COLLECTORS BOOKLET
2
VICTORY PARTS
BY
AC ACOUSTICS
The recording of Victory Parts took us from a hot summer in rural Wales, to London and ultimately back home to Scotland. The spirit of all the people we met along the way are manifest in the album. For those who helped us along the way, and still do, euis qui adhuc meminerunt nam ego numquam obliviscar. The observant will have noticed this sincere declaration scratched into the run out groove of some of our vinyl releases. As for what it means, you will have to work that out for yourself. After all, you wouldn’t reasonably expect us to have to do all the work would you? Whether these recordings come to you as a first encounter or as a point on a return journey, I sincerely hope they bring you much pleasure. Paul Campion 3
CONTENTS A BIOGRAPHY BY MILES PRESTIA
P.05
AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL CAMPION:
- MAKING ‘VICTORY PARTS’
P.10
- CREATIVE APPROACH P.12 - JOHN PEEL P.15 - GLASGOW P.16
Victory Parts by AC Acoustics 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 its associated labels. For more in the series visit totemseries.co.uk.
: Indian.co.uk Published by One Little Indian Records
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: Totemseries.co.uk
A BIOGRAPHY
BY
MILES PRESTIA
1997 can be read as transitional year for Glasgow’s music scene, a breaking point between two generations of Glaswegian artists, as bands like Teenage Fanclub and The Pastels acquired elder statesman status and fresh names like Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai, Camera Obscura and Arab Strap broke through. Making their first release in 1992 and balanced between the generations were AC Acoustics - probably the only substantial British answer to American counterparts like Codeine, Mercury Rev and their presumable godfathers Jesus Lizard and Flaming Lips. In the mid-to-late ‘90s as many Glasgow bands were following in the steps of Teenage Fanclub, The Pastels and The Vaselines, and the guitar-driven British ‘60s revival that was Brit Pop was running out of steam, Paul Campion and his gang took diverse 5
inspiration from left-field experimental bands such as Spacemen 3, Slowdive, Steve Albini’s Big Black and The Jesus and Mary Chain’s abrasive wall of sound. It was 1989 when Paul Campion (guitar and vocals), Roger Ward (lead guitar), Caz Riley (bass), Dave Gormley (drums) first got together, meeting in Scotland’s best-known and now closed music shop, McCormack’s Music. However, it would take a while before they released their first recording in 1992, a five track EP titled ‘Wirst Eye’ that featured Gerry Love from Teenage Fanclub on backing vocals. By that time Mike Daly, who was Head Of Entertainment at Strathclyde University, managed the band, securing them significant support slots with the likes of Spacemen 3, Jesus Lizard and PJ Harvey. They would eventually get a record deal with Elemental Records an offshoot of Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles record label. In 1993, Elemental released AC Acoustics debut single ‘Sweatlodge’ on blue vinyl 7”. Through intense live activity, the band started gaining media attention, with Allan Brown from Melody Maker writing an outstanding review of one of their shows in Glasgow. Together with NME, Melody Maker poured acclaim on ‘Sweatlodge’ describing it as “two helpings of genius on one platter”. In 1994 the band got noticed by Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley resulting in critically acclaimed Evening Sessions for Radio One. John Peel would spin their single and play their debut session three times. The debut album, a short LP, came in 1994 under the name of ‘Able Treasury’. NME would define it as a “mixture of the instantly recognisable and the frankly lunatic that makes AC Acoustics such a vital prospect”. The record features Roger Ward on guitar, who was replaced shortly after by Mark Raine, member of the local Glasgow band Big Burd. With Mark Raine on board, the band started working on new material for the following LP, which was preceded by the ‘Hand Passes Plenty’ EP and a memorable appearance at Reading Festival, which features on this re-issue. It would take three years before the release of the band’s second LP, the band decamping to Loco Studios in Wales, to record the album live with BBC engineers Andy Rogers and George Thomas. The sessions were not entirely successful though. As Paul Campion would state in a later interview: “the best way to make bands work really fast is to put them in a really stinking studio with no food, no money, no natural light, make it as miserable as you can and then they work as fast as they can so that they can get out”. The band eventually moved back to Glasgow and finished the record at Park Lane 6
