35 minute read
Kula Shaker Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.
KU L A SHAKE R
SPREAD THE CHRISTMAS KARMA!
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Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.
Having spent a majority of 2022 touring countries as far flung as Japan, Chile and Spain, Kula Shaker embarked upon the UK leg of ‘The Eternal Love’ tour with shows at The Waterfront in Norwich on the 7th of December and the O2 Shepherds Bush empire on the 8th. More UK dates are to follow early next year, before the band head off to the States in late February.
A statement as grandiose as their latest offering, the twenty-track, double concept album ‘1st Congregational Church of Eternal Love (and Free Hugs)’, released back in June to widespread critical acclaim deserved a tour of such magnitude if only in celebration of these once unlikely Britpop heroes having had the audacity to return after six years with a sixth album which so boldly eschews 21st Century listening trends in favour of creating a piece of work which is as imaginative as it is timeless.
But then, throughout the band’s twenty-seven year history, its creators, vocalist and guitarist Crispian Mills; bassist Alonza Bevan; keyboardist Harry Broadbent (who replaced original member Jay Darlington upon the band’s reformation in 2006) and drummer Paul Winterhart have never felt compelled to follow the
fashions of the day, with their ascent to superstardom at the time of Cool Britannia having been more down to luck than by design; their coupling of late-’60s and early-’70s inspired Psychedelic and Prog Rock sounds with Indian mantras spreading messages of truth and love such as ‘Tattva’ (UK#4) and ‘Govinda’ (UK#7) from their double-platinum selling 1996 number one debut album ‘K’ or the ultimate expression of pre-Millennium tension that was their second album, 1999’s ‘Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts’ (UK#9) having been about as far removed from the nihilistic attitudes and laddist posturing associated with the movement as was possible.
Still thankfully very much believing in music as the ultimate means of escape from reality in the increasingly arduous 2020s, Mills recently set out Kula Shaker’s intentions for ‘The Eternal Love’ tour as we move into 2023 as such: “What the world needs now is LOVE, sweet love. Affordable fuel, world peace and end to debt-slavery would also be nice! So, light up the incense and break out the magic mantra cake as we’re taking the ‘1st Congregational Church of Eternal Love (and Free Hugs)’ on the road to lift off ‘23 with some all-round good vibes!”
However, before Kula Shaker’s mission to bring joy to people in venues all over the UK begins, we caught up with Bevan, who joined us from his home in Belgium, where, in-between recording and touring the world with his own band, he has recently been busy working as producer of local Britpop-influenced Indie act The Stanfords on their debut self-titled album, to spread some Christmas karma!
Firstly, hello Alonza and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you. Let’s start at the here and now, because the 10th of June this year saw the release of Kula Shaker’s sixth album and follow-up to 2016’s ‘K 2.0’, ‘1st
Congregational Church of Eternal Love (and Free Hugs)’ on your own StrangeF.O.L.K label. Congratulations, because this twenty-track double concept album is a truly great piece of work, but it also sounds like an album that had quite a lot of work put into it, so when and how did you come to start working on it and could you tell us a bit about its writing and recording process?
