A.R.Kane: Complete Singles Collection by One Little Indian Records

COMPLETE SINGLES COLLECTION BY A.R.KANE Culled from material originally released across no less than five different record labels, this compilation pulls together A.R.Kane’s long out-of-print singles, EPs and associated remixes for the first time, telling the story of the band’s unique trailblazing path through the late 80s and early 90s independent music scene. This booklet contains a brand new biography by writer Simon Reynolds (‘Rip It Up & Start Again’, ‘Retromania’) – an early champion of A.R.Kane in their heyday in his then role as Melody Maker staff writer – and an exclusive new interview with A.R.Kane’s Rudy Tambala revealing the inside stories behind the recording and production of each release.

CONTENTS A BIOGRAPHY BY SIMON REYNOLDS

P.05

AN INTERVIEW WITH RUDY TAMBALA

P.10

P.12

- WHEN YOU’RE SAD

- LOLLITA P.14 - M/A/R/R/S P.18 - UP HOME P.21 - LOVE SICK P.23 - POP P.24 - CRACK UP P.26

- A LOVE FROM OUTER SPACE

P.28

- SEA LIKE A CHILD

P.29

- HONEY BEE (FOR STELLA)

P.31

Complete Singles Collection by A.R.Kane is part of One Little Indian Records Totem Series. Totem Series is all about uncovering great lost classics, rarities and oddities from the archives of One Little Indian Records and it’s associated labels. For more in the series visit totemseries.co.uk.

: Indian.co.uk Published by One Little Indian Records

: Totemseries.co.uk

A BIOGRAPHY BY SIMON REYNOLDS It is tempting to describe A.R.Kane as the great lost group of the 1980s. “Great” is spot-on. And “1980s” is more or less accurate (they did release some stuff in the Nineties but the late Eighties was A.R.Kane’s recording prime). No, it’s the “lost” bit that is misleading. It gives the impression that this was a group that was neglected, overlooked... if not utterly unknown, then certainly marginal in the scheme of things. And that is inaccurate. Not only were A.R.Kane renowned and revered, but, in certain quarters, they were regarded and written up as one of the central groups of their era. The singles and albums received rave reviews (and when I say “rave” I mean frothing at the mouth, purple-prose5

drooling paeans). Their faces appeared on the front covers of the British music weekly papers. But A.R.Kane weren’t just critics’s faves either. Sixty Nine, their debut album, topped the independent charts in the summer of 1988. But wait, there’s more: bizarrely, A.R.Kane actually made it to Number One in the UK pop charts, via M/A/R/R/S, their short-lived and fraught collaboration with Colourbox. Okay, it was ‘Pump Up the Volume’, the mostly-Colourbox side of the double A-sided 12 inch single that got the radio play and the club action (although the song evolved as much out of A.R.Kane’s experimentation as any other A.R.Kane song). But A.R.Kane could take consolation from the fact that the all-our-own-handiwork flipside ‘Anitina’--included on this collection-- is by far the more remarkable and enduringly captivating piece of music. (Not that they need consolation, really, what with all the money they earned from M/A/R/R/S). Still, the “lost” bit of “great lost group of the 1980s” does apply, in so far as A.R.Kane are now the stuff of cult memory. As often happens, the passing of the years resulted in History shaking out and settling into a shape that doesn’t necessarily reflect how things were seen at the time. So some late Eighties groups (My Bloody Valentine, Pixies) have maintained a high profile, while others, considered their contemporary equals, have faded into the background (A.R.Kane, Throwing Muses). Hopefully this long-overdue collection of A.R.Kane’s EPs and singles, which has arrived--funny coincidence--the same year as MBV’s own EPs compilation, will serve to redress this injustice. Other players came and went but the core of A.R.Kane was always Alex Ayuli and Rudy Tambala. From East London, they had known each other since primary school. Released on One Little Indian in 1986, their debut single ‘When You’re Sad’ reminded reviewers of The Jesus and Mary Chain: the template of sugarsweet melody juxtaposed with scouring wall-of-noise that in the wake of the J&MC’s early Creation singles was widely adopted across the British indie scene during 1985-87. But in their early interviews, Alex and Rudy adamantly insisted they had nothing to do with indie rock and cited as their true inspirations jazz-fusion figures like Miles Davis and Weather Report, ECM Records outfits such as Azymuth, along with the (genuinely lost) black postpunk group Basement 5. The only vaguely indie-land outfit they expressed admiration for was The Cocteau Twins. Probably a truer indication of where A.R.Kane’s heads were at was the flipside of ‘When 6

You’re Sad’, the drifting, gaseously gorgeous mood-piece ‘Haunted’. It fit the way that Alex and Rudy described their creative process: in early interviews, they spoke of how “our songs emerge out of total chaos” which “we chip away at until there’s this beautiful shape”. Alex declared that “our ambition is for people to have dreams for which our music is the soundtrack”. Early in 1987 A.R.Kane signed to 4AD and in July they released the ‘Lollita’ EP, produced by Cocteau Twins’s guitarist Robin Guthrie. ‘Lollita’ starts dreamy, with the lilting, love-sickly title track, but quickly turns to nightmare with ‘Sadomasochism Is A Must’ and ‘Butterfly Collector’, increasingly psychotic thrashes that seemed to shower the listener with shards of splintered crystal. In their first front cover story (for Melody Maker) Alex and Rudy talked about how the record had turned into a sort of accidental concept EP about the tainted-ness of love. But the darkness and violence had always lurked malignantly within even their most idyllic-seeming songs: ‘When You’re Sad’ was originally titled ‘You Push A Knife Into My Womb.’ Violence certainly came to the fore during A.R.Kane’s sporadic live shows of this period, squalls of abstraction in which Alex’s fragile vocals were buried deep inside the seething colour-swirl of feedback and FX-wracked texture, a barely-sculpted chaos almost impossible to correlate with the recorded versions of the songs. Despite their Hendrixredolent love of electric guitars and effects pedals, A.R.Kane weren’t a rock band in the conventional sense, i.e. a group that gigs regularly and whose recordings offer a polished up version of the band in performance. A.R.Kane were more like an experimental guitar pop unit who loved to push the recording studio to its limits. Which is why 4AD supremo Ivo Watts-Russell thought it would be a smart idea to team A.R.Kane up with another bunch of studio boffins on his label, Colourbox. The resulting collaboration M/A/R/R/S (the name is based on the first letters of the first names of all the people involved) proved to be a paradoxical blend of triumph and fiasco. One the one hand, ‘Pump Up the Volume’ reached Number One in the U.K. and dominated dance clubs worldwide all through late 1987. It spearheaded the “DJ record” craze for sample-collage cut-ups (Bomb the Bass, Coldcut, S’Express, et al). On the other hand, Colourbox and A.R.Kane couldn’t find workable common ground, and as result ‘Pump Up the Volume’/‘Anitina (The First Time I See She Dance)’ was more like a split single than a real collaboration. On ‘Pump,’ all you hear of Rudy and Alex is a single trail of lustrous feedback; Colourbox, for their part, only supplied a basic drum machine 7