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Studios with Dare Mason and Kenny Patterson, abandoning the option of live recording in the process, in favour of more traditional techniques. ‘Victory Parts’ saw the light in 1997 receiving high critical acclaim, with Mojo stating: “this is rock as art, and ‘Victory Parts’ is a near masterpiece”. The band’s sound had evolved into fuzz-drenched guitars and a raving wall of sound, spiced up by memorable hooks of which the killer singles, ‘Stunt Girl’ and ‘I Messiah Am Jailer’, are two good examples, both appearing in John Peel’s annual Festive 50 chart. The first reached number 26 in 1996 and the second reached number 19 in 1997. They also topped the charts of college radios in USA. Lyrics and titles were cryptic, as a result of Campion’s passions for hermetic poetry. As Paul Campion would state in an interview to Jonathan Greer: “I think songs that put a bit of effort in are more worthy of respect than the usual run-of-the-mill ‘baby I love you’ choruses. I think I have a relationship with the songs as entities as themselves. I see them as plays for several voices, they have several characters rather than just me. I like the lyrics to read well, rather than the usual Primary School stuff”. AC Acoustics promoted the record with extensive touring, alongside artists like Embrace, dEUS, Stereophonics and their friends Placebo. ‘Hammerhead’ was often performed with Brian Molko as a guest. ‘Victory Parts’ is considered the best record of the band and their biggest artistic statement. Perhaps suffering commercially as a consequence of being out of phase with the late ‘90s music scene, AC Acoustics have remained relegated to a cult status, remembered (and sometimes venerated) by only a few, including their notorious fan number 1, Brian Molko of Placebo, wearing his ‘Stunt Girl’ T-shirt on Top Of The Pops and in photo shoots for Melody Maker [as a consequence of which AC Acoustics sold more T-shirts than records during 1997, as the band would wryly acknowledge in an interview of the time]. Only a few would recall their featuring with Molko on the single ‘Crush’, and not many know that one of Placebo’s most successful hits, ‘Every You Every Me’, was co-written with Paul Campion. In 1999 AC Acoustics left Elemental and signed with Yoyo Records releasing two EPs: ‘Like Ribbons’ and ‘She’s With Stars’. Around the same time the band can also be credited as being one of the first bands to ever release a free downloadable track through their official website. In 2000 they signed to Cooking Vinyl Records and released the EP ‘Crush’, featuring 8
vocal contributions from Brian Molko. The same year, as Paul Murray joined on keyboard, the band released their third LP: ‘Understanding Music’. Stefan Olsdal, from Placebo, contributed with additional keyboards. Again the album recieved widespread acclaim. Mojo named it their ‘Album Of The Month’, Uncut called it “an addictively strong album” and NME stated that “it smashes the limited boundaries of its particular genre”. ‘Understanding Music’ would go on to be re-released by the London based Fire Records in 2010. In 2002, AC Acoustics released their fourth LP: ‘O’. Nearly forgotten, their last record precedes their sudden and silent departure in 2003, with their official website being removed from the internet along with many of the traces they printed across a path that was nearly fourteen years long. Though they may not have sold millions of records, AC Acoustics represented for Britain some sort of quintessence of “Alternative Rock” at a time when the nation was moving in the complete opposite direction. They pushed forward the paradigms of bands like My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab and Spacemen 3, developing their own hermetically sealed musical language. In that respect, they were one of a kind.