Thank you! Sure, I think Crispian and I started talking about maybe doing some music together again in 2019. We’d come off the road at the end of 2016, when we toured ‘K 2.0’ [2016], we’d had a little break. Crispian was working in film [Mills wrote and directed the 2018 comedy-horror ‘Slaughterhouse Rulez’] and I was doing music over here [in Belgium], so we started exchanging ideas. We’d met up in England and he’d come over here and then, before the two years of craziness that we went through [the pandemic] ... we started recording before that period. So, it wasn’t a lockdown album, we started the process long before and then we continued. It was a little difficult but, you know, for work, we were able to travel still and it was done in about three or four sessions over here about two weeks at a time. The guys would come over and all move in my family home, with my very tolerant wife [laughs] and we started tracking the album and we built up a bunch of songs. And so, yeah, the writing process, it was a little long distance, exchanging ideas and obviously, we’d come together here and we’d be routinely rehearsing songs and then as they took shape, we were recording them straight down and then obviously building those up. We’ve got a host of musicians out here that we can work with and you meet the craziest people out here in the South of Belgium, in the middle of nowhere! The bus driver for the local school bus, he’s a sitar player and a really good sitar player as well! [Laughs]. And through my connections here, we know some great horn players and string players, so we’ve been able to sort of get some local musicians in to
help expand the album and Henry [Bowers-Broadbent, aka Harry Broadbent, organist], of course, added some nice organ pieces. He’s a classical organist who works in many areas and we were able to use his pipe organ for stuff. But the basis of it all was really a live recording off the floor, so we tried to keep it as unprocessed and un-cut-up and as real and as dirty as possible in that sense as an album. I don’t know, when you listen to the top 40, apart from most of the artists being solo artists, already we’re a band, so that’s a little bit of an anomaly, but most of the music, you’re listening to the sound of a computer and that can be great, but when that’s all you have, it’s nice to have some relief and there’s something in live performance and I think there always will be and when you get that right, that connection, that human expression you can get through music and especially live, when you see that live, it’s still a really magic thing, so we wanted to try and capture that.
I like the idea of the album being a proper live recording, as opposed to all that computerised nonsense that we get filling the charts, because you can really tell most of it has been made on a computer, can’t you?
I know, and sonically, the sound can be very impressive, but I always find that after thirty seconds, nothing changes, so there’s no danger, there’s not that feeling that the band could just fall apart any minute and it’s that danger in the music, that tension that keeps you drawn in.
It is all a bit sort of safe, isn’t it?
For me, yes. Yes, absolutely! I love a lot of electronic music and it can be really innovative and dangerous and brave in it’s own right, but it’s true, we’re lacking some excitement, some new musical trends really.
Definitely! You have recently been working with Belgian Indie act The Stanfords, a band with a distinctly classic British Indie / Britpopinspired sound, producing their
Crispian (left) and Alonza on stage
2020 debut EP, ‘Come and Get This’ and debut self-titled album, which was released on the 12th of October this year. When you were working with them, did it remind you of yourself and the other members of Kula Shaker when you first started out?
Yes, absolutely and in many ways, because they’re, you know, a Belgian band that are obsessed with British music from the past, they’re terribly out of touch and unfashionable in that sense and so were we. It was quite a fluke that we were playing Indian mantras; we were into Psychedelic Rock music; we loved The Beatles, obviously and I think we were just lucky. You know, Grunge sort of transformed in Britain into what was Britpop and there was an emphasis on live music again and we were just very lucky to be mistaken, in a way, for one of those kind of Britpop bands, I guess! We were a live band and we loved a lot of similar records, I’m sure, in our record collection, but we weren’t at all fashionable and I like that! But it’s good not to follow the crowd too much!
You mentioned there about sending demos backwards and forwards via email in order to put this album together, which was quite a different way of working for Kula Shaker. Was this a process born out of necessity due to the various pandemic lockdowns and how did you find working in this way in comparison to the way in which you worked on your previous albums (‘K’, 1996; ‘Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts’, 1999; ‘Strangefolk’, 2007; ‘Pilgrims Progress’, 2010 and ‘K 2.0’, 2016)?
No, I mean, that’s caused by geography. I live out here in Belgium, in the middle of the sticks in Southern Belgium and obviously Crispian is out in the sticks west of London, so, yeah, it’s a little hard. I mean, I could get in a car and I can hop over the [English] Channel and I’ll be in a few hours, it’s not that hard, but at the same time, spontaneous songwriting is a little bit difficult. I mean, I curse technology a
lot of the time, but what’s great about it is the fact that we are able to produce an album, you know, and a lot of the pre-production and post-production, we were able to do remotely. So, if we needed an extra guitar part, if we thought the track needed an extra guitar part or some organ or something, we could record it in London, it could be sent over here and put into a session and that’s all really great, we love all that.
