A history of the synthesiser in pop music with Martyn Ware

Martyn Ware is a founding member of The Human League and Heaven 17. He and other acts from Sheffield pioneered British electronic music in the 70s Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Covet your husband's rucksack, you bareback gobnets. Welcome to the Blind by Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast. But if you're a regular listener, if you're a 10-foot Declan or a steaming Quava, you know the crack. I have a very special episode this week. This week's episode is a bit of a, I suppose it's a part two to last week's episode. Well, technically, no, it's a part three. Last week's episode was about my love of analog synthesizers, and I went into the history of analog synthesizers. But then the podcast before that was about artificial intelligence and how artificial

• 1:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  intelligence could never replace real human analog artists. So this is a bit of a part three. So I got a massive surprise last week.

• 1:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  So as you know, I've got my hands on some analog synthesizers. If you've been following me on Instagram at Blind by Bulk Club, you know that I've been using my spare time to, to make a few tracks with my analog synthesizers and upload them. And I've been loving it. It's been healing my neurodivergent burnout. I'm consistently in and out of neurodivergent burnout. It's something that's, so someone who's, who's neurodivergent, ADHD or autistic, when we consistently find ourselves in situations that are

• 2:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  overwhelming or overstimulating to our unique place on the spectrum, then we experience burnout. Social interaction, that's, that's what will trigger burnout for me. Consistent social interaction. And I've been on tour. I've been gigging nearly every week for the past two months. And every time I do a gig, I love it. But each time I gig, I'm interacting with maybe between six and 12 strangers each night that I gig. And it's not that I don't like doing that. It's because I am autistic.

• 3:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Meeting people, for me, it requires me to put on my, my learned performance of being a normal person. Forcing eye contact, being conscious of my body language, my facial expressions, what I'm speaking about. I'm well able to do it. I've been practicing my entire life, but that does take up quite a large cognitive load as an autistic person. It's overstimulating and it's a bit overwhelming. So after enough of that, over a sustained period of time, I start to experience feelings of what we call burnout. And burnout is a, a loss of skills, a loss of what we call executive functioning skills.

• 4:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I become very forgetful, not responding to emails, not staying.

• 4:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  On top of tasks, needing to come home from my office at five o'clock, but then getting confused and arriving home either too early or too late. I've become very, very irritable at the slightest things. And then my capacity to manage and regulate my emotions is more difficult. And then I have a very strong urge to just to be by myself away from people and to not speak at all, complete silence with my own thoughts. Now, burnout isn't something that affects just neurodivergent people.

• 4:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Neurotypical people would also experience burnout. It's, it's called like the impact of stress. You might have experienced this over COVID in particular. If you've got prolonged stress or if you're at work and there's just a lot, a lot, a lot being expected of you and you can't deliver that. Or you're struggling to pay bills and, and your efforts aren't being rewarded. You'll experience burnout too. Exhaustion, confusion, feeling a bit depressed, forgetfulness, brain fog, conditions which will lead to mental health issues if they go on long enough. The main difference with neurodivergent burnout is, is what causes it.

• 5:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  So for neurodivergent people, what causes our burnout is whatever is, whatever overstimulates our particular brains, our particular way of, the way that our nervous systems experience the world. So if you go to a festival and meet a lot of people, you might have tremendous fucking crack and love it. If I do it, after about an hour, I'm going to start experiencing it as very intense, very confusing and a strong desire to get the fuck away and be by myself. But you know, I exist in a neurotypical world. And I have to do gigs and I love doing gigs. So managing my burnout, that's very important.

• 6:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  And something which is like a tonic for me specifically is when I get to make music, when I get to enter musical flow for hours, playing with synthesizers, creating music, losing a sense of time and space, sculpting with symmetrical vibrations of air. Whatever goes on in me when I do that, it feels like the part of my brain that is overstimulated by social interaction, that very cognitive, language-based part of my brain that completely relaxes and sleeps while I experience the non-verbal bodily

• 6:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  flow, the physical bodily flow of creating music. That's like taking a Panadol from my burnout. It's like that if burnout was a headache, two hours of just creating a piece of music by myself, I feel healed and rested after that. And my confidence returns, my self-esteem, and then my executive functioning skills return. Then I'm able to answer that email instead of ignoring it or forgetting about it and then dealing with the consequences in a few days. So this is what I'm at with my analog synthesizers and posting those videos on Instagram. It's been really wonderful and joyful and I feel fantastic.

• 7:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  So last week's podcast was about my love of analog synthesizers because that's what I'm living right now. But I got a wonderful surprise. So when I put out last week's fucking podcast about analog synths, two hours after I put it out, I get a mail on Instagram and it's from Martyn Ware. And he says, "I loved your podcast about analog synthesizers." Now, before I explain who Martyn Ware is, if you don't know.

• 8:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  This is like making a podcast about guitars. And then you get a mail from Jimi Hendrix or Rory Gallagher. That's what we're dealing with here. Martyn Ware is founding member of The Human League and Heaven 17. A serious pioneer of the use of synthesizers in pop music. When we think of the first big explosion of synthesizers in pop, most people will think of Gary Newman. Gary Newman's first appearance on Top of the Pops in 78, I believe it was, with his song Cars. But he wasn't the first. The Human League in Sheffield, coming out of the punk scene,

• 8:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  were messing with synths first. If you want to learn about this before listening to this week's podcast, there's an incredible documentary that the BBC made around 2012. It's up for free on YouTube. It's called Synth Britannia, all about the history of electronic music emerging in Britain, particularly in Sheffield and with The Human League. And also other Sheffield bands like fucking Cabaret Voltaire. Sheffield is an industrial city. And I just, I love how you look at all the industrial cities in the world and that's where you see pioneering electronic music. I mean, I've done podcasts on this years ago, I can't even remember.

• 9:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  But you go to Detroit, you've got techno music. You go to Chicago, it's where house music came out of. And something else that's always fucking fascinated me is

• 9:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  after World War II, the Axis powers in World War II, Germany, Italy, Japan are also, for some reason, pioneers of electronic music.

• 9:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  You had the likes of Kraftwerk coming out of Berlin, Japan, of course, is where synthesizers were being made, Korg and Roland. And then with Italy, you can go farther back to 1913 with the Futurists, which was an art movement that was strangely aligned with fascism. But there was one fellow called Luigi Rosolo and he wrote a manifesto called The Art of Noises, which was revolutionary because you have someone writing about what electronic music needs to be when the technology simply does not exist at all because it's fucking 1913. I did do a podcast about five years ago where I contrasted the Futurists, the

• 10:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Italian Futurists of 1913 with the city of Birmingham in the UK, another industrial city, and how heavy metal music came out of Birmingham. Because heavy metal, it's not electronic, but it's fucking noise music. It's industrial. But Luigi Rosolo's manifesto in 1913, it was, "Cities now exist. Industry exists. Humans are exposed to so much loud noises from machinery in cities that music itself is now obsolete and we must now think of a type of music which isn't melodic but is abrasive and noisy and electronic and

• 11:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  industrial." And it was the musicians of Sheffield who realised that. The industrial city of Sheffield where steel was being made. A very ugly city. I love Sheffield. I love its ugliness. I'm obsessed with fucking Sheffield. I love the fact that because Sheffield has so many hills. That in the Victorian period, they were afraid that sewer gas would accumulate under the hills and you'd just get spontaneous explosions. So Sheffield has more fart lamps than any other place in Britain. A fart lamp is a type of lamp that is lit specifically with sewer gas to release

• 12:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  it so that shit doesn't explode. But in Sheffield, yeah, it could have exploded at any moment because there were so many farts underneath the ground that would accumulate on the hills. But the musicians of Sheffield in the mid seventies who started messing around with synthesizers, they had an awareness of the futurists. I mean, you had a band called Cabaret Voltaire. The Cabaret Voltaire, originally it was a nightclub in Zurich in Switzerland in nineteen fucking sixteen, which is where the Dada movement, so the Dada movement would have been associated with the futurists. But the Dada movement was bartered in the Cabaret Voltaire. So then in Sheffield, you have a group called Cabaret Voltaire, so they have an awareness of this history.