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AN INTERVIEW
WITH
PAUL CAMPION
MANY THINK ‘VICTORY PARTS’ IS YOUR BEST ALBUM, BUT NOT EVERYONE KNOWS IT HAS A BIT OF A TORMENTED STORY BEHIND IT. CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE MAKING OF THE RECORD? We recorded it in a number of studios. First stop was an amazing place in Wales, Loco Studios. It was a residential studio, in the countryside. I believe The Verve and Stereo MCs recorded there. By this point we had done a lot of sessions for Radio 1, for John Peel and in Maida Vale. Of course when you do all these successful sessions and you do them live, then you assume that surely if you can do four tracks in one day, you can do an entire record in a week. The idea was to record with an excellent producer, Andy Rogers, and engineer George Thomas from the BBC, people we had done a lot of 10
sessions with. They came with us to Wales and the idea was to make the entire album, recording it pretty much live. It just seemed like an obvious plan. But it didn’t work out that way. HOW COME? Well, it would seem to most people that if you can’t make a record in a week, you must be struggling really hard and blushing in your musical competence. But then, that’s the way music is: sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t. And after a couple of days it wasn’t working and our fears became a self-fulfilling prophecy. We finished the album but it just didn’t quite measure up. That said, there are some tracks from the album, I think ‘Kill Zane’ and ‘Admirals All’, which were pretty much all from the Loco sessions. AT THAT POINT THE BAND MUST HAVE BEEN IN LOW SPIRITS, HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO GET THE WORK DONE? We left Loco and we were all sort of disappointed, making our way back to Glasgow. So we moved the recording to Park Lane Studios, in our hometown, and worked with Producer Dare Mason and engineer Kenny Patterson. Kenny worked on pretty much all of our records in some capacity after that. Broadly speaking we stuck to more conventional techniques this time around and it was a great atmosphere with friends coming from time to time, taking part or having a listen. We then moved back to London to mix the album at Moody Studios as I recall. AT THE START YOU SOUNDED MORE LIKE A SHOEGAZE BAND, THEN YOU DEVELOPED YOUR OWN WALL OF SOUND. ‘VICTORY PARTS’ SHOWS THE EVIDENCE OF THIS TRANSITION, HOW DID THAT HAPPEN? I suppose that physicality in music was something that we all really had in common. All the music that we enjoyed had a physicality to it. You know, either The Clash or Big Black, Spacemen 3 or Slowdive. All the so-called shoegaze bands had a lot in common with the so called Kraut Rock bands, like Can for example. There is a physicality to that music that I have always particularly enjoyed. We started from that and took it all towards a more melodic direction, I guess.
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SO WHAT WAS THE CREATIVE APPROACH OF THE BAND? We wrote a lot from jams, it would be very rare that somebody would come and have a complete concept. It’d be a guitar riff, a groove, a bass line, we would jam for hours and hours and hours. We would start from one single thing and it would expand. It was a really organic process and every member of the band was absolutely unique to that process. We all brought something to it. There was no starting point, like a verse or a chorus building up to a multidimensional thing in a traditional way. For us it didn’t work like that. DO YOU THINK IT WAS SORT OF A NATURAL OUTCOME OF A VERY NATURAL APPROACH TO YOUR MUSIC? When we got together, one of the features of the band was that all of the members had a varied taste in music. I was into stuff like Spacemen 3, bands like Big Black, also Young Gods, you know a broad spectrum of more sort of hardcore bands and shoegaze texture guitar music. I guess we were probably unusual in Glasgow, considering the sort of bands that influenced Glasgow musicians. Other guys from bands... they were probably influenced by the Clash or R.E.M at that time. Let’s suppose that four people get together and form a band. Let’s suppose that you’ve got four people who love the Beatles. I guess you end up with a band who are kinda Beatlesesque. For AC Acoustics, because we all came from very different directions, that was a bit different. And also across the various records that we made, I think we were quite comfortable with experimenting. We experimented different techniques, different instruments, different musical ideas. We didn’t really stick with one particular sound, which may have limited us in terms of commercial success. DO YOU SEE THIS AS THE MAIN STRONG POINT OF AC ACOUSTICS THEN? I suppose if you find a more uniform sound, then you are more likely to be recognisable and successful, I guess. While if you changed from record to record, from song to song you have a different scenario. We were the kind of band who would have a B-Side that people thought could have been the single. But then when we tried to do something really different like on ‘Stunt Girl’, which was one of the singles from ‘Victory Parts’, it became one of the most successful we released. 12