So, was this album the first time you had actually worked like that?
Yeah, pretty much, it was, yeah, absolutely, and I guess the pandemic added into that, but also the technology .... I mean, technology has always affected the way that music is made and the way that we create music, so I guess it’s just that, yeah.
As we previously mentioned, ‘1st Congregational Church of Eternal Love (and Free Hugs)’ is a concept album, very much in the vein of those great ‘70s concept albums from acts like Pink Floyd, Yes and ELP, which takes place in the titular church under a leaking roof in the semi-fictional village of Little Sodbury. Was it envisaged as a concept album from the outset or was there a point in putting the album together when you realised it was going to be something more than just a standard album?
Yeah, there was a point in it. We never start off with anything particularly in mind, we start exchanging songs and ideas and often, the initial idea ends up very far from where it will end up and that’s always the case. And yeah, so half way through, we realised we had a bunch of songs and actually good songs and it was very hard to choose which songs to leave off the album. And also, we were talking about just this day of TikTok and social media and the instant sort of hits for information where attention spans are now no longer than thirty seconds and we thought, you know, ‘let’s make a double concept album with a ridiculously long title [laughs] and see what happens!’ Going
against the grain, pushing the youth to their limit!
Do you perhaps feel that, with all the changes in the way that many people listen to music these days, particular following the advent of streaming and download platforms, that the concept album is something of a dying art these days?
Well, it is and I guess young folk probably think we’re quite sad, but often, when I was young, we would, you know, sit around with friends and we’d put on an album and we would all sit around and listen to it and maybe chat a little bit, but often, you were immersing yourself in the album and especially those albums that really told a story, like the classic, ‘Tommy’ [The Who, 1969] and the Pink Floyd albums, but also, The Pretty Things, ‘S.F. Sorrow’ [1968], one of those classic albums that really takes you and puts you into a different world. We wanted to create something like that, so yeah, Crispian came up with this concept of the ‘1st Congregational Church’ set in this little rural church somewhere in Little Britain. It’s a good escape! With music, you can always immerse yourself in another world; it’s a great medicine for modern life.
Well, it’s brilliant that in this day and age, somebody has actually had the nerve to bring back the concept album! Because, personally, I always loved all those late-’60s and early-’70s Prog Rock concept albums and ‘1st Congregational Church of Eternal Love (and Free Hugs)’ very much has the same sort of feel for me.
Well, excellent, yeah! We were just trying to be free and not constrained by any sort of preconceptions or any expectations either. You know, that’s the good thing about being independent!
Obviously, you will have seen many technological changes between those early pre-Kula Shaker days under the names Objects of Desire (19881993) and The Kays (1993-1995) and
during Kula Shaker’s lifetime and now. You have been there and recorded in the expensive studios, with your classic 1996 debut album ‘K’ (UK#1), for example, being recorded at various big recording facilities all across London, including Eden, RAK and Townhouse and its follow-up, 1999’s ‘Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts’ (UK#9) being recorded on Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour’s Astoria houseboat-studio, but whilst ‘1st Congregational Church of Eternal Love (and Free Hugs)’ presumably didn’t have quite as money thrown at it and was obviously recorded on a smaller scale, you have still retained an impressively big sound. What is your opinion on the way in which recording technology, allowing you to acheive this, has changed over the time that the band has been together?