undercarriage to the delicious soundclash of lover’s rock reggae and ‘Third Stone From the Sun’-style kaleidoscope-guitar that is ‘Anitina’. The latter track anticipated directions later pursued by everyone from Saint Etienne to The Stone Roses. But in the acrimonious wake of the unexpected mega-success of ‘Pump Up the Volume’, all the parties involved decided there would be no follow-up single or album. A.R.Kane then jumped ship from 4AD to another of the era’s mighty independents, Rough Trade. In April 1988, they released the ‘Up Home!’ EP, arguably their most concentrated slab of iridescent awesomeness and a true pinnacle of an era that abounded with astounding landmarks of guitar-reinvention (Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything and their two 1988 EPs, releases by Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur Jnr, Spacemen 3, Loop, The House of Love, and more... ). The clanking dub-sway of ‘Baby Milk Snatcher’ combined an oblique jab at Margaret Thatcher (in the title) with the languid erotica of lines like ‘suck my seed’; ‘One Way Mirror’ induced snowblindness of the ears with its dazzling rush of supersaturated textures; ‘Up’ was A.R.Kane’s most glorious expanse of sound yet, the winding, slowly ascending melody like a spiral stairway veering up from a plateau of mirrors. The album that followed, Sixty Nine, saw reviewers going verbosely ape-shit. Perhaps sensing that they’d taken the Niagara-of-noise aesthetic as far as they could, Sixty Nine saw Alex and Rudy attempt some different directions (stripped-down and grooveoriented, ambient and meditational) along with the expected glistening grottos of abstraction. Continuing this move away from the “classic” A.R.Kane sound, the ‘Love Sick’ EP (October 1988) was a transitional affair, with tracks like ‘Green Hazed Daze’ and ‘Sperm Travels Like Juggernaut’ moving towards a cleaner, sharper-defined sound that faintly recalled the lush ‘n’ lurid Goth-psych of the Banshees circa Kiss in the Dreamhouse. Then came the remarkable reinvention that was ‘i’. Originally titled Supercallafragilisticexpealodocious until the Disney Corporation took exception, this 1989 double album was a bold stride in the direction of pop. This shift to clarity and accessibility seemed to be signposted by the first single off the LP, ‘Pop’, but the band insisted that the word “pop” referred to the bursting of a romantic bubble, the end of a relationship and its attendant illusions. (The “short version” of the song, included here, starts with a sample from Martin Luther King: “I have a dream”). Once again, A.R.Kane were probing one of their favorite sore-spot zones of inspiration, the dark and twisted side of love. 8

Some of the best tunes on ‘i’ can be found on this collection, because they popped up on various EPs and singles over the next few years. Rough Trade’s 1989 ‘Pop’ EP included ‘What’s All This Then’ (an off-kilter skank-house groove trailing a wake of hallucinatory after-images) and ‘Snow Joke’ (a delightful hybrid of bouncy electro-bop and M.O.R. orchestration abruptly split apart by samples from ECM artist Norma Winstone and 2001, a Space Odyssey’s computer-gone-crazy HAL). The following year Virgin France put out ‘i’ highlight ‘Crack Up’, a mixture of jittery paranoia and pump-and-pound club energy that seemed to have assimilated some groove-science from the whole M/A/R/R/S misadventure. Then, in 1992, to accompany their A.R.Kane anthology Americana, David Byrne’s label Luaka Bop released ‘A Love From Outer Space’ as an EP with four different mixes of the title track (‘Solar Equinox’, ‘Lunar Eclipse’ and ‘Venusian Dub’ along with the ‘i’ original) and threw in ‘Sugarwings’, also from ‘i’ and one of the group’s most beguiling broken-heart ballads. In the early Nineties, Alex and Rudy set up their own label H.Ark! and released a series of wondrous EPs by outfits like Papa Sprain and Butterfly Child, groups that had clearly been shaped by A.R.Kane’s vision. And you could see the influence of their late Eighties music popping up in all kinds of places by the early Nineties. Along with My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins, Alex and Rudy had contributed a hefty quotient of DNA to shoegaze’s blurry-guitar sound, particularly with the movement’s more idiosyncratic groups such as Pale Saints, Moose and Slowdive. They had also been an influence on the UK branch of post-rock, operators like Seefeel and Bark Psychosis and Disco Inferno, while the brilliant west country neo-psych outfit Flying Saucer Attack explicitly and fervently cited A.R.Kane’s early singles and EPs as a formative catalyst. But when A.R.Kane released their next (and, as it turned out, final) album New Clear Child in 1994, they had abandoned the very aspects of that their sound that had been most inspirational: the halcyon guitar-haze. A confounding move as far as many fans were concerned, but possibly a shrewd one, given the total overload of shoegazey miasma that had blanketed the British music scene in recent years. New Clear Child, represented here by the ‘Sea Like A Child’ EP and the America-only single ‘Honey Be (For Stella)’, embraced a jazz-tinged pop-funk that in places recalled positivity-era Prince or the New Age R&B of Seal and PM Dawn. For some fans, this was a step too far towards the mainstream, but really it was A.R.Kane pursuing the same goal as ever: just a different version of what they called “dreampop”, the merger of song and space, the deep inside and the far out-there. 9