• 12:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're artists, they're deliberately modernists, they know what they are doing consciously to popular music with the use of noise and electronic instruments. And the person who I'm gonna chat to on this podcast is one of the architects of that. One of the most important living musicians of the twentieth fucking century. And the thing is with the twentieth century, you know, the way we look back at the Renaissance, and you know, you think of the Renaissance as this great period of art. If the world is still around in 500 years, they're gonna speak that way about the twentieth century in terms of music specifically.

• 13:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  And this is why I think that music is most likely the earliest human art form via singing, right? So we've been making music for as long as humans have been around. Let's call it 50,000 years, okay? The twentieth century is unique because it's the first time that we could record music.

• 13:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  You see, for years, we had paintings. And you make a painting and it doesn't disappear. It's an object, same with sculpture. But with music, with the exception of classical music that you can write down, you can write down classical music and someone can play it. But folk music, like Jimi Hendrix existed in the 16th century and he's forgotten. You know, and in the 15th century and the 14th century and 13th century, music was created amongst regular people. And then it disappeared into the air once it was finished. And possibly was remembered in, in the form of humming or, or learning tunes. But music would disappear. The 20th century was the first time that we could record music.

• 14:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then you have copies of it. And now you don't need to be able to read music. You can just hear a record or a CD or a tape. And then that inspires other people. So that's why I think the 20th century is going to be viewed like the Renaissance. It's the first time that we could record music. And then the creative explosion that comes from that. So Martyn Ware, whom I'm about to chat to, he's a huge part of that. He's a pioneer of the use of the synthesizer in popular music. He's one of the inventors of synth-pop. We just take this for granted now because all music contains synthesizers. But there was once a time in the seventies where this was nuts. This was punk, this was radical.

• 15:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  A lot of people didn't like it. You've definitely heard of the Human League. You know about Heaven 17. What a lot of people don't know is that the early Human League music was quite difficult and strange and punk. And they didn't know what to call it and revolutionary. So I spent the day with my jaw wide open. It's like, when I make this podcast, I'm not really thinking about an audience. I'm showing up each week and being passionate about what I'm passionate about. And it's just me here in my studio. And I don't really have an awareness of how many people are listening. I'm certainly not thinking that when I'm speaking about analog synthesizers, that one of my fucking heroes is not only listening, but it turns out like he's a 10-foot

• 16:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Declan. He's been listening for years. He's been tuning in every week. He's one of the people who, when my podcast comes out, he gets up on a Wednesday morning and it's like, I'm gonna listen to Blind Boy. So that's deeply surreal for me. But anyway, look, we had a chat and I loved every bit of it. This might be a little bit too nerdy for you. If you're not into music, if you're a fucking musician, this is gonna be utter heaven for you because we just go on huge tangents about the history of music and the history of harmony in western music and recording techniques. If you're not a musician specifically or a producer and you're an artist, you're still gonna love it because we're speaking about the creative process.

• 16:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you're none of these things, go and listen to some early Human League, the first two albums and some Heaven 17 and maybe take a look at that Synth Britannia documentary that's free on YouTube. But I had a class chat with Martyn Ware and I don't want to interrupt it with an Ocarina pause, so I'm just gonna go straight into an Ocarina pause now. I'm gonna play my Ocarina. It doesn't feel right me playing a synth on a podcast where I'm chatting to Martyn Ware, so I'll just go with the Ocarina. You'll hear adverts for some bullshit, all right?

• 17:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, that's not very dog friendly.

• 17:40Speaker 00

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• 18:10Speaker 01

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• 20:21Speaker 00

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• 20:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was the Ocarina Pause. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if you listen to it regularly, please consider supporting it directly because this is my full-time job and it's how I pay my bills, how I rent out my studio, how I exist and how I have the time and space to show up and deliver a podcast each week. This is an independent podcast, listener-funded. I'm not beholden to advertisers in any way. So if you're listening regularly and you enjoy it, if it brings you distraction, entertainment, whatever, please consider funding this directly. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee

• 21:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets the exact same podcast and I get to earn a living. I'm coming to the end of my tour, so I'm just gonna call out some gigs before we get into the chat with Martyn Ware. This Saturday, I'm up in Monaghan in Castle Blaney. Can we call that sold out? I'd say that's sold out. You might get lucky on the door. It's a small gig up in Monaghan. I just really wanna go up to fucking Monaghan, up to Paddy Cavanagh country. Then next week, Thursday, the 9th of April, I'm in Limerick in my home city at the University Concert Hall.

• 22:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Please come along to that, that's gonna be fucking tremendous crack. There beside Yurti's Couch, the spiritual home of this podcast. Then the 20th of April, up in Vickers Street in Dublin. I have a class guest for Vickers Street. You don't wanna miss that gig. That's on. Is that a Monday night, lovely Monday night gig in Vicar Street? I love my Vicar Street gigs, they're fantastic. I always put my Vicar Street gigs on, on the nights that no one else wants. I put them on on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays. No one wants those dates because usually it's music. And if it's a music gig, people wanna go out and drink or whatever. But with my live podcasts, it's like going to the theatre or going to the cinema. You don't have to have a drink.

• 23:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  You can come to the live podcast on a Monday night and you're up for work the next day with a clear head. Saturday 25th of April, this one is nearly sold out, but I'm up in Galway in Leisure Land. That's that gig that I cancelled and now I've rescheduled, so your tickets are still good for that. So there's Galway Leisure Land there on the 25th of April. Then in May, on the 9th of May, I'm in Maynuth, Maynuth University, as part of the Arts and Minds Festival. Now, this is a daytime gig at 1.30 in the day. Now, I thought it was just students that could go to this gig in Maynuth, but it's not. It's, it's the public, the public can actually go to this gig. So if you fancy a nice little daytime live podcast in Maynuth University,

• 23:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  come along to that on the fucking 9th of May, the Arts and Minds Festival. 5th of July, I'm in Sheffield at the Crossed Wires Festival. I think that Sheffield City Hall, I'm gonna make a fucking day of that now. And I'm just gonna, I'm gonna walk around by myself, listening to Human League, listening to a bit of Cabaret Voltaire, and I'm gonna drink a pint of whatever the local shit is. And then I might have a little bit of Baldi and go down to Sheffield Cathedral and have a think about the Anglo Saxons. Oh, and I'm gonna try and visit that, that fridge in the co-op there in Sheffield that hums in the key of C. Very spiritually Sheffield behaviour when you think about it.