It’s true, you can now make music in a much more affordable way that certainly back in the ‘90s even, or certainly the ‘80s, where, you know, a mixing desk would be the price of a house [laughs] and would achieve pretty much the same. It was very expensive to record and obviously, you can get a very good quality recording from your iPhone these days! [Laughs]. One thing about the old recording process is, it was done on tape and those tapes were maybe twenty minutes long, depending on what speed you were running them at and what it meant was ... also, to edit on tape was a real pain. If you wanted to correct some timing on a drum track, you would have to go into the tape machine, you would have to find that point on the tape, you’d have to get your knife out, you’d slice it down, you’re slicing a couple of millimetres off, you’re sticking it back together and you’re going back in and you’re checking it and, you know, that took ten minutes to do that and it’s done in a split second now! So, as a result of that, musicians had to get their bloody parts right, they had to be on the money and they really had to have a great part and really had to play it brilliantly. There was no ‘Oh, we’ll fix it in the mix’; ‘I’ll sort that out
later’; ‘Don’t worry, we’ll do some science and we’ll repair that stuff’! That wasn’t an option back then, so as a result, you’ve got these great, you know, real life performances from those recordings. And yeah, it’s hard to know these days how far to go. It’s a bit like plastic surgery, you know, when you do a little bit and you go, ‘Hey, you look good!’ and then you take it too far and start looking horrific! [Laughs]. It’s a little bit like that with modern music, I guess!
The first single to be taken from ‘1st Congregational Church of Eternal Love (and Free Hugs)’ was ‘The Once and Future King’ on the 3rd of May. We believe that his was the first piece of music that keyboardist Harry Broadbent, who replaced Jay Darlington upon your reformation in 2006, brought to the table, wasn’t it?
That’s right, absolutely, yeah! I mean, he’s really given a lot to the band. You know, he’s probably the best musician out of the lot of us, because he plays everything and he can read notes and everything, he’s brilliant! And yeah, he loves his synths; he’s got all his modular synths and he created this almost Synthwave track, but because it was using all these old analog synths, it was very reminiscent of all those old ‘70s bands that we were talking about, like [Pink] Floyd and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. And so then, we kind of laid the band on top of that. He created this amazing soundscape and yeah, it’s a really great track on the album and sonically, we hadn’t done anything like that before, so it was something new. He’s brought something new to the sound.
It was a really good single to come back with because it was so different for you.
Well, yeah, it was commercial suicide to put that out as a single, because, you know, it’s the most un-media friendly, meandering, sort of atmospheric track, but yeah, it really sort of summed up the mood of the album and it’s got some fire in its belly, it gets going, it’s got some great performances and it’s a
On the set of the ‘Hey Dude’ video, 1996
great song, so, yeah, I love it and the video’s great. It’s really worth checking out that video! It was filmed at Beachy Head, scene of the famous scene in ‘Quadrophenia’ [1979], where Jimmy flies off the cliff! We filmed down there and it was a fantastic day. Yeah, really great!
I really like it when bands come back with a daring first single from a new album. Coming back with ‘Once and Future King’ reminded me of things like when Radiohead came back with ‘Paranoid Android’ as the first single from ‘OK Computer’ (1997).
Yeah, absolutely! There are moments when, yeah, you surprise people, so yeah, absolutely, I think you should do that in any art form.
Well, exactly! There is no point in being boring, is there?!
No, no, no, definitely! There’s plenty of time to be boring! [Laughs].
Following the release of the second single from ‘1st Congregational Church of Eternal Love (and Free Hugs)’, ‘Cherry Plum Tree (Farewell Beautiful Dreamer)’, on the 29th of July, your latest single, and first standalone single since your 1997 cover of ‘Hush’ (UK#2), is a cover of John Lennon’s ‘Gimme Some Truth’ (‘Imagine’, 1971), released to mark Remembrance Day in the UK. How did the idea to record a version of this particular song come about?
Well, yeah, we recorded that along with the album tracks actually and maybe because it was a cover, it didn’t make it on to the album, I’m not sure. Again, it really sort of captures something in that performance. ‘Gimme Some Truth’, it’s a great song and I think with Crispian’s vocal performance, it’s made it a little less angry than John Lennon’s version and it’s got some real heart to it. Yeah, we live in a crazy age, what can you say and ultimately, if we can have some real truth, you know, it would make the world a better place. So, we released that on Armistace Day,
on the 11th of November and we were very lucky to get permission to use some World War I footage, you know, which is the colour stuff that Peter Green put together and yeah, when you set it [‘Gimme Some Truth’] to the images of war, you realise just the stupidity, the futility of war, so let’s get some truth! [Laughs]. But even spiritual truth, let’s have some love, let’s be honest with ourselves.