AN INTERVIEW 10

WITH

RUDY TAMBALA

YOU AND ALEX HAD BEEN FRIENDS FROM PRIMARY SCHOOL. DID YOU ALWAYS SHARE AN INTEREST IN MUSIC? Well we grew up together and we shared the same pop music tastes. He was much more from a reggae side of things, his brother was in a sound system and stuff, whereas my family were more from a soul music, dance music, jazz and jazz funk side. We went to different clubs but it sort of crossed over. It wasn’t until we got older and went off to uni, when I was about 18, that we got exposed to different kinds of music. That’s when we started branching out in our musical tastes a little bit. I mean they weren’t massively dissimilar but that was when we started being exposed to stuff that was alternative to the mainstream and alternative to what we’d grown up with but that we had in common. WHEN DID YOU ACTUALLY FORM A.R.KANE? Well we started messing around with guitars and playing around with some songs. I remember it was Christmas time in I think 1985, we were at a party and we decided to start a band. We played around with some names and A.R.Kane was a mish mash of several ideas, it sounded like a cool name. The same night at the party I met Ray Shulman (producer) and his wife Tan and told them I was in a band with Alex. I bullshitted them a bit and they asked what we sounded like so I spun them a little story. They said that we should send them some stuff to listen to so we had to get a tape recorder and make some demos. HOW DID THE RELATIONSHIP WITH ONE LITTLE INDIAN RECORDS COME ABOUT? Well Ray was producing a Flux Of Pink Indians album at the time which was Derek Birkett’s band and Derek had just started One Little Indian. So we sent Ray the demo and he played it to Derek. Derek thought it was alright but wanted to see it live. He didn’t believe it I guess so we had to get a band together and do a couple of rehearsals. Derek came down with some of his scuzzy crew and that was it. Ha ha.. He hated it, he said it was shit. But then he asked us to record.

WHEN YOU’RE SAD (1986) ONE LITTLE INDIAN

WHAT ARE YOUR MEMORIES OF THE RECORDING OF THE ‘WHEN YOU’RE SAD’ SINGLE? Oh it was amazing. It was partly influenced by lots of other songs. It was a Ramonesy, thrashy, pop, punk sound but the actual music was massively influenced by ‘Atmosphere’ and Joy Division. Even though it doesn’t sound anything like it now, it’s actually a similar kind of thing. For the recording of it we used a guy from One Little Indian. All I remember is that he had dreadlocks and we had dreadlocks, so we thought it would be cool. So, this guy came along and did drums for us and Ray Shulman and Derek produced it. They just let us go wild. It was the first time we had ever been in a studio. HOW DID YOU FIND THE EXPERIENCE OF WORKING WITH A PRODUCER FOR THE FIRST TIME? In general terms, there are two types of producers. One that’s got a sound and he gives you his sound like Daniel Lanois or Flood. Then you get other producers who figure out what you’re doing and bring the best out of you. Ray’s one of those guys so you just knew you could trust him. He knew everything musically, he was really advanced. He can play every single instrument. In the recording studio, if you wanted that sound a little more ‘crispy’ he’d make it sound crispy. So he’s really intuitive, a really brilliant producer. IN EARLY INTERVIEWS YOU SAID THAT YOUR SONGS “EMERGE OUT OF TOTAL CHAOS” WHICH YOU “CHIP AWAY AT UNTIL THERE IS A BEAUTIFUL SHAPE”. HOW DID YOU ACHIEVE THIS? 12

There was a lot of studio experimentation; we knew roughly what kind of emotion we wanted to create, what kind of feeling, what kind of space. It’s not until you’re in the studio that you can actually do it. The demos that we took in for ‘When You’re Sad’ for instance were just one guitar and a little tin pot drum machine and a little bit of vocals over the top, bounced between two cassette players because we didn’t have any multi tracks. Really sparse, really empty but we knew we wanted to get a massive sound out of it with lots and lots of layers, so the studios is where you actually create all of that sound. A lot of the recording sessions from the outside just looked like chaos. From the outside it’s like, why are you recording twelve tracks of feedback? But we had an idea of what we were trying to create which was a great big wall of noise with more traditional instruments and arrangements positioned within it. So it was pretty much about creating something really massive and then trying to find where the song fits inside of it. It changed later on though as we progressed through the singles. You can hear on the collection that it becomes more structured. The chaos thing was an early phase. WHEN THE RECORD CAME OUT COMPARISONS WERE MADE WITH BANDS OF THE TIME SUCH AS THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN, BANDS THAT YOU CLAIMED NOT TO HAVE BEEN AWARE OF. HOW DID YOU FEEL ABOUT THESE COMPARISONS? DID YOU SEE A SIMILARITY? No we were lying, we knew all about The Jesus and Mary Chain (laughs). I think there was alot of lazy journalism at the time. Because we had feedback and noise we were being called ‘the black Jesus and Mary Chain’. It was kind of lazy but in a sense it was true because if you listen to Psychocandy and you listen to our first single they’re very similar in style. We weren’t actually listening to The Jesus and Mary Chain but we knew about them immediately afterwards. Everyone said we sounded like them so then we heard them. But they’re very much a kind of Velvet Underground, rock n roll thing whereas our influences were very different - which is why we only did one song that had that sound. We didn’t do any songs like that ever again.. Whereas they made a career out of that sound. God bless ‘em.

LOLLITA (1987) 4AD

AFTER ‘WHEN YOU’RE SAD’ THE BAND MOVED TO 4AD. WHAT ATTRACTED YOU TO THE LABEL? We fell in love with the Cocteau Twins completely and then we started delving into and understanding a little bit more about independent music. Before ‘When You’re Sad’ we didn’t know what independent music was, but then obviously being on that scene and hanging out with the Melody Maker people and things like that, we began to understand that indie was a music scene and at the top of that scene was Rough Trade, Mute, Beggars, 4AD and Factory. We really liked the aesthetic of 4AD, like the 23 Envelope / Vaughan Oliver artwork. When you bought their records they looked beautiful. We started thinking that we could really do something fantastic there. So we did a gig and Robin Guthrie was there. We were like “Oh my god! Robin Guthrie’s at our gig. Oh look, there’s Liz Fraser as well, that’s really amazing.” We played them our demo and Ivo Watts-Russell (4AD owner) just immediately said he wanted to make a single and put us in the studio with Robin. It was like a dream come true. I remember we were sitting there with our beers wondering what the fuck was happening. How could we actually be on this label because we wanted to be? We had no background, we were hardly even musicians! It was really cool. They were a fantastic, fantastic label to be with at the time. They were really at their peak. THE SONGS ON ‘LOLLITA’ SEEM TO BE ABOUT THE DEVELOPMENT OF A RELATIONSHIP THROUGH TO SELF-DESTRUCTION. WAS THIS CONCEPT INTENTIONAL? 14