THERE IS A POETICAL COMPONENT TO THE MUSIC OF THE BAND AND TO YOUR LYRICS IN PARTICULAR... I remember when I was a boy, my Grandpa wasn’t very well read. That had an impact on me. I started to read poetry from a very young age, when I was in College. I had a book, a compendium of poetry called ‘The Golden Treasury’, for some reason it always stuck in my mind. That was my first approach to poetry and from that is the title of our first record, ‘Able Treasury’. WHICH POETS HAD A MAJOR INFLUENCE ON YOU? Dylan Thomas is an obvious one. I enjoy Welsh poetry. I enjoy Norman MacCaig, a Scottish writer. Also Gerard Manley Hopkins was very important to me as well as contemporaries from my period. A wide range of poetry really. I suppose what I respect is poetry being a celebration of life rather than gloomy and tedious. AC ACOUSTICS CAME OUT DURING A NEW GOLDEN AGE OF BRITISH MUSIC. WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER OF THOSE DAYS AND WHAT WAS YOUR FEELING OF THAT ERA, OPERATING IN THAT PARTICULAR SCENE AS AN INDEPENDENT BAND FROM GLASGOW? It was a hard one for us I suppose. On one hand you had bands like Blur, Pulp and Manic Street Preachers, who were huge bands, headlining big festivals, but at the same time there was still an appetite for genuinely indie music. Bands like Blur and the Manics were described as being ‘indie’ but they clearly were not. Being on a so-called independent label does not make your music ‘indie’. At the same time there were bands like Radiohead and The Verve, who were more left-field and so I felt there was an opportunity for us to be airplayed and heard by significant audiences. I always thought that people are open to different types of music. It really depends on whether or not they are given the opportunity to hear it. I remember being in a taxi in London at the time and there was a row of about fifteen taxi drivers parked in front of the station. Some of them were listening to Radio 1 while others were listening to more independent stations that were playing far more interesting music like Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips and those sorts of bands. So I think that if people are given the opportunity to hear music, people are open to that and they enjoy that. It was a huge honour to be sort of on the edge of that and of course a wonderful honour to be sort of critically acclaimed and have the support of 13
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Steve Lamacq, John Peel and Jo Whiley. AS YOU’VE JUST MENTIONED HIM, WHAT WAS YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH JOHN PEEL? We were invited to do a session for John. I think he played tracks from our first album, ‘Able Treasury’. We did our first session and John at the end of it said it was “truly brilliant”. That was the greatest honour. He went on inviting us for more sessions and live concerts were broadcasted on his show. I think it may have been at the time of ‘Stunt Girl’, when we had pluggers from record companies, that I asked if I could speak to John. I said “John, this is our new single, ‘Stunt Girl’” and he asked “is it any good?” and I said “well I think so”. And he told me “well, I’ll take your word for it and I’ll play it tonight” without having listened to it. I think we did five sessions with John. In fact I remember going out for dinner with him. We were in a taxi and I asked him “do you love every record that you play on the radio?”. He said “well not all of them, but I think all music deserves to be heard, it’s not up to me, it’s up to other people whether they enjoy that music or not”. And I think that’s a very important stance that he took. GOING BACK IN TIME, AC ACOUSTICS OPERATED IN BETWEEN TWO MAJOR GLASGOW MUSICAL WAVES. BEFORE YOU HAD THE PASTELS AND TEENAGE FANCLUB AND LATER YOU HAD MOGWAI, DELGADOS AND MANY MORE. WHAT DO YOU RECALL OF THAT PARTICULAR MOMENT IN THE GLASGOW SCENE? Originally there was a shop in Glasgow, McCormacks music shop, which is sadly no more. In the good old days lots of people would go up there, especially a lot of musicians. People would come together and meet up, a lot of the Glasgow bands met there. You know The Rolling Stones and The Clash visited that shop but sadly it’s no more. We met there long before we played any gigs, it was maybe 1989. However, it actually took a while before we were getting out there as a band. And I think by that time we operated in a moment in which Glasgow’s music had sort of moved. Glasgow always had a fantastic music scene and bands were always very supportive to one another. We all played a lot of disparate genres. Obviously we admired bands like Teenage Fanclub and The Pastels and Mogwai were a big one later on. We were friends with Teenage Fanclub. In fact Gerry provides backing vocals on ‘Victory Parts’. 15