Is it right that Mills write some alternative lyrics to the verses of ‘Gimme Some Truth’ in order to make the song more relevant to today’s global issues, but you were refused permission to release that version by John Lennon’s estate, so your version instead stays faithful to the original version?
No, no, well, we didn’t put that forward, we put forward the original version. We did record a version with some alternative lyrics, I don’t know if that will get out there later, yeah, because at that time, it just felt like we needed to, what can I say? You know, misinformation, disinformation, all of this, it really felt like a time when we are lacking truth and everyone’s opinions are so polarised and people muddle up opinions with facts and, you know, to have collective truth and for us all to come together would be nice. There is truth, we all share that, but, you know, it’s a very divisive world and often, we’re divided for opportunist reasons, so we should come together and see through it all! [Laughs]. There’s only so much I can say about all this, I’m sorry [laughs] or I’ll have the Belgian Intelligence Services over here hunting me down! ‘He’s talking about truth and freedom, shut that man up immediately!’ [Laughs].
To coincide with the ‘1st Congregational Church of Eternal Love (and Free Hugs)’ album, you are currently out on the road on the ‘Eternal Love Tour’. Having recently played shows in Spain and Chile, the UK leg of the tour kicks off on the 7th of December at The Waterfront in Norwich, with the 02
Shepherds Bush Empire following on the 8th, before you play a further fourteen dates in January and February next year and head off to the US in March. With gig-goers having had a few months to listen to the new album, how have you found audiences’ reactions to the new songs and how do you feel that they sit in the set amongst the obvious Kula Shaker classics and tracks from your previous five albums?
Obviously, we do play all our old songs from all our albums, the old classics, absolutely, and the audience loves that, but as the tour goes on, people know the album [‘1st Congregational Church of Eternal Love (and Free Hugs)’] better, so yeah, we can play those songs and ones like ‘Once and Future King’, for example, is a great, great live track; a breath of fresh air, actually. They’ve worked, they’ve fitted really great into the set and everything stands up and it feels like one whole kind of sound, if you like. No, and it’s been great touring. We released the album just before the summer, so we picked up a few festivals and we got out to Japan in the summer, which is always great and like you said, we’ve just got back from chile and that’s the first time we’d played out in South America and it was a really crazy, fantastic place. Really lovely, warm people and huge music fans, really great music fans and you have no idea and actually, we did two shows in Chile, but we had people coming from Brazil and Argentina to see the show. It was great to meet all the music fans out there; just really passionate, really positive. Yeah, it was a great country with a great heart. And we played out in Spain, which was really lovely and I’ve been really falling in love with Spain again and as you said, we’re doing a UK tour next year. We’re doing a London show in December [02 Shepherds Bush Empire, 8th of December] and we’re playing Norwich [The Waterfront, 7th of December] and then we’ll be going out and playing every town and village [laughs] around Britain, which is great, and I’m glad we’re getting back to Wales as well!
By the time of that aforementioned classic 1996 debut album, ‘K’, which hit the number one spot, surpassed the record for fastest selling debut album of all time set by Elastica’s self-titled debut the year before and produced the singles ‘Tattva (Lucky 13 Mix)’ (1995, UK#95); ‘Grateful When You’re Dead / Jerry Was There’ (UK#35); ‘Tattva’ (UK#4); ‘Hey Dude’ (UK#2) and ‘Govinda’ (UK#7), you and Mills had already been working together on music since 1988 when you formed Objects of Desire after meeting at Richmond upon Thames College in South-West London. You then went on to form the pre-cursor to Kula Shaker, The Kays in 1993, before adopting your final name in 1995. Having been working on music for that long together, did the fact that Kula Shaker became quite so big at that point in time come as a surprise to you?