No it wasn’t, they were three completely separate songs. It was only after we had finished it that we looked back and noticed that there was a theme there. You don’t always intend it. Maybe those were themes that were on our minds anyway being young men. WHAT ARE YOUR MEMORIES OF ROBIN GUTHRIE’S APPROACH TO THE PRODUCTION AND THE RECORDING OF LOLLITA? Well, working with Ray was one thing. We went to Robin and he was the other kind of producer, the kind who has a sound and is going to give you that sound and who knows better than you what your songs are about. It was hard to take that but we trusted him wholeheartedly and he was like a genius at the time. He was out there. No one else sounded like him, no one else even knew how to make a song sound the way that he made it sound. This big kind of spacey thing and it was perfect for that song. It had really quite gentle bits and then an explosion of noise and then it could be really quiet, gentle and soft. He had the sound but also, he was a really good musician and he made us perform in a way that we had never had to perform before. He made us play in time properly and really work. He’d say “No, that’s not good enough, do it again” over and over until you’re almost crying and your fingers are bleeding until you got that solo, or that little riff bang on. He’s a perfectionist. That’s hard but when you listen to their music and you listen to all these other kind of shoegazing, dreampop bands that are out now and you listen to the Cocteau Twins - oh my god! - its worlds apart. A completely different world, a different order. They can’t aspire to that because they don’t have the same level of perfection. So that’s what he brought to the table. A level of professionalism and a sound that no one else had. IT SEEMS LIKE YOU HAD MORE TIME AND RESOURCES TO BE ABLE TO EXPERIMENT ON THIS SINGLE. WAS THAT THE CASE? Yeah it was very much the case because Robin had his own studio. There was no time restraint. We were in the studio making a song. There was no thought of being out at 9 o’clock kinda thing. It was a luxury and also, we just took our time. There was no hurry. 4AD was a very well established label and I think they had certain processes in place and they knew how to kind of feed things out. I think probably One Little Indian got there but I don’t really know anything about them as they evolved. We were the second band on One Little Indian so they were probably going through processes like finding the cheapest studio. If you go into a studio where the musicians actually own it. When you 15

shut the door, you’re in their universe where nobody else can touch you. SOON AFTER ‘LOLLITA’ WAS RELEASED YOU RECEIVED YOUR FIRST MAJOR PRESS IN THE SHAPE OF A MELODY MAKER FRONT COVER. HOW DID THAT FEEL? In Leyton, East London, there was a music shop that we used to go to. It was a typical music shop, with loads of gear and you’d go in and there would be guys playing the same rock n roll riffs and the guys behind the counter would just diss you and say “Leave that alone, don’t touch that”. Suddenly, we walk in there and they’re all over us, that was the fucking funniest thing. That’s when we realized that this is actually changing people’s perception of us because we’re on the front cover of some oily rag. It was madness. Suddenly they’re like, “Oh hello, would you like to try out our new effects pedal?” We just started going to Denmark Street because we had money (laughs) but yeah, that was the first thing that I noticed. Another side was when we would go to the local pub, where we’d been going for years, The King Edward in Stratford Broadway where everyone was just mates. Suddenly it was really weird. People would point at you and then people would diss you badly, which was the strangest thing. People who were our mates really didn’t like it. No one likes change. Some people were pleased and interested but a lot of people were like, “Who the fuck do you think you are, how dare you be on the front cover of Melody Maker. We read that every week! We can’t read it anymore because you’re in it and you’re wankers.” It really polarized things. I think that happens to anyone who is relatively successful and we became successful really quickly, so it was a shock to people. What happens is you tend to end up spending most of your time with other musicians rather than with your mates and then they think even worse of you. They presume you think you’re too good for them now. “Well, yeah we are actually” (laughs) It was really weird. How do you get your head around that?

M/A/R/R/S (1987) 4AD

WHERE DID THE IDEA FOR THE M/A/R/R/S COLLABORATION COME FROM? By the time we got to 4AD we probably had twenty or thirty songs ready to record. So one of the first things we wanted to do was ‘Lollita’ and we also wanted to do a song called ‘Anitina’, which is like the AA side of M/A/R/R/S. We were mates with Adrian Sherwood and he had worked with the Sugarhill Gang rhythm section Keith LeBlanc and Doug Wimbish and they were the hottest rhythm section around at the time. We asked Ivo Watts-Russell if we could work with them and get Adrian as a producer. We wanted to do Anitina as a dance track and we wanted to do it with them. Ivo said no point blank because he thought it was too obvious to take a couple of black guys and give them the Sugarhill Gang. We thought it would be the best thing in the whole fucking universe. However Ivo said he had these guys from Colorbox who were a good dance outfit. They hadn’t worked for two years and had kind of dried up. He thought that with our energy we could bring them out of retirement and get something going with them. And it worked. Big time. So, that’s how it came together initially. We wanted to do a dance track so Ivo put us in a studio with Martyn Young of Colourbox. His brother Steve wasn’t there though for some reason it has always been recorded that he was. He was actually on holiday or in rehab or something. I’m not sure what he was doing but he seemed to shake a lot. Anyway, he did turn up eventually. So basically they put us in with John Fryer the engineer at Blackwing Studios and Martyn brought in a piano piece and we brought in Anitina. Now what we liked about him is that he had good drum programming. I wasn’t really into his music 18