• 24:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's a fridge, there's a, there's a fridge at the back of a co-op right now in Sheffield, and it hums perfectly in, in the key of C. And people go and visit it to experience the musicality of a fucking fridge, which is very Sheffield, as you can see. I can tell by this conversation that I'm gonna have with Martyn Ware. What I'd like to do is go into that co-op with an analog synthesizer and, and jam with that fridge, dressed as the IRA. I'm gonna try and steer clear of festivals now over the fucking summer and just concentrate on, on growing vegetables. I have numerous seedlings I'm getting very excited about.

• 25:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Potatoes, broccoli, kale, spinach, spring onions, garlic and San Marzano tomatoes. I can't grow cannabis anymore because I have children. Then October, my big tour there of fucking England, Scotland and Wales in October, right? Starting off Brighton at the Brighton Dome, then over to Cardiff, bit of Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London, the Barbican, I think that's sold out, possibly sold out in London, Glasgow, Gateshead, can't wait to get a bit of Gateshead into me. Gateshead, as I understand it, was the, the inspiration for the film Blade Runner because

• 25:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ridley Scott, who directed Blade Runner, grew up around Gateshead and there's some industrial area there that was an inspiration for Blade Runner. So I'm gonna try and visit that. And then Nottingham, fucking Nottingham, large Anglo-Saxon underground cave network. Let's not forget about Nottingham. So anyway, look, here's my chat with Martyn Ware. Pioneer of synth music, very kind man with sound politics, who gave me a lot of his time.

• 26:23Speaker 06

  When you first heard Kraftwerk, how did you hear it? Well, big question. I, my, my musical journey of, of expansion in my taste started when I met Phil Oakey, really, at school in the fourth form. And he had a, yeah, 14, 15, like that.

• 26:49Speaker 06

  He came from quite a wealthy background and I only knew like poor people, I mean.

• 26:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 26:54Speaker 06

  Uh, and he had a big record collection and uh. And it really opened my ears. So I was listening to a lot of experimental electronic music that he had. I was listening to avant garde kind of experimental jazz like um Carla Blay and uh stuff like that. Uh, the uh, the Blay, Carla Blay, what is it? Peacock synthesizer show and at Peacock uh. But also Frank Zappa and the whole tape manipulation stuff, you know, uh, which is really important.

• 27:33Speaker 06

  Uh, people kind of don't really understand it so much unless you've had to deal with uh, you know, reel to reel tape recorders and recording studios and stuff. So um, all that meant that, I mean, I came from a background of loving rock music and so did Phil. We saw some of the earliest um.

• 27:55Speaker 06

  Rocks music gigs in Sheffield when Eno was still there. I saw rocks music with Eno uh, five times before he left.

• 28:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 28:04Speaker 06

  Uh, it changed my life, uh, I have to say. And I just wanted to be Eno, you know? It symbolized the future, but really good vibrations was the start of that kind of journey of thinking. Wow, this doesn't sound like uh, a band in a pub at all, you know? This is like the future. I still think that actually about that record.

• 28:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's really fascinating because the one. So something I was really, really wondering about and I couldn't figure it out and now you've just answered it for me is. Like, I know that you're from working class Sheffield. I know you told me that both your grandparents are Irish.

• 28:43Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 28:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I'm just going, how the fuck did working class Irish immigrant kids, how are they even being exposed to electronic music? But now you tell me that Phil Oakley was middle class, so there's a whole different cultural literature there that. You just have from having a bit more money or maybe parents. I'm assuming his parents might have been, maybe went to college today.

• 29:06Speaker 06

  No, his, his dad was head postmaster of Sheffield.

• 29:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 29:12Speaker 06

  He was not from Sheffield. He he he came to my school, which was like the biggest grammar school in Sheffield, King Edward the Seventh, uh, in the fourth form. And he just moved, his dad had just moved the family from Leicester where he was head postmaster. And um, so it was like, to me, Phil, apart from having a fantastic haircut, was uh, it was like a bromance, really. We were so close. Uh, we spent most of our spare time together vibing on, you know, films, science fiction, uh, you know, Oz Magazine, uh, and anything that was kind of transgressive,

• 29:55Speaker 06

  really. We took acid together, uh, to say, we went to a, a, a, a rock music gig, actually, and took acid for the first time. That was interesting, I have to say. Um, uh, and so we were super close.

• 30:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  But were you freaks? I mean, it seems like

• 30:15Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 30:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  what you were doing was so, if you think of it in the context of the early seventies, was so strange. Like, there's no way you didn't get picked on.

• 30:25Speaker 06

  Ah, but the interesting thing is, and it's a cultural, uh, uh, thing to understand in Sheffield. We, immediately, we, we saw rock music and, of course, gay glitter and all the, all the other glam acts on Top of the Pops and stuff. We thought, that's for us, because it had this element of transgression. And it wasn't really about, were you gay, were you bisexual, were you, it was like, just an exciting escape from the mundanity of a, of a depressed city, you know. So we used to dress, uh, in extreme, well, we used to dress in women's clothing.

• 31:07Speaker 06

  There's a funny story that Glenn tells on stage normally. And he says, um, one day, I was, uh, living in a, uh, some council flats near the centre of town. Phil came to pick me up and we were going out. No, sorry, not Phil, it was Glenn. And Glenn, uh, turned up in a dress, right? With makeup and everything. He was a good-looking lad. And, um,

• 31:35Speaker 06

  My mum answered the door and said, oh Glenn, don't let Martin go out like this. And he, and he went, I'm wearing a dress, you know. So um I was wearing like tight loon pants, white loon pants. Um, a one-armed lurex jumper and uh ala, you know, kind of Bowie. And, and a green fun fur Belero jacket.

• 32:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:07Speaker 06

  Uh, and six inch platform boots, silver. And we were going and walking through the centre of town to the Crazy Daisy, I think it was at the time. Which ironically is where Phil met the two girls who went on to join the Human League.

• 32:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:22Speaker 06

  And um, we ne- to cut a long story short, we never got picked on. Cause I think we were so out there and so extreme that uh the, the beer monsters just thought.

• 32:37Speaker 06

  I don't know what to do with this. I don't know. I don't know whether to, you know, kind of intimidate them. I, they just thought, I'm just gonna steer clear, you know.

• 32:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  It is, was Sheffield a bit more accepting? Like I know, so in Ireland, right? If, if, Jesus Christ, I know a fella who once walked into a pub with a particularly long leather jacket. And from then on, his nickname was, was Stile. They just, they just caught, do you know what I mean? Or there's another dude. He was seen coming out of River Island with three sets of the same pairs of jeans. So it's three sets of trousers and his nickname became Spider.

• 33:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  But like you, i- in Ireland, like if you deviated in any way, you got a fucking nickname and, and people took the piss out of you. And I know from, speaking to people from Manchester in particular, Manchester seems to be the same vibe. That there's an enforced conformity, that if you are weird, you're gonna get picked on. Was Sheffield a bit more? Accepting?

• 33:40Speaker 06

  It was um definitely more accepting. I mean, the original club that we went to in Sheffield was called The Penthouse. And it was, they used to have like a student night midweek, which was like Tempe Drinks Night, right? And so of course we went down there and that was like a glam kind of musical set. So you used to end up, we, this is where we started dressing up in that fashion. But um you'd also get like, we used to joke about it. You'd also get like people coming in from Doncaster, which is, was an even poorer town at the time. Um like, you know, big burly kind of plumbers and builders.

• 34:23Speaker 06

  Who've not changed their clothes at all, but had started wearing eye makeup. Cause they'd seen The Suite on Top of the Pops. Or Mud.

• 34:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go away. Cause the other thing as well is so, so many of these groups were working class.

