Well Freud was a cigar chomping cokehead; his theories are reductionist and concerned with ‘unconscious desires’; everything is a fucking penis with Freud! Jung is more interested in the collective unconscious; he found archetypes/symbols reoccurring; he did not try to reduce everything to cocks! As for Lacan, he’s a Marxist isn’t he? I disagree with how Marxists try to reduce everything to the economy.” So back to politics again then!
Veering Talbot away from the political is a losing battle; every turn our conversation takes, we’re back in the barracks him fighting his corner of “all that is wrong with the world”. It’s nice to meet someone who is so passionate in his evidently intellectual views, but we’d rather hoped to talk about music!
Is his music as intellectual as he is? “I don’t know if my songs are intellectually stimulating. There’s a track on the album that would probably appeal to intellectual types and that’s the cover of Fairport convention’s ‘Fairwell, Fairwell’. There is a famous quote of Morrissey’s that goes something along the lines of, ‘if you have an acoustic guitar, you’re considered to be a protest singer.’ It’s all so fetishistic nowadays…’
He goes on to talk about youth movements about the recent resurgence of interest in folk music which he feels has more to do with people seeing the past through rose tinted spectacles than an actual interest in authenticity or folk cultures themselves; leading to the commodification of what was once a revolutionary period. We’re sure he feels the same about t-shirts branded with communist dictators - but fear to ask.
Luckily we’re able to divert the conversation back onto music, more specifically his latest long-player. ‘The Western Lands’ is actually his forth album, but the first with the band in its current form. The title is loosely based on the book by William Burroughs that Talbot admits he hasn’t bothered to read. “Sometimes the ideas behind books are more interesting than the books themselves.”
On the album, Talbot cites ‘Trust’ as the most ‘straight forward’ song. It’s the song that ‘grounds him’ as he knows exactly what it means; he cannot say this about many of his songs but then neither can we! ‘Trust’ is about breaking up and looking for answers in the ruins of a relationship as to why it all went wrong. “When you break up, you never think about the baggage that the other person has; this song is about meeting up with exes of exes and seeing if you have anything in common. It’s an ugly and perverse idea really.”
Gravenhurst’s new album is thankfully not ugly and perverse though he might think his ideas; he’s a genuinely clever man, looking for answers in his music, whilst eluding meaning or rigid interpretations of what it all might mean. Perhaps not a visionary, but someone with questions and ideas, someone that makes interesting music. And if that’s a bad thing, we’ll burn our Che Guevara t-shirts.