at all but he was a good programmer. So we took in the Jam and Lewis remixes of Janet Jackson’s ‘Control’ with it’s really massive snares. That was the sound, that eighties sound. It’s terrible now in a way. We wanted our drums to be is as big as that because we couldn’t get this sound out of our little boxes but we knew that Martyn could do that. So basically he laid down some drums and we put down our track with the bass and all the echoes and all the spacey guitars. By the time we had done that Martyn just threw out his piano track and said he wanted do a dance track as well. Now rumor has it, or complete lying bastards will tell you, they had already written ‘Pump Up the Volume’ before they went to the studio. What a load of bollocks. It was written in the fucking studio. But they stuck to their story for years because they screwed us out of some money and royalties by sticking to that story for a long time. When it came down to it, I think Martyn was quite inspired and he actually came out of retirement to do it. Immediately after though, he went back into retirement and never came out again. Strange isn’t it? WERE YOU SURPRISED BY ITS SUCCESS? Yeah, we thought it would sell 100,000. That’s what we had been told, that it was gonna sell about 100,000 copies which was massive then for an indie. We knew it was good but it went ballistic! It sold over a million in America, so yeah, of course we were surprised. We didn’t have much money before that. We were kind of brassic and not working or anything and suddenly there were cheques coming through and it was like “What should we do with this shit? I’m used to being poor. I’m used to nursing a pint for a whole day in the pub, to stay warm. I’m used to having no electricity. I’m used to living hard and suddenly it’s like I don’t even know where to put it.” It was really odd, a really strange life change. Not all positive but, ultimately very cool. CAN YOU REMEMBER WHAT YOU WERE DOING WHEN YOU HEARD THAT IT HAD GONE TO NUMBER ONE? I tell you when it really hit me. I was on the number 25 bus going up Romford Road. I think I was going to a party. There were a couple of kids sitting in the seats a few rows back from me singing ‘Pump Up The Volume’. A couple of little kids like twelve-year-olds. I thought “Oh my fucking God, this is serious shit.” You grow up with Top Of The Pops 19

and number one is the pinnacle. Everything leads to number one. But those experiences are never what you think they’re gonna be. It comes with so much other bullshit as well. Being on the front cover of Melody Maker is one thing but having a number one in the charts is a completely different fucking ball game. It’s bizarre. People get really weird but you get a lot of free lunches. Every single record label and every single publisher wants to take you out to lunch and you just milk the lot of them. THE SUCCESS OF THE SINGLE MUST HAVE REALLY TURNED THE SPOTLIGHT ON A.R.KANE? It did, it made it really easy for us. The first thing that happened was that we went to France and we were playing a few concerts. Just the reception that we got was phenomenal when we got over there. It was really amazing and they were genuine music lovers who had heard of this new band from 4AD who had got a number one fucking record. It was bizarre. We didn’t know any different, this is one of the weird things, because we just came into it. The night that we decided to have a band we met Ray Shulman at a party. We told him we had a band. We didn’t, we were lying, we had an idea for a band. A few weeks later we were meeting Derek and a little while later we were in the studio. Bang, bang, bang. Everything just rolled and rolled. And when things are rolling they’re just fucking rolling. It has nothing to do with your effort. You’re just along for the ride. You don’t know when it’s gonna end. Everything connects and clicks. It gets really surreal. I do remember sitting with Alex and us thinking “What the fuck is going on?” Everything we wanted just seemed to be happening. “Let’s be on 4AD. Let’s have a hit record. Let’s do a dance record. Oh it’s got to number one. Let’s leave 4AD. Let’s go to Rough Trade. Oh Rough Trade want to sign us. Oh we’re in the studio again. Let’s do an album. Let’s build our own studio. Oh there’s the money for our own studio.” It sounds stupid, but if you don’t know any difference from that you start to take it for granted. Then when it starts to slow down you wonder why it isn’t this working any more (laughs).

UP HOME (1988) ROUGH TRADE

HOW DID YOU FIND YOURSELVES ON ROUGH TRADE? Well, the demo for ‘Up Home’ was done for 4AD with Robin (Guthrie) in his studio. I just had it transferred a few weeks ago, so I still have the original demo of the EP. It’s actually not bad at all! Because we fell out over the M/A/R/R/S record with 4AD. They said that we weren’t going to record unless we signed a contract. So that was a parting of ways because we weren’t going to sign this dodgy contract. So then we sent the demo to Rough Trade and Geoff Travis was flying to New York that day, I remember. As soon as he got there he rung up and said “Let’s do it”. Just that, nothing else. We met with him, went to the studio and recorded it. The ‘Up Home’ title track, which was ‘Up’ was about as out there as you could go, in terms of all that bullshit they would write in the press about crystal cathedrals kind of stuff. We went for it. So, we used lots of different elements in there. We used a lot of classical music elements but then did not use any classical instruments. Playing little baroque things, transferring the melodies around and creating loads of layers of sound really beautifully with deep bass and really out there lyrics. I don’t think it really went any further out than that. ‘Up’ might be the best track we ever did. COMING OFF THE BACK OF THE M/A/R/R/S SUCCESS WAS THERE A PRESSURE TO DELIVER SOMETHING BIGGER IN TERMS OF COMMERCIAL SUCCESS TO A NEW LABEL? There’s always pressure. Record labels are there to make money. No matter what they say, 21

they’re there to create wealth, so there was always pressure. However, we were in a really lucky situation whereby we were very quirky in what we were doing. That’s why we were successful. So we didn’t need to go out and make a Kyle Minogue record, we just had to go out and make the weirdest record we could. Go be weird, go do what you do naturally. It was great. Sixty Nine was the album we made immediately after that single and it sold really well. There was a lot of creative energy and we got a lot of artistic reviews I suppose, more than sales units but it did really well for an indie band. RAY SHULMAN RETURNED TO PRODUCE ‘UP HOME’. WAS IT DIFFERENT WORKING WITH HIM AFTER THE SUCCESS OF M/A/R/R/S? Ray was our producer but our spiritual guru was his wife Tan and she was always there. Tan is a really gritty, down to earth American and there’s no bullshit with her. If ever our egos took off, she brought us back down to earth. She would say “Hey, you guys are the coolest band in town, but you’re still just boys” and all that kind of stuff. Ray was one of the most self-effacing, humble people you could meet, with the most talent at the same time. He’d had a number one record. He was in a band called Gentle Giant that had done a song called ‘Kites’ in the 60’s and he’d toured the world for years and years. He knew everyone. It’s not like he had never met people who had had a number one record before. He was way beyond us. We were not worthy, we were lucky. THE SONG TITLES ‘BABY MILK SNATCHER’ AND ‘W.O.G.S.’ SEEMED TO INDICATE A POLITICAL MESSAGE COMING THROUGH IN THE MUSIC. WAS THIS THE CASE? ‘Baby Milk Snatcher’ was a name they had given to Margaret Thatcher. We were really into JG Ballard. We used to read his books religiously. He used to mix up Politics with ultra violence and sex. He said, in the 60’s when he first saw Maggie Thatcher as a junior minister, he started writing about her, saying she was going to be prime minister. He used to talk about this kind of sheen of perspiration on her top lip. Pretty gross. So Baby Milk Snatcher was a play on words. Margaret took the children’s milk away but baby milk is another thing as well. So it was this whole thing of sex and politics and social injustices. It’s all mixed together, all power plays.