• 34:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Nobody, nobody picked on anyone. It was a really, uh, uh, I was, it was a really accepting thing, yeah.

• 34:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Slade, like I was looking at early Slade and they were dressed like, like at the very start, Slade were dressed like sixty skinheads. And they had shaved heads and Doc Martens and suspenders. And then all of a sudden they went glam.

• 35:02Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 35:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  But at the end of the day, you've got, so you had working class kids with an awareness that even though these people on Top of the Pops, they're wearing makeup, they come from the same streets that they come from.

• 35:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's like, it, it, it was like um a fashion thing. It wasn't even to do with sexual identity or anything. There's another thing in, in uh, in Sheffield, in the area I lived in, Broom Hall. Across the street from these ultra-modern kind of minimalist, brutalist, concrete.

• 35:36Speaker 06

  Um, Walkways in the Sky, there was a whole bunch of uh very old pre-war uh two-up-two-down houses.

• 35:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  This is what we call the slums.

• 35:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, the slums, they were slums. I grew up, I mean, I was born in a slum. I lived for seven years in two-up-two-down house with outside toilet and no bathroom.

• 35:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, you said in your fucking, in your, in your biography, they had a tin bath and an outdoor toilet.

• 35:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's it, that's it. And uh no, no fridge. You had the, you had the cellar ed, you know, the.

• 36:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's that?

• 36:06Speaker 06

  The cellar, the, there's, there were steps down to the cellar where the coal was stored.

• 36:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 36:12Speaker 06

  But at the top of the stairs was the shelves where you stored um stuff uh instead of the fridge, because it was cold. Um, anyway, so it's a bit like the, it's a bit like the Four Yorkshireman sketch this, I know, but you know, uh multi-pis and things.

• 36:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Where you're having a competition about who is the poorest.

• 36:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, your, your dad was a toolmaker and did you grow up with music in your house?

• 36:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, loads of it.

• 36:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  What crack were you listening to?

• 36:43Speaker 06

  We didn't have any books. We only had four books in our house.

• 36:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  What were they?

• 36:48Speaker 06

  Uh, there were four volumes of uh the Encyclopedia Britannica and the four.

• 36:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's not bad. It's pretty good.

• 36:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, they were different subjects. So, and the weird, this is the weird thing. So one of them was science, which is great, and I read it from cover to cover. One was biology, which is great. One was geography, which was dull as dishwater. And one was the Commonwealth, which was unreadable. And it was just the basis of the Queen shaking hands with lots of black people in the.

• 37:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Propaganda.

• 37:22Speaker 06

  Uh, yeah, propaganda. And um anyway, so getting back to the music thing, I've got, I had.

• 37:29Speaker 06

  Uh, I've got two sisters who are ten and twenty years older than me. And they, our.

• 37:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm the same. I, I was the exact same. I was born into a family with a lot of older. So that's why I got exposed to music from the sixties and seventies.

• 37:43Speaker 06

  There you go.

• 37:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Eighties, yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 06

  Exactly the same. So they had a dance set player and lots and lots of sixties singles. And, uh, but all interestingly, also, uh, soundtracks. You know, things like West Side Story.

• 37:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, Leonard Bernstein, yeah.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  Leonard Bernstein, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I mean, I fell in love with soundtracks before I fell in love with film.

• 38:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 38:12Speaker 06

  And that influenced, uh, my compositions, I'm pretty sure. Cause I still think when I write stuff, I often think I'm composing for an imaginary film in my head.

• 38:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow, okay. So when you're writing, is it you, that's a bit like writing, writing a book really. So you're, you're seeing pictures and then you're matching the, the emotion of the music with the pictures that you're seeing in your head.

• 38:38Speaker 06

  It's quite synesthetic, yeah, I would say.

• 38:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  The Irish connection, did you, were yours, so even though you had grandparents who were Irish on both sides.

• 38:46Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 38:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Would, did your parents retain any of that Irishness or they had to become fully assimilated into, into Sheffield?

• 38:54Speaker 06

  Well, their parents, uh, lived nearby us, uh, in a place called Netherthorpe. Again, quite close to the city centre in Sheffield. Um, so they, you know, very much the tradition there was they looked after them, visited them every day. And everybody lived close to each other. Um, it's, I mean, it's quite similar in a lot of ways to, you know, more, um, remote communities in, in, in Ireland, I suppose.

• 39:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Where were they from, your grandparents?

• 39:27Speaker 06

  Uh, one was from, um, one was from Belfast and one was from Limerick.

• 39:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fuck off.

• 39:39Speaker 06

  I think so.

• 39:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow. And, and did you, like, they, they had full Irish accents and everything, so they were full.

• 39:45Speaker 06

  I can't remember them. They were very, very, I was very young when they died.

• 39:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they were very old.

• 39:50Speaker 06

  They were like, they, they did live to be like nearly ninety, but, uh, I can barely remember them.

• 39:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  And so did you have any type of Irish culture growing up?

• 40:01Speaker 06

  No.

• 40:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was just so your parents had become fully assimilated?

• 40:04Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 40:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow. You see, that's the thing too, is a lot of, you know, when I was chatting to Johnny Marr and Johnny, like Johnny Marr was telling me he grew up more or less in an Irish household in Manchester, but also telling me that he was aware that his parents were also very much trying to escape Ireland. So even though he experienced a lot of Irishness in his house, it was involuntary. They didn't want, like, you gotta realise, because we were fucking colonised, a lot of Irish people felt shame about being Irish, about what Irish culture is, felt shame about Irish music. So it was kind of hidden away. And when people then emigrated to America or to the UK, they tried to forget it a bit, you know?

• 40:50Speaker 06

  Well, they tried to reinvent themselves. I mean, it was quite interesting when I, when I married my wife Lansley, who's from Armagh, as I mentioned.

• 40:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 41:01Speaker 06

  She, you know, the first kind of six months of our relationship, she was going, she was hammering on about,

• 41:10Speaker 06

  about the bias, because she was in advertising in London. Clever girl, you know, and, and, and made her way and left home when she was 16. And, but she was going on about, you have, telling me, you have no idea how much

• 41:29Speaker 06

  racism there is towards Irish people in London. And I'm going, because I'd never really witnessed any of this, because I didn't really, I know a few, I knew a few Irish people, but they were all in the kind of creative industries and quite, I suppose, middle class.

• 41:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 41:45Speaker 06

  And, and I didn't, I, I didn't, I used to think she was exaggerating. And then as soon as she pointed it out, over the years, I noticed it is completely real.

• 42:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, in the seventies and eighties in particular, like I, Jesus, my brothers had to immigrate there. And I had a brother in London in the early eighties and he just went into McDonald's to take a shit. But he happened to have a backpack on and he's sitting on the toilet and the manager and the workers kicked the door in the toilet. They were terrified, they were terrified, but they were fully sure this dude is here to bomb the place just because of his accent, you know? And he also worked at, he worked in M and S and he was at the cheese counter and there was people who'd refused to be served by him because of his accent.

• 42:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the thing with, like, it's not like that now, but Irish people in the seventies, eighties and nineties in the UK. They were British until they spoke. And then when people heard their accent, then it'd be like Islamophobia today. People just associated being Irish with terrorism and this, like, it didn't help the Irish community.

• 43:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  I suppose I'm bringing up the Irishness because we don't have, electronic music is not an Irish thing. But sometimes I challenge it because, like, we have an instrument, I don't know if you've ever heard it, it's called the Ilin pipes.

