Political Power - Gravenhurst

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!