Yeah, I know what you mean, it should have done. No, we were young ... I guess young and stupid and probably a little bit arrogant. A lot of our friends had got record deals. You know, we went to college with the band Senseless Things, who were a great band who had been playing since the age of twelve, so when we were at college, they were a really happening band, so they went off and got signed and also there was Miranda Sex Garden ... there was a great little music. It was a lot easier back then, you know, because you had a lot more record companies, there was a lot more money being put into going out and developing artists, you know. There was so much money in the music industry that you could sign an act and it would be a tax write-off for a record company, so there were lots of bands just getting record deals, so for us, it was like, ‘If we just write some good songs and be a good band ...’ It’s silly, you know, we were really lucky and we didn’t realise it I don’t think at the time how hard it is actually and even when you do get signed, how many bands just sat there stuck on a record deal on a record company’s roster where you’re not allowed to release stuff and you’re actually stopped from moving forward.
Kula Shaker upon reforming in 2007
Columbia Records got behind us and they pushed their global super-button and even now, twenty-five years or so later, we’re all grateful that we’re able to tour the world still, because it’s really down to that. Yeah, we were immensely lucky.
At that time, was there any particular moment of realisation of quite how successful you were about to become?
I’m trying to think ... yeah, I remember the press agent that we were working with at the time warned us, ‘You’re going to be really famous’ and you just thought ... I don’t know, partly, you’re young and arrogant and yet, you dismiss that sort of stuff as well and I don’t think we were probably ready for it. It is a shock. I mean, back then, obviously to get on ‘Top of the Pops’ was a huge thing. I’m trying to think ... there were moments. Mark Radcliffe invited us on to ‘The White Room’ [Channel 4, 2nd of March 1996] and that was very early and we were still playing pubs. You know, we’d been playing playing pubs around North London and we’d built up a little following, funnily enough, out in Essex as well and then we did this TV show and we continued on our pub tour, but then, of course, the gigs were just rammed and there was a moment where it expanded a little bit too quickly in a way, we weren’t ready for it! [Laughs]. Yeah, I think the first time you get on TV, it’s the equivalent of ... now, people talk about ‘How many hits you got on YouTube?’ or whatever, but back then, to get on national TV, that’s like getting fifteen million hits on YouTube in one evening, you know! So, it was really influential! [Laughs].
In fact, ‘Hey Dude’, released on the 26th of August 1996 as your fourth single, was only held off the number one spot by the Spice Girls’ debut single ‘Wannabe’ (‘Spice’, 1996), whilst your cover of Joe South’s ‘Hush’ (previously covered by Deep Purple as their debut single in 1968 and featured on their debut album, ‘Shades of Deep Purple’), released in March 1997, was held off the top spot
by No Doubt’s ‘Don’t Speak’ (‘Tragic Kingdom’, 1995). There were obviously the obligatory TV performances and such like, presumably alongside both of those acts, but do you have any particular favourite memories of promoting those two joint highest charting singles?
I’m trying to think ... somebody said that if you can remember the nineties, you weren’t there! [Laughs]. I can remember doing ‘Top of the Pops’ and I think it was at Elstree [Studios, London] at that time and we would drive up to the security gates and there were all these screaming young girls outside and we drove in and we got to the dressing room and these hysterical girls had managed to get in and we were like, ‘How come they got in?!’ and then we realised it was actually the Spice Girls! I think that was the first time we played ‘Top of the Pops’, so that was quite a shock! Yeah, it’s true, they did keep us off the top! I’m trying to think, yeah, goodness me, there were a hell of a lot of music shows. We loved doing ‘TFI Friday’ [Channel 4, 1996-2000], which was a great music show with Chris Evans. That was a crazy show, really chaotic and one of the great memories, we got Arthur Brown, [sings] ‘Fire’ [‘The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’, 1968]! And yeah, he set his head alight live on TV at the end of ‘Mystical Machine Gun’ [‘Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts’, 1999] and then told everybody ‘Don’t worry’ and ‘It’s the end of the world’, you know! It was great, that was a really fantastic moment, one of our favourites from our whole career! What a lovely guy! For all the fire and brimstone, he’s an amazing, lovely guy, really great, yeah! And a fantastic artist, he really puts some theatre into that performance. I love all that, yeah!