• 43:21Speaker 06

  Oh, cool. So in fact, I've used, I've tried to find Ilin players in London and I didn't look hard enough because.

• 43:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  That drone, that's an electronic drone. Like, it's not, it's not an electronic instrument, but that fucking drone from the Ilin pipe is very. And then of course, someone who gets looked over a lot, Enya, like Enya's contribution.

• 43:46Speaker 06

  Very good.

• 43:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know, people think of Enya as, what's the word that's used? I often say it because it feels quite misogynistic, but Brian Eno gets to be called ambient music, whereas Enya is called new age. And I don't like the phrase new age because it suggests that the music is wallpaper, it's decorative, that it's not real music. Whereas ambient is real music, but. Enya came from a proper traditional trad music, Irish trad music background. And in the eighties, she just decided, I'm going to invent a new genre. I'm going to start blending electronic music with Irish traditional music and create something which we can only call Enya.

• 44:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it's only in the past 10 years that people have started to reappraise her and look at her as a pioneer, you know?

• 44:35Speaker 06

  Well, some people, it's interesting because I work with a lot of young people. I do a lot of education and stuff and so I talk to them about their influences and stuff. My view of Enya was at the time, and I'm being honest here, I liked it, but I thought it was a bit anodyne.

• 44:54Speaker 06

  But for the younger generation, I believe they, they see her as a totally credible and authentic artist. And I think that's very interesting because it's got a kind of eternal quality, which is predicated on the whole. God, listen to me with all the posh words. It must be you bringing it out of me. Predicated on the, on traditional Irish music, obviously. But you know, it was Simon Cowell who was responsible for popularizing her, right?

• 45:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go away, really?

• 45:27Speaker 06

  Did you not know that?

• 45:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  I did not know that, no.

• 45:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was on Simon Cowell's label. I think that was his first big success.

• 45:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow, because she's like huge, huge, like she's nearly Michael Jackson level when it comes to sales. And like when I was growing up, like when Enya was on the charts, I was pissed off because I wanted to hear The Prodigy and stuff. And Enya was knocking her off the top of the charts, you know? So it's me too, only in later years that I start to go, hold on a second here. I think I'm not, I'm not looking at the art for, for what it actually is. And instead I'm, the marketing, the marketing is, she was never marketed as cool, you see? And she never tried to be cool. And but what she's doing was actually quite challenging and transgressive. And she was herself and she didn't give a fuck, you know?

• 46:16Speaker 06

  Nothing, nothing is quite as alluring as somebody who doesn't want to be.

• 46:23Speaker 06

  Isn't chasing fame.

• 46:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  And she's not, and she's never done a gig. Actually, ye never do, when you started having seventeen.

• 46:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  You started off as we're not gonna do gigs.

• 46:36Speaker 06

  We did, yeah. We did TV shows.

• 46:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  What was that, why, why did you make that decision?

• 46:43Speaker 06

  Um, because with the early Human League, um, you know, you're kids and you sign a, you think, oh, I'm gonna be a big star, sign a record contract. In fact, we took a wage cut of fifty percent to, to, uh, so we could pay ourselves a reasonable amount and eke out the money that they'd given us as an advance for the first two Human League albums. So it wasn't quite as glamorous as, as it appeared to be. But what, what we realized at the end of the, uh, Human League Mark One is that we'd, all the, all the, uh, tour support that the record company had been paying to get us on like the Susie and the Banshees tour and

• 47:23Speaker 06

  Per Ubu and various other, uh, you know, Stranglers and Iggy Pop and all this stuff. We were paying for it. It was going on our bill. We didn't realize that. So we looked at, we looked at our accounts and went, hold on a second. We are paying. We, we are getting into big debt. It was just, the, the start of HEM Seventeen just started at the same time as more or less, um, MTV. So we thought, well, fuck this for a game of soldiers. We, you know, we're gonna, if we're gonna spend money and get into debt with the record company, we're gonna make

• 48:05Speaker 06

  videos because then you can service, uh, every territory on earth simultaneously. Secondly, it's cool and innovative. Um, and thirdly, we, we didn't want to play live because we didn't wanna be away from our loved ones and our friends in London. We were having the best time of our lives. And I saw what happened to people like friends of ours, like, um. Simple Minds, who turned into, uh, from a relatively experimental rock kind of synthetic band, writing fantastic stuff into more of a kind of stadium rock band.

• 48:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then you have to change the music.

• 48:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, it changes the music. It changes the music.

• 48:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  It like, they call this the Bon Jovi effect, where once you move into stadiums, the type of songs that you have to make now must accommodate the size of that space, the amount of people in the audience. And now the more, the quieter, weirder stuff just simply does not work in a venue of that size. And now you're a band where it's like, we've, we've lost what we started off doing.

• 49:22Speaker 06

  And yeah, in fact, with, um, with Simple Minds, it was Virgin, cause, and we were both on Virgin. Um, it was Virgin who persuaded them to do, uh, Don't You Forget About Me, which was written by Kim Fowley. It wasn't written by them at all. A lot of people don't realise that it was the record company going, you guys need to get real. We need a hit. And it was fantastic, of course. But that, then that like shifts the whole paradigm, doesn't it?

• 49:59Speaker 06

  Somewhere else.

• 50:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  If, so the early Human League stuff, right? Late seventies up until eighty two. So Reproduction and Travelogue, they're.

• 50:08Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 50:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like even today, I would listen to that and I can see how difficult that music is. You have to really listen to it and you have to be into it, which means that in the late seventies, that must have been insane. Like, did the record companies even, like, they're putting you with Susie and the Banshees and stuff. Like, what did, did they know what to do with you? Or what you were doing was it's so strange. They didn't know where to put you.

• 50:32Speaker 06

  They had no idea what to do with us. Uh, they, they. The the only thing they could think about was there was this over overarching explosion of public interest in in um in punk and I suppose you call it new wave. Uh, and they just, so you you you're in this kind of uh absolutely mad chaotic period where everybody was getting signed.

• 51:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 51:03Speaker 06

  You know, friends of ours who never have ever sought uh, commercial success, like Cabaret Voltaire. Got a big record contract with EMI. Spiz.

• 51:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's crazy. Like the stuff they were doing was so anti-pop, anti-radio.

• 51:21Speaker 06

  Spiz, Clock D V A, all the, I mean, I'm I'm glad they got signed. I'm just saying they would, were it not for punk, none of this would have happened. I would honestly believe we would never have had a a career, were it not for punk, kind of uh, opening of the doors, kicking down the doors, you know.

• 51:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  As I understand it,

• 51:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  one band would come out of an area and then A and R flocks to that area and just signs everybody who's mates of that band. Like, is that how it was?

• 51:51Speaker 06

  No, not at all.

• 51:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 51:53Speaker 06

  It's it's a bit of a trope.

• 51:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  I read that on Wikipedia, so I have no fucking clue.

• 51:57Speaker 06

  No, no, no, no. It it's it's kind of a tempting idea, but there were bands, for instance, in Sheffield who uh, who were, who who

• 52:11Speaker 06

  were always being touted as the next big thing. And they were generally kind of influenced by they were, they were like, kind of slightly off the wall kind of rock bands. Uh, there was a band called The Extras who who kind of modeled themselves a little bit on early Roxy Music. But that kind of went on for years and years and A and R men rarely came up to Sheffield. So of course, when we get signed, then this, then A B C suddenly comes along, who were brilliant. Uh, but they had a band before that called Vice Versa, who were a lot more like the early Human League. Um, there was no, it wasn't like, oh, Sheffield's the place to go now. They would.