BUT YOU STILL SOUNDED QUITE DIFFERENT FROM THE REST OF THE SCENE SURROUNDING YOU... Albeit that we enjoyed and admired those bands maybe we were more inspired by Glasgow bands like Jesus & Mary Chain. In fact we started with a drum-machine. We were in love with Big Black, Steve Albini’s band, and also Spacemen 3. There were American bands at times that influenced us like Pavement and Royal Trux. They were all very different. I would say it was certain bands that influenced us rather than genres. WHAT WERE YOUR FIRST GIGS LIKE IN GLASGOW? Well it was quite traditional to play boozers and small venues to ten people in Glasgow. We tried to keep a different approach, focus on our music, and try to get ourselves involved in good supports, good venues and attract some attention from the press. YOU HAVE MENTIONED SPACEMEN 3, WHO YOU ACTUALLY SUPPORTED ON ONE OF YOUR EARLY GIGS? I remember Spacemen 3 were doing a show in Glasgow and we would tell them porky pies, like we were a rated local band who had a big student support. Of course the promoter never heard of us because we barely put on any gigs but Spacemen 3’s management heard us and let us do the support. So we ended up playing a huge gig in Glasgow. AC ACOUSTICS ACTUALLY MADE THEIR WAY THROUGH THE SCENE THANKS TO SEVERAL BIG SUPPORTS. HOW DID THEY HAPPEN? Our first manager was a chap called Mike Daly. Mike was the Head Of Entertainment at Strathclyde University and he was responsible at that time for putting on bands. Basically all universities at that time, and I think they still do, had someone who runs entertainment. When he started managing us we got a support with PJ Harvey. HOW WAS IT PLAYING OUTSIDE OF GLASGOW FOR THE FIRST TIME? Well everything was very exciting at that time. NME and Melody Maker would go to gigs and we’d get reviewed. People would buy these papers every week and read them 16
voraciously. We played legendary venues, of course some of them would be very disappointing compared to what you would imagine. I suppose the smallest venue in Glasgow at that time would have been King Tuts Wah Wah Hut, which was a legendary venue. We played legendary venues like London’s Water Rats. I guess at that time it was very exciting for us to play these venues we had read about. A guy who was with Melody Maker, Allan Brown, was at one of our early gigs. We got a great review in Melody Maker and from then we started to get some interest. Which, on one hand, opens up a lot of opportunities for bands to expose themselves, but at the same time you can be lost within thousands of other bands. Maybe there was also a bit more quality control at that time, you had to work a little bit harder. And also all Glasgow bands were holding it together, while bands in London came and went very quickly. They would form very quickly, get a lot of press very quickly, get a lot of attention very quickly but then disappear just as quickly. IN 1999 YOU CLAIMED THAT WATERED DOWN VERSIONS OF AC ACOUSTICS WERE RISING FROM THE GLASGOW SCENE? Well that was pretty regrettable. It didn’t do us many favours in Glasgow. It was a very collegy music scene. What I said was perceived as a criticism or an insult. I said something along those lines but I didn’t mean to imply that these bands were directly inspired by AC Acoustics. What I meant was that all of those bands had been part of the ever expanding experimental side of music of which we were part and of which we were contemporaries. It certainly was not meant to suggest that anyone had ripped us off, because these bands were clearly different. We very much admired and enjoyed the music that was being created. HOW DID YOU END UP WITH ONE LITTLE INDIAN RECORDS? We first signed to Elemental Records, which at that point was part of Alternative Tentacles, Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys’ label. Elemental then became part of One Little Indian Records. It was great because One Little Indian had more resources and was a wonderful and genuine record label. We wanted to make the music that we wanted and that seemed to be essential to One Little Indian from the first conversation. What we did wasn’t commercially obvious, but we had complete support from the label. I remember meeting Derek Birkett from One Little Indian in their boardroom. At that time he had a huge collection by a Glasgow artist called John Bellany, who is one of my 17
favourite artists. He said to me “Paul, if you sell a million albums, I’ll give you one of those paintings”. And of course we did not sell a million records in the end but it was wonderful to have the opportunity. LISTENING BACK TO ‘VICTORY PARTS’, HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT IT TODAY AS A RECORD? It’s funny you know. I hadn’t listened to ‘Victory Parts’ or any other of our records for years. I find it, in some ways, a bit too emotional, like meeting an ex girlfriend you were very much in love with. But because of what’s been happening recently I have been forced to listen back to it and I have to say it’s a fucking amazing record.
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