Well, to be honest, we need more artists like Arthur Brown these days! I am getting a bit bored of all these solo artist who just get up on stage and do virtually nothing!
Yeah, I know, we were known as a country of eccentrics and we need more
people like that who are willing to set their head alight! [Laughs].
As with many bands at that particular time, Kula Shaker were afforded the Britpop tag. However, ‘K’ was an such an expansive album filled with the Indian musical influences that you became famed for, not to mention quite a lot of inspiration from the Progressive Rock of the late-’60s and early-’70s, and by the time you got to ‘Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts’, which featured the singles ‘Sound of Drums’ (UK#3); ‘Mystical Machine Gun’ (UK#14) and ‘Shower Your Love’ (UK#14), your ambitions had led you to recording on David Gilmour’s Astoria houseboat-studio with Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper, KISS and Peter Gabriel producer Bob Ezrin to make what was arguably the ultimate expression of the fears that abounded at the turn of the Millennium. Did you ever feel that whilst that whole Britpop movement may have been pivotal to your success during the mid to late-’90s, it also undermined the ambitions that you had as a band and the messages that your music was conveying?
I mean, there’s a lot goes in the world that you’re not okay with and you don’t feel that you fit in with and certainly, yeah, the Britpop movement, you know, it was characterised by the laddism and that sort of slightly nihilistic sort of attitude and we were all about, you know, spiritual love [laughs] and exploring existence. Yeah, but, of course, we liked to have fun as well! So, we weren’t at all singing about the same things, absolutely, and I think yeah, maybe we were probably criticised at the time. You know, I think there was the classic, ‘How can you be spiritual when you’re working bloody hard down the mines?’, or whatever it was! But, of course you can, it’s just about lifting your mind out of the mundane, isn’t it? And we’re confronted by mundane crap every day, so you know, if you can create something, some music, or even if you can create a thought which just for a moment lifts you out of that, what a
wonderful thing! You know, you can travel anywhere with your mind!
Absolutely, yeah! And you especially really did on ‘Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts’, didn’t you?
Yeah, absolutely! And we got to work with Bob Ezrin, who’s a fantastic producer and people will know him from the Pink Floyd album ‘The Wall’ [1979], but also Alice Cooper. He’s a great, larger than life producer and we got to work on Dave Gilmour’s houseboat [Astoria] not far from where we grew up in the South-West of London there and, you know, what a fantastic studio on the River Thames and recording with a top producer. Yeah, it was a really great opportunity and I think because ‘K’ [1996] had been a successful album, you’re automatically allowed a little bit of freedom and there’s a little bit of trust to explore and do whatever you want. So, again, we were really lucky to be allowed to do that.
Yeah, ‘K’ wasn’t exactly what anybody could have called a straightforward album, but I think ‘Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts’ really surprised a few people, didn’t it?
I think a few people were very surprised! Over time, people have really grown to love that album, but certainly, I think it shocked a few people at the time! You know, I guess it was less immediate than ‘K’, but it reflected where we were at at that time. We’d had a great experience with ‘K’ and I think that album [‘Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts’] reflected some of that craziness that we had been through and the way we were kind of looking at the world after that.
I really think that ‘Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts’ reflected the way the tension that was apparent as we approached the Millennium, didn’t it?
Yeah, I mean, it was intuition and it was correct, that feeling that we were about to fall off of a cliff! [Laughs]. I think we did, didn’t we?!
I think we have now!