• 52:54Speaker 06

  Because a lot of people had to move out of Sheffield like we did to

• 52:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 52:58Speaker 06

  make a success of it, you know, I mean, the second version of the Human League stayed in Sheffield. Good luck to them, that was fine. Um, and but they still did all their recording down in London, you know, and stuff. Um, we decided we wanted to be on the, uh, uh, uh, uh, on the, uh, on the case of the record company in their face at all times. So we, we actually lived in Notting Hill where Virgin Records was. So we were in the offices every day. We were like part of the staff. Uh, and they loved us for that because we were passionate about what we were doing. So uh, we didn't have management. We looked after ourselves, you see.

• 53:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  I saw, uh, so Phil Oakley was, was, was speaking about the beginnings of the Human League and he said that you called around to his gaffe with a Georgia Marauder record, played it and said, we can do that.

• 53:50Speaker 06

  Yep, that's true.

• 53:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Where, what, like, what's, what was going on in your head at the time where you're going, we can do that? I mean, what I'm trying to get at, I suppose, is like, how did you, how did you go, I'm gonna get my hands on a synthesizer? And could you play instruments beforehand?

• 54:10Speaker 06

  No.

• 54:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, when did you first go, I'm, I'm gonna get one of them and where am I gonna fucking get it?

• 54:16Speaker 06

  This, well, you probably, you may have read the story in, in the autobiography, but, uh, it's very funny, I think. Um, so myself and Ian Marsh have both become computer operators.

• 54:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 54:28Speaker 06

  Uh, in separate companies. And so for the first time, we'd actually got a tiny bit of disposable income. And amazingly, um, finance companies would give higher purchase agreements to anybody who was drawing a wage who could prove they got a salary. This is pre-credit cards.

• 54:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 54:48Speaker 06

  Bear in mind. So we thought, hold on a second, they're gonna let me buy something on HP?

• 54:57Speaker 06

  Uh, I'm gonna get something. This coincided with the first kind of um cheaper kind of more diffusion range synthesizers like the Korg seven hundred S.

• 55:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause you're looking at Eno, cause when you're looking at Eno in the club, he's probably using a Mini Moog or something that's really expensive.

• 55:20Speaker 06

  Uh, he's using a, I think he was using a VCS three.

• 55:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Which is ten grand?

• 55:25Speaker 06

  Ten grand, yeah, something like that. Um, again, every, I think people need to understand that all the people that were doing electronic music from uh Van Gogh, obviously brilliant.

• 55:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 06

  Uh, as you mentioned, the, the CS eighty was like, was like, you might as well, I might as well have said, I'm going to buy a rocket and go to the moon, you know?

• 55:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you own one now? Do you have a CS eighty?

• 55:52Speaker 06

  No, no, no, no, no. I've got a, I've got a virtual one.

• 55:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, yeah.

• 55:56Speaker 06

  I, I love, I mean, it's great for certain things, right? So um, I was lucky enough to work with Vince Clark uh and produce an album of his called I Say, I Say, I Say. We became very close friends. He had the most amazing futuristic Jules Verne like circular studio.

• 56:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  When you say circular, does that mean you sit down and you're just surrounded by synths? Like Van Gogh's had.

• 56:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, three sixty.

• 56:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 56:23Speaker 06

  Um, and walkways around the back to get to the modular ones.

• 56:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 56:27Speaker 06

  And it was all connected via CV and gate. I mean, you would literally ejaculate, I think, if you'd have seen this. He had every synth.

• 56:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 56:38Speaker 06

  I think, I mean, just about. There are obviously some kind of academic bespoke things that he didn't have. But he had pretty much everything and, and actually duplicates of most of them as well. So he had really experimental stuff like booters and uh, but everything had been plumbed, so you could connect it by a patch bay with CV and gate. Now, for people who don't know what that is, is how you basically make different analog synthesizers talk to each other. And, and synchronize. So.

• 57:13Speaker 06

  I, when I was producing stuff with him, I mean, I remember doing a John Peel session in nineteen seventy eight. The, the highlight of my life at that point was going to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. And seeing the whole thing, this is before everybody had synths, right? It was like, I could not believe what I was looking at. It was like Aladdin's Cave for me. And this was so inspiring to me. I thought, well, I know what I'll be spending my money on. I'm not gonna buy cars or yachts or anything like that. I'm, I still can't drive. Um, and I don't want to, uh, but the, this is, if I get money.

• 57:57Speaker 06

  I want to firstly have my own recording studio and secondly, because I think recording. And learning recording techniques is as much of a tool as any synthesizer.

• 58:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 58:11Speaker 06

  So analog synthesis was the way forward then. And I, I tended to feel that, that like the kind of. It all started falling apart a bit when we went to FM synthesis.

• 58:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  The case that I was making, like I've been using VSTs as I said for twenty years. And only in the past couple of weeks is the first time I've had an analog synthesizer that I can touch.

• 58:32Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 58:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know, it's like, that's, when I got the fake Mini Move. I'm physically touching something that I know inside out for twenty years. So there's no learning curve. I know. And the same with the Prophet, but it's all digital for me for twenty years. And now I'm touching it. And what I compared it to was.

• 58:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  When you're, when you have a VST and you have all those presets. It's like buying tubes of paint and just using them straight from the tube. But with the synthesizer, you have to mix your own colors. And when you're mixing your own colors. Your personality comes through, you think about every decision. And it's a much more involved and artistic way of, of making sound.

• 59:13Speaker 06

  Well, we still, this is a really important point. When we started with the Human League, there were no drum machines. So. The, the only way to make rhythms, and we were lucky because. I never found this out till later, but it transpired. I'm going, how did, how did Ian Marsh manage to buy a complete System 100? Because that, even at that time, that was like nearly £5,000. That's a lot of money now. And it transpires, I only found this out like, you know, I think 10 or 15 years later. His dad had won the Pools.

• 59:55Speaker 06

  And this is what he bought with it. So I'm going, okay.

• 1:00:02Speaker 06

  So it had a, excuse me, a hardware sequencer. Which enabled us to create basic rhythms, which if anybody was sort of being boiled, that's the hardware sequencer.

• 1:00:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  But you're making your own, your own drum pads.

• 1:00:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, every individual sound had to be designed from scratch, so there are no memories. So every time we wrote a new song,

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  we had to design it from scratch, every sound, every individual drum beat was designed from scratch. And if we performed it live.

• 1:00:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's different.

• 1:00:39Speaker 06

  It's different every time.

• 1:00:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  But there's great value in that because now, because that, I'm sure at the time, you had critique from, from quote unquote real musicians saying, you're not a real musician. But that there is your personality and the choices are there in the sounds that you're making. And that's unavoidable. That's what makes Jimi Hendrix incredible or Stevie Ray Vaughan incredible as guitar players. Is it's their hands, it's the touch. And that's in synthesizers too, and the choices that you're making.

• 1:01:11Speaker 06

  Totally. And I mean, I often say to people who, who have this kind of attitude towards synthesis. I'm not a trained musician, I can't read or write music. But it didn't matter.

• 1:01:28Speaker 06

  But I often say to people, look, if you look into the history of the development of musical instruments. The uh when the piano was, the piano forte was invented. Exactly the same arguments were used.