LOVE SICK (1988) ROUGH TRADE

AROUND THE TIME OF ‘LOVE SICK’ YOU STARTED WORKING FROM YOUR OWN STUDIO AND PRODUCING YOUR OWN MUSIC FOR THE FIRST TIME. HOW DID THIS COME ABOUT? When we went to Rough Trade Geoff said we could record an album and suggested choosing us a studio. Our response to ask for an advance to build a studio so that it wouldn’t cost anything to make albums. We could make albums really quickly and really cheaply. We’d never built a studio before but we weren’t scared of technology so he gave us an advance and we built a studio in Alex’s basement. The first thing we recorded was ‘Love Sick’. So it was a transition. It was a way from working with producers like Robin and Ray to doing it ourselves in our own basement, not knowing what the fuck we were doing and learning how to use 16 track recorders and samplers and sequencers with no help. We were just desperate to be in the studio all the time. Alexs’ cellar was damp, I can still smell it, it was disgusting, but you couldn’t keep us out of there. We’d be in there all night. Actually I’ve just thought of something funny about ‘Love Sick’. When we finished ‘Green Haze Days’ we had a mastering session booked for the next day. I had left Alex in the studio and he thought he’d give it one more listen. He accidentally hit play and record over the master and recorded over the front end of it. He then spent the whole night running back and forth trying to reproduce the track but couldn’t. He did the best he could and cut and spliced it together. If you listen to the track now you’ll hear that it changes to a really different sound after a few bars. He played it to me really sheepishly but I thought it sounded fucking wicked! 23

POP (1989) ROUGH TRADE

‘POP’ MARKED A SERIOUS CHANGE IN SOUND FROM THE EARLY SINGLES AND PROBABLY PEOPLES IDEAS OF WHAT THE BAND WAS. WHAT INFLUENCED THIS? Well people thought we called it ‘Pop’ because it was pop music but it was about the sound of a bubble bursting. When someone says that they’re leaving you. That’s what the refrain is. “I’m gonna leave you.” That’s what it was about. But then it’s a very English thing and a very A.R.Kane thing to make a play on words always. One word never has one meaning. It’s an African thing and it’s an English thing so it kind of made sense to us. In terms of the change of direction, our technical abilities, our knowledge of the studio and our knowledge of how to get a sound we wanted was just increasing really, really quickly. We probably would have gone for a massive sound straight out but we didn’t know how to do it. As soon as we knew how to do it we went for it. Not so much on the later stuff, there’s actually some really stripped back tracks on the last album. But if you listen to the long version of pop it’s like a Lloyd Webber track. It’s ridiculous, like a rock opera or something. It was really a case of “How shall we do that backing vocal? Let’s get two girls in. And lets layer it” you know? Just fucking about with it. Not being constrained at all. We were just blending things and coming up with different ideas and seeing what happened. HOW DID PEOPLE REACT TO THIS CHANGE OF DIRECTION? I don’t know. No idea at all seriously. I never asked anyone. 24

THE MEDIA SEEMED TO GO WITH YOU THOUGH? YOU MUST HAVE BEEN AWARE OF THE REVIEWS YOU WERE GETTING? Yeah. I haven’t got any of the reviews though (laughs). I wish I had. We’d look at them or Alex would ring me up and ask if I’d read something or whatever and we’d have a bit of a laugh about it. Right at the beginning we were really excited because we read the music press but after about a year of it we’d be in the press even of we weren’t doing anything so we just stopped reading it. It wasn’t that interesting anymore. So I don’t know what people thought of it. I wish I did know. HOW DID THE SOUND BECOME SO FULLY FORMED SO QUICKLY? Well we were getting our heads round the studio as I was saying. Ray Shulman was with us a lot of the time and if he wasn’t we’d ring him up and ask him how to get certain sounds. Ray has got an encylopedic knowledge of studios and equipment and sounds so he’d say something like “You want that high string sound? Use a Solina String Machine. You want a really good string sound? Hire a fucking orchestra.” That kind of thing. “You want the drums to sound like that? Do this and put this compression on it.” We were lucky enough to have really good budgets and access to really good engineers and producers. People studied music and recording as an art in the 60s and 70s and we were lucky to have that legacy of someone like Ray who had had hit records in the 60s and having done prog rock which is musically and technically as accomplished as you get. Then we had Robin Guthrie and his cohort Lincoln Fong (Cocteau Twins Studio Engineer) who knew the whole new way of doing stuff with drum machines and digital technologies. So we just absorbed everything that was going on but we also had our own idea.

CRACK UP (1990) VIRGIN

IN RELEASING ‘CRACK UP’ WITH AN ALTERNATE MIX A.R.KANE APPEARED TO BE EMBRACING A MORE DANCE MUSIC APPROACH TO THE REMIX. WAS THIS THE CASE? Yeah. We had a lot of time in Robin Guthrie’s studio with Lincoln Fong late at night so we’d pull out the 808 drum machine and play around with the sounds we had used on ‘Pump Up The Volume’, fuck about with samples and really go for that four to the floor thing. Spice it up with live percussion and live guitars but really, go back to something we’d done before on ‘Anitina’. Blending it and playing around with that genre or medium again. For us it was just ‘Kaning it’. It was A.R.Kane music. Your question is asking why did you do a certain genre or why we moved into something else. For us there was no genre, there was just the music. If you take some of my favourite artists like Kate Bush or Joni Mitchell, they’re just musicians. If they do a dance track, or a bit of ambient, or a folk track you don’t really question it, that’s just what they do. They just find the right setting for the sentiment to create the atmosphere, the vibe or whatever. THE PRODUCTION CREDIT ‘H.ARK! PRODUCTIONS’ FIRST APPEARED ON ‘CRACK UP’. WHAT WAS THE STORY BEHIND THIS? We had the studio in Alex’s basement but at a certain point I transferred all of the equipment to a purpose built studio in Stratford. It’s still there and part of the Olympic village now I guess (laughs). So I built a studio inside this old Victorian building and I 26