[Laughs] Yeah, I think it’s been going for a while! When you look back on this century and the 20th Century was pretty crappy as well, I have to say, but at least it was a bit more colourful! [Laughs]. But let’s keep this thing positive! It’s global and you feel it wherever you go and when we were out in the United States, I had that feeling as well. You know, you felt like you were at the end of a civilisation. You’ve got shanty towns in the downtown areas of the West Coast and you just think ‘this is the richest country on the planet’. It’s criminal is what it is, and weird, yeah. Liberal capitalism, there you go! It’s like that in many places in the world, but you don’t expect it in America, I guess. You know where it is like that? Washington D.C. is much the same. I saw this pile of rubble and there was something moving in it and you realised ‘God, that’s a person!’ And this guy walks out of it, he’s got no shoes on, he’s got bare feet and a rope tying his trousers up. Yeah, it’s shocking. I’ve been to India too, I’ve been to Delhi and it’s also shocking! [Laughs].
So, how did you actually find the experience of being in India?
Oh, you know, you really judge a country by it’s people and again, what a lovely country, really, and the people there, that enthusiasm. I don’t want to sound patronising, but there’s a real child-like quality, especially when you get out in the villages ... playfulness and that love of colour and sound and that enthusiasm for life, it’s really touching. With the whole Indian philosophy and that spiritual side to things, in the West, it can seem pretentious and a bit alien and a bit like new age craziness and, you know, I even felt like that myself at certain times, but when you go out to India, you see it’s just a part of every day life out there and people are living that and that’s the most natural, loving thing that can be done, you know. To see that, yeah, you fall in love with the place and it’s hard not to. It’s such an old culture. We’re always fascinated with ancient Egypt and stories of the Pharaohs and all of this and the Egyptian culture, which was immensely advanced, you know, but the Indian culture, I don’t know if we tend to put that down because we colonised India, but it’s such a rich philosophy and actually, their knowledge is so huge, you know, from thousands of years ago. They say that when Britain entered India in the late-17th Century, India was the richest country on the planet and Britain wasn’t, it was just starting to establish itself, it was maybe the thirtieth richest and, anyway, when Britain left India, Britain was the richest country on the planet and India was way down, so you can see what happened there [Laughs]. No, I love India, it was a great place, a really fantastic place. The music, the art, the people, the culture, everything
and the landscape, you know, from deserts to the Himalayas, it’s amazing. It’s changing fast and certainly the cities. It’s great to see it’s doing really well, you know, for itself and it’s changing quick, certainly cities like Delhi and Bombay are becoming really modern cities. But the world is changing, really fast, yeah [laughs], scarily much ... STOP!
I will make this the last question, because, although I could talk to you all day, I have kept you quite a while! So, finally, as this interview will be featured in our Christmas issue, do you have a Christmas message for our readers and your fans?
Yeah, no worries! My tea is going, so I’m going to have to make a fresh tea! I’ve got lukewarm tea. I like it, it’s good, but, you know ...! [Laughs]. Merry Christmas! Just remember to keep it ‘merry’ and the New Year ‘happy’ and never wish anyone a ‘happy Christmas’, always wish them a ‘merry Christmas’. It’s important! It always used to be ‘merry’ and I think it should be ‘merry’. I mean ‘happy’ is good, but ‘merry’ has got something ... you’re happy when you’re merry, but there’s something a little bit giddy about being merry. Something a little bit more, yeah! So, keep Christmas ‘merry’! You get annoyed by silly things when you get older, don’t you? And that’s one of those silly things that annoys me! It’s not ‘happy Christmas’, it’s ‘merry Christmas!’ There you go, that’s becoming a dad and what it does to you! [Laughs].
That’s brilliant, thank you! It has been such an absolute pleasure talking to you, thank you so much for a wonderful interview, Merry Christmas and we wish you all the best for the future.
Yeah, lovely talking to you, thank you Alice!
‘1st Congregational Church of Eternal Love (and Free Hugs)’ is out now on StrangeF.O.L.K Records. For Kula Shaker news and all of the band’s upcoming tour dates, visit the links below.
www.kulashaker.co.uk
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