• 1:01:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Speaker 06

  Because before that, it was harpsichords where all the notes were identical in volume. And if you go to, I mean, I was lucky enough to live in Venice for thirty years and I used to go down to the to the church of the Pietà where uh where Vivaldi wrote, for which Vivaldi wrote the Four Seasons. And you go into that church and you hear like uh them playing the authentic instruments from the period, performing the Four Seasons. And you realise that he composed that, uh the the only keyboard they had at the time was a like a clav- um you know, a harpsichord. It's it's really quiet.

• 1:02:28Speaker 06

  I mean, you can barely hear it. It's only in the most pianissimo passages that you can hear it being played. But it's there. And then the other thing I noticed about that, I mean, this is going off topic a bit, but.

• 1:02:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, fuck it. Go wherever you wanna go.

• 1:02:45Speaker 06

  Uh is

• 1:02:48Speaker 06

  the entire composition of that piece and presumably other pieces from that period. They were designed, they were designed size specifically for that church. In in the acoustic, in this this perfect acoustic in this church. It all blends into one chord.

• 1:03:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 1:03:12Speaker 06

  So when you hear contemporary recordings of things like the Four Seasons, it's all about the virtuosity of of the violinist.

• 1:03:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  But not the space.

• 1:03:22Speaker 06

  Inside that space, it was a size specific soundscape.

• 1:03:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you look at the the the history of harmony in Western music, right, so. We'll say Gregorian chant, which would have been 11th and 12th centuries.

• 1:03:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  So those monks were singing Gregorian chant in, in, in a cavern as such, in a monastic cavern. So it's just a large, round room. So it's, it was quite monophonic.

• 1:03:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  And when Notre Dame Cathedral was built, and, and this is fucking fascinating. The architecture of Notre Dame Cathedral, whatever way the, it rose up to the ceiling, the architecture was mathematically in fifths. And then when monks started to sing in Notre Dame, they naturally started to harmonise with the architecture of the building and that changed harmony in Western music.

• 1:04:13Speaker 06

  Resonant, resonant reinforcement. And another interesting point about Venice is,

• 1:04:20Speaker 06

  Monty Verdi, I can't remember what year, it's 14 something, wrote the vespers for, for San Marco, San Margio Cathedral.

• 1:04:33Speaker 06

  It was written specifically with different sections of the choir in the different knaves around the, the, the place, the different ulcos in the church, because it's built on the plan of a Greek cross. So the different points of it had different reverberant characteristics to create different effects. So this was, you know, to, this is all in the glory of God, right? Trying to make you feel like you're experiencing something that's transcendental. And so, you know, when I, when I started doing in the start of the 2000s, myself and Vince formed a company called Illustrious, based around immersive three dimensional music. It was really inspired by that, that kind of shit.

• 1:05:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Using the space. Cause one, one thing that bothers me about music today is, so we're all listening to music on Spotify and we're all listening to them on the same iPhone earbuds. So everyone is hearing music in the exact same way. And like, if I listen to hip hop from the late eighties and nineties, I can tell the difference between east coast and west coast hip hop.

• 1:05:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because like, I was looking at Teddy Riley, the producer, a pioneer of new jack swing.

• 1:05:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  When he used to make music in his apartment.

• 1:05:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  He would play it out the window and it's how that music, you're talking about tower blocks, but then you go to the West Coast and Dr. Dre and they didn't have tower blocks, they had large, wide open spaces. So the beats are completely different because of the environment that they're being played in. Interesting. And then, like in San Francisco, San Francisco hip hop started to get incredibly bass heavy. And one of the pioneers was this, was about eighty six, Too Short. And Too Short said that they wanted to listen to hip hop in their cars. And the bass had gotten so heavy that when they were listening to it at home, the bass was so heavy that the needle would skip on the record. And only when cassettes became a thing and you could

• 1:06:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  throw it in the car, could you turn that fucking bass up because now no needle is gonna jump. And then what changed from that was the sound of the hip hop as it's in a giant speaker in the back of a car. And sometimes what they used to do was, when it came to the eight oh eight in particular, they'd loosen the, their license plates. So when the eight oh eight played in the car, the license plate would buzz and create a distortion. But that's kind of lost now, you know? I mean, the Jamaican sound systems had a similar type of thing. Even in fucking Ireland, this is nuts. You're gonna love this. So they did excavations on cottages in Ireland and in the, they'd be cottages from the eighteen hundreds. Yeah.

• 1:07:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  And when they dug up the floors of these famine cottages, they would find underneath the floorboards, loads and loads of horses' skulls underneath the floorboards. And the archaeologists couldn't figure out, why are there horses' skulls, so many of them, underneath the floorboards of these cottages? And they looked into it and what they found was, so when- The first, we'll say Protestant colonizers came from, not from Scotland, from England to Ireland. Protestants in the seventeen hundreds from England, they had a fear of witches. The fear of witches isn't an Irish thing, it's it's an English folk thing. So when Protestants would move to cottages in the seventeen hundreds in Ireland,

• 1:08:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  they would place a horse's skull underneath the fireplace because they believed that a horse's skull would stop a witch. Because horses were such nervous animals, so they would put a horse's skull underneath the fireplace, or sometimes what was called a witch bottle, which was a glass bottle full of piss and nails, and the witch's spirit would get caught in this. So the Protestants were doing this, then the Protestants move out, and Catholics about fifty years later move into the same cottage. And when they play music in the house that has the horse's skull, they just notice that it sounds better. So then they start putting more horse's skulls there, they don't know why, but they put more horse's skulls there.

• 1:08:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you look at the structure of a horse's skull, it's like, you know those microphones you used to have as a kid, which which don't have a battery and you just talk, and it it naturally reverberates like a resonator. A horse's skull is a type of resonator. So that was an eighteen hundreds Irish sound system. The houses would have horse's skulls, and sometimes they'd put bottle caps in the horse's skull, and then you're dancing on the floorboards and playing music, and the skulls themselves reverberate the music better. So that's a, that's a, isn't that crazy?

• 1:09:22Speaker 06

  I love that. I've got a version of that for you.

• 1:09:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go on.

• 1:09:26Speaker 06

  So we, with the early human league, when we got our first advance, we decided to move into yet another derelict space where we had a studio. It was a derelict vets. It had a, you know, a kind of five meter by five meter studio, and we had all our new studio equipment, blah, blah, blah, and a mixing desk. But next to it was, the place we used as a vocal booth was like a small kitchen. It'd been left derelict for for about ten years. And when we went in, there were, I think, about thirty or forty milk bottles.

• 1:10:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:10:06Speaker 06

  In the kitchen. So anyway, we, we were recording the first week that we were recording Hem seventeen, we recorded, the first thing we recorded was Wish to the Lineman, the cover version for the B, first B F M. And we put Glenn into the room, put the microphone in the room, and we noticed that the vocal had this amazing kind of presence, um, which we'd never noticed when we put the microphone somewhere else. I'm going, what the hell is that? And we figured it out. It was the reverberance coming off the milk bottles

• 1:10:44Speaker 06

  that were emphasizing the kind of presence frequencies around about two K ish. And so we just kept the milk bottles there for the rest of the time we're there, even though it's filthy. We thought this is, we just stumbled across this

• 1:11:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's beautiful. That's

• 1:11:01Speaker 06

  Secret.

• 1:11:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's so beautiful. It's, a plugin isn't gonna do that, you see.