started a production company called H.Ark! Productions and started working with other bands. It was me and Alex initially but then he left the country and I continued running the production company and the studio. ‘Crack Up’ might have been the first time that we decided we were a production company. It was just a name, it was bollocks really but that was probably why it’s on the credits. WAS ‘CRACK UP’ EVER RELEASED IN THE UK? No ‘Crack Up’ was never released as a single in Britain, it was released as a single in France which is why it’s quite popular over there. Bands like Tahiti 80 did cover versions of ‘Crack Up’ and ‘A Love From Outer Space’ because they were both tracks that were released in France. I didn’t know that single existed until we started doing this singles album and Federica (One Little Indian A&R) told me. When I heard it I wasn’t even sure if I’d heard the mix before (laughs). We did loads of mixes, many of which have disappeared.

A LOVE FROM OUTER SPACE (1992) LUAKA BOP / WARNER

HOW WAS A.R.KANE AFFECTED BY THE CLOSURE OF ROUGH TRADE IN 1991? I can’t remember the exact details but we were owed a huge amount of money and they weren’t gonna pay us so that was a bit of a bummer. We did get some money but I had to sit in the Rough Trade offices all day until they gave me a cheque. We were still signed to Rough Trade and were going to do another album. We decided we were going to do it in America because we’d formed a relationship with David Byrne’s label Luaka Bop. They got in touch with us and said they really liked our stuff and wanted to put it out in America. So we started working with David Byrne on that and went to America to record the album which Rough Trade were supposed to own and pay for. While we were over there in the studio, the studio owner wasn’t being paid anything and was threatening us. You don’t want to be threatened by a mad Californian who obviously has guns. So in the end David Byrne bailed us out and signed all the cheques and paid for the album. That was our departure from Rough Trade. ‘A LOVE FROM OUTER SPACE’ WAS ON THE 1989 ALBUM ‘I’ BUT THE SINGLE WAS RELEASED IN 1992. WHY THE GAP? The first thing we did with David Byrne was a compilation album called Americana which was released to introduce A.R.Kane to America and ‘Love From Outer Space’ was on that, so the single released to advertise the album. They got this guy called John Luongo to do mixes of it. I never liked those mixes by the way. He had some dodgy synthesiser on there. 28

SEA LIKE A CHILD (1994) LUAKA BOP / WARNER

‘SEE LIKE A CHILD’ WAS RELEASED AFTER AN EXTENDED BREAK HAD THE BAND BEEN ACTIVE DURING THIS TIME? I’d been running a record label, H.Ark! Records. So I did four EPs, two with Papa Sprain and two with Butterfly Child and some other bits and pieces, remixes and stuff so I was acting more as a producer. I wrote a handful of songs for A.R.Kane and Alex had written a handful of songs but he was living in America at that time and I was living in England. When we decided to make the New Clear Child album we didn’t want to make it in London, Alex wanted to make it in California where he was living. So we went to David Byrne and asked if we could come and make an album in California. PRESUMABLY, WITH YOU AND ALEX IN DIFFERENT CONTINENTS, THE NATURAL EVOLUTION OF THE BANDS SOUND HAD BEEN INTERRUPTED. HOW DID YOU APPROACH THE WRITING THIS TIME ROUND? WAS IT DIFFICULT TO FIND A COMMON GROUND? It was very much that. I think time, distance and different experiences had made us go off in different directions to a larger extent and you can hear it in a lot of the tracks, they’re kind of pulling against each other. Not that that’s a bad thing, those tensions can be really good but it wasn’t that good in some of the songs. I think ‘Sea Like A Child’ is really beautiful. That’s one where it works. It’s a really crystalline sound which I don’t think anyone else has ever had. A bit baroque, a bit spacey and very, very odd. There’s tracks on the album that weren’t singles like ‘Surf Motel’ which 29

are very me and Alex. It was something that was written on the spur after an incident in California which we both experienced which is how it had worked before. Us both experiencing things together, getting a feel about it and sharing it. But when I’m coming from over here doing my thing and he’s coming from over there doing his thing you come together and it’s not quite.. It’s not the same thing anymore. It was a very frustrating experience for both of us but still, we managed to pull out some nice tracks but I don’t think it had the same consistency and the same creativity maybe. A.R.Kane was one person, not two people. It required two people acting as one person. I know that sounds a bit twisted and weird, but I don’t think either of us on our own individually could create what A.R.Kane could create. When we worked together we worked like one person, we didn’t speak very much, we didn’t need to. Between the two of us we created one whole which was A.R.Kane. When we weren’t that close I think that was lost and apart from a few moments on that album we didn’t have the same telepathy and that instantaneous thing when we just got it and we didn’t have to talk about it. We had to labour it a bit more and we probably could have come through that but we didn’t. It’s a really intimate relationship and regardless of what else is going on when it comes to music that has to be all that’s important. I don’t think it was then, I think there were lots of other things going on.

HONEY BEE (FOR STELLA) (1994) LUAKA BOP / WARNER

THE SOUND OF ‘HONEY BEE (FOR STELLA)’ HAS MORE IN COMMON WITH EARLY 90S POP FUNK / HIP HOP / SOUL THAN THE BANDS EARLIER INFLUENCES. WHAT WERE YOU AND ALEX LISTENING TO WHEN YOU WERE WRITING IT? Well you’re close I suppose. We were both spending a lot of time in America driving up and down Highway 1 listening to west coast rap and then all that chill out stuff like Tribe Called Quest, Digable Planets all that type of stuff. So there’s a jazzy inflection and there’s a hip hop vibe going on there. It was jazz and hip hop and sun. That was the vibe. We had a different thing going on so we chose a producer to give us the sound we wanted. There was this producer called Chris Cuben Tatum and we’d heard one of the acts he was working with called Me Phi Me. The interesting thing about them was there was a black guy rapping with a white guy playing 12 string guitar. We thought it was really cool and it related to what we were doing with a few tracks we were working on. So we got in touch with him and flew out to Murphysboro in Mississippi, stayed with him for a couple of weeks and worked on some tracks. And this one one of them. He produced it and gave it that sound. HOW DID HE GIVE IT THAT SOUND? He brought in a drummer which was one thing. No drum machines but a proper hip hop drummer. Everything went in the sampler, everything was heavily compressed. It was a different approach. I ain’t gonna give away his secrets but it’s a different approach to how 31