• 1:11:08Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:11:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  And people are gonna wa, like, when, when I was mentioning Teddy Riley there, he had a particular reverb on his tunes and no one knew what it was and people tried to recreate it. And it was just, all he could record in was a shitty shower with a bunch of tiles.

• 1:11:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know, um, we lose a lot of that stuff. And even for you guys to have the awareness and to have the ear to go, something is different here. Let's not clear, clear away the milk bottles. This is working.

• 1:11:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you keep that as a little secret?

• 1:11:44Speaker 06

  Not really. I mean, it was just, it was so horrible. I mean, it was filthy. The, the kitchen was not a pleasant place to be, but it just sounded great, you know? And then, of course, a lot of that, kind of the beauty of the kind of roughness of the recording techniques got ironed out as soon as we were commanded by the record company to go and mix it in a professional recording studio, like at the townhouse in London. And, you know, they got every piece of, you know, hi-fi kit, you know, hi-fi recording equipment, the best reverbs, the best digital reverbs, you know, Steinway pianos. And it just, the first Human League album is beautifully recorded and everything.

• 1:12:30Speaker 06

  But he sounds a bit kind of washed out because it's just not got that kind of punkiness and that grit. So we insisted to the record company that when we did the second album, Travelogue, that we wanted to record it. We'll, we'll mix it in London, but we're not going to re-record it in London like we did with the first album. So it, so the grit remained, right?

• 1:12:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  That reminds me a bit of, you know that band, Boston, More Than The Feeling?

• 1:12:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I love that record.

• 1:13:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  I can't think of your man's name, but like Boston, it's, it's kind of one guy. Um, he was a total nerd. He was like an audio engineer. And when he recorded that first album that More Than The Feeling is on, which would have been mid seventies. He did it all himself. He was even like literally inventing equipment as he did it because that was his profession. So he went to the record company with the final piece and this was perfect. But the record company were like, no fucking way. You, you're signed now. You must get a producer. You must get this. We can't put this out because this is just nuts. You can't record something yourself.

• 1:13:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  So what he ended up doing was creating a fake producer that didn't exist. And he lied to the record company and what went out was actually him producing it, but with a person who didn't exist.

• 1:13:53Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:13:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Speaker 06

  I've got, I've got a related story. It's not quite the same, but when we, um, recorded Temptation.

• 1:14:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, banger.

• 1:14:02Speaker 06

  Our biggest hit. Um, they, the, the record company didn't want to put it out.

• 1:14:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wait.

• 1:14:08Speaker 06

  I, I, exactly. So we went, what? It's just, in our opinion, and we're, we go to nightclubs, we, you know, we're right in the middle of the real scene of the people who are going to be buying this record. I think they'll love this. And also we had this influence of northern soul in there and all that stuff. And they said, oh, well, you know, I don't know, it's just something about it. So they sent it off to an LA producer, David Kershaw Bam, who'd just had a big hit with Joe Jackson. Came back and it was fucking awful. I mean, he'd missed the point of the record completely, washed it out with loads of reverbs and, and repeats.

• 1:14:49Speaker 06

  And it was just terrible. If I'd like to hear it now, I don't, I think they may have destroyed it. So anyway, he came back and we we talked to Simon Draper, head of A and R, and said, look, you must put this record out, just trust us. And it transpires, it transpires that the reason why they didn't want to put it out is because they didn't have Carol Kenyon, the the co-lead on it, under contract.

• 1:15:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, for fuck's sake.

• 1:15:17Speaker 06

  They were worried about getting blackmailed.

• 1:15:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ah, for fuck's sake.

• 1:15:21Speaker 06

  Anyway, so they did it. The, when it came out, Temptation, I rang them up midweek before the actual first chart, uh, the the sales office. And their words, their exact words were, uh, I said, how's it going, uh, sales-wise? And they said, it is pissing out. They ca- they they're having to commandeer pressing plants all over Europe because they can't press the singles fast enough to sell for reorders.

• 1:15:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  What I adore about Temptation is you managed to do that thing that's really, really difficult to do with a piece of music where

• 1:16:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  it's not a northern soul song, it's not a soul song, but it sounds like I'm hearing in it the memory of a child who heard that as a kid.

• 1:16:14Speaker 06

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:16:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  I think the word for it is hypnagogic. It's, you've managed to recreate the feeling of of of a child hearing it through a door or something, or a distant memory. And then it's coming through in the song without it copying, or it's, you've created something new and I'm I'm hearing memories. And that's.

• 1:16:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, yeah, my my sister's had the big Motown.

• 1:16:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is that it, your sisters? Is that it? So were they into northern soul?

• 1:16:41Speaker 06

  Oh, they were into northern soul, but, you know, and mainstream Motown as well.

• 1:16:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you know the?

• 1:16:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  I heard, cause I've always been baffled by Northern Soul. I've always been baffled by the fact that, you know, why did these Northern English towns end up with the B-sides, the songs that didn't perform? And one theory I heard was certain Northern English towns were exporting coal to Detroit and to Chicago. So the ships would leave the north of England loaded with coal, end up in Detroit and Chicago. But then, when a ship comes back to England, it has to have a ballast that has to be weighed down. So they would weigh the ship down with rubbish. And some of that rubbish were unsold records. So they'd weigh it down with unsold Motown stuff.

• 1:17:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then it gets back to the north of England on the docks as rubbish there. And then people who were running cafes that they had jukeboxes in, in order to save money, it's like, well, I'm not gonna fucking spend five quid on getting an Elvis record. I'm just gonna pick up this record that I found down in the docks. And then the local kids are getting exposed to very obscure B-sides that didn't perform over in America. And that's the possible origins of Northern Soul. Cause it's nuts. It doesn't make sense, like.

• 1:18:04Speaker 06

  I don't care, you know, I don't care if that's true or not. It sounds pretty.

• 1:18:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a brilliant story.

• 1:18:08Speaker 06

  Appoffal to me. It's just a fantastic.

• 1:18:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  I want to believe it.

• 1:18:12Speaker 06

  I want to believe it as well. I think the reality is that it's like a bunch of kind of trendy DJs in the north of England were visiting New York and used to buy huge amounts of, you know, cheap, cut out stuff that were getting chucked out for cheap or free from record stores in New York or Chicago or wherever. And just bring you back, I've talked to a couple of them on the podcast I do and it's like, they're going, like, they used to take just empty suitcases across and just pick any old shit up, you know? It didn't really matter because it was so cheap. They, it was just, if it had not been heard before, but it was in the right genre, that was all that these people wanted.

• 1:18:58Speaker 06

  It was like, it was like collecting trading cards or something, you know?

• 1:19:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  And you wanna have the one that no one else has. So it's that exclusivity and scarcity.

• 1:19:07Speaker 06

  And hence you got the thing where, I used to go to Northern Soul clubs and you used to go. I was never a complete devotee. I was kind of like on the edge of it, but um used to go there. And of course, they they used to be young kids, high as a kite on amphetamines.

• 1:19:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  The Dexies.

• 1:19:27Speaker 06

  Dexies, um carrying their um seven inch record box boxes with handles on the top. And just stacking them at the edge of the dance floor, going and dancing, completely in an alternative, not dancing with anyone, just dancing. And then when when while they were resting, they'd just be trading these records, you know, swapping records.

• 1:19:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like Pokemon cards, yeah.

• 1:19:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, like Pokemon cards, yeah.

• 1:19:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, so I'd originally asked you the story of your first synth and we went on a crazy tangent that went