English people would make a dance track. That’s why English hip hop never sounds like American hip hop. You use a live drummer or you use a really good drummer to do the drum programming to put in a bit of swing. It’s completely about production. If you want to make Irish music, you get an Irish band, simple as that. If you want to make an American hip hop groove, you go to America, you don’t do it in England ‘cos it’ll sound cheesy. HAD TECHNOLOGY IMPROVED IN THE STUDIO AND IF SO, HOW DID IT AFFECT THE RECORDING PROCESS FOR YOU? Working with Chris on that particular track we used a drum kit and a microphone. There was very little else going on. Everything he recorded he immediately put inside the sampler, cut it up and sequenced it. There was nothing on tape. Everything was on an Emulator sampler. He’d hit the play button and it’d just run. Radical. Previously we had been using tape, a 48 track digital mixing desk and shit like that, whereas he was working like hip hop artists work. It was refreshing. HOW DO YOU VIEW THE ALBUM NOW? We did one track on the side that could have changed things in an alternate reality but Chris refused to mix it. It was a hip hop cover version of ‘Castles Made Of Sand’ by Hendrix. If you think about the original it has a hip hop groove and a spoken lyric. If you imagine Alex’s voice doing it.. It’s really simple and easy. We just used 12 string guitar so it had the vibe of ‘Honey Bee (For Stella)’ but a Hendrix song. It was interesting because we wrote to David Byrne and told him what we were doing and he wrote back a long letter saying that if we wanted to break in America doing a cover version was the way. Talking Heads did ‘Take Me To The River’ by Al Greene and because everybody knew the song, they got it and they liked it regardless of if they liked independent punk music or not. He said if we did the Hendrix cover version that we’d break in America but Chris thought it wasn’t different enough and refused to mix it. It’s interesting to think what might have happened if we’d done it. If I ever got back with Alex we’d do that one I reckon (laughs). ‘Castles Made of Sand’. Fitting and ironic.

-DID YOU AND ALEX WORK ON A FOLLOW UP TO THE NEW CLEAR CHILD ALBUM? WHEN DID YOU DECIDE TO CALL IT A DAY? We worked on demo tracks. We set up a studio in California, a little 8 track recorder, a mixing desk and a sampler, keyboards and stuff and we started writing together. We wrote half a dozen tracks or more and called it a day. It just was not there at all. We were so far apart by that stage musically, we couldn’t see eye to eye on it so we just chilled it. WHAT WAS YOUR DIRECTION AND WHAT WAS HIS? I can’t really comment on his direction. It is what it is. He did a lot of the tracks probably on the Alex Soul Surging album. My decision was that I had a bunch of songs I didn’t want to bring to it and I wanted to do something completely different. He did his thing and carried on but I wasn’t really into it. For me it felt like going backwards and I wanted to move into a lighter area for a while. So I did some stuff with my sister, the two Sufi albums and a bunch of singles. It was really nice to be in a relaxed place making stuff that was really mellow. I needed a break from A.R.Kane I think. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT A.R.KANE’S CREATIVE OUTPUT NOW WITH THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT? I never really thought about it or listened to it over the years. It was only a couple of years ago when I decided to set up an A.R.Kane page on Facebook that I started to get a lot of people sending me messages and talking to me and I realised that people really liked it. I still didn’t really listen to it. When we started making the Complete Singles Collection album I had to pull the music together and review material so I started listening to it again. I went to the mastering room to master the album and I sat there and thought “Fucking hell! That’s a good body of work.” I don’t necessarily think that the compilation is completely representitive of A.R.Kane because Sixty Nine and i are albums which are statements in themselves. But I was shocked by the speed of change and how the singles run into one another, changing every time and the speed of that happening. I was also surprised that the music sounded 33

really fucking good! (Laughs). Just at the weekend my wife put on ‘Spermwhale Trip Over’ off the Sixty Nine album and turned it up really loud. I was a bit out of it I have to admit but I was listening to it and thinking that there’s nothing else like it. There’s absolutely nothing like it. SINCE THE BAND SPLIT UP, THE INFLUENCE OF A.R.KANE HAS NEVER GONE AWAY. DOES IT SURPRISE YOU TO STILL GET NAMEDROPPED BY BANDS TODAY? I don’t really take too much notice of it. Sometimes I hear something that I think sounds like A.R.Kane or people say obvious stuff like that Bloc Party are like A.R.Kane because they’ve got a black guy fronting an indie band. But they’re not. When The XX said they liked A.R.Kane and we’d influenced them I was suprised. That’s cool. I never expected it but I like their music. It’s really nice to think you’ve influenced people in a positive way. WHAT IS YOUR PROUDEST MOMENT OF A.R.KANE? I’ve got a few memorable moments. We were sat outside BBC Broadcasting House, in the rain, waiting all night for John Peel to come out so we could give him our first single ‘When You’re Sad’. Eventually John Peel came out and we thought he was going to get away so we dashed down the road after him. He turned around and he looked horrified! He thought we were going to mug him (laughs). He had a big stack of records so we asked him if he wanted ours as well. He said “Stick it on top” so we did and went home. Later that night I was crashed out in the flat me and Alex shared and I was lying with my head next to the radio just in case. I was probably a little bit stoned and I was sleeping and in my dream I could hear A.R.Kane playing and I opened my eyes and realised it was the radio. John Peel is playing our single on the radio! Now you have to understand, if you’ve listened to the radio since you were a baby and suddenly your music is on there, it’s a mind altering experience. It was mind blowing. And he actually said on the radio “I was out tonight and these two guys came running down the road. I thought they were going to mug me!” (Laughs). But then he played the whole 12” version of the track. It doesn’t get better than that. Number one doesn’t get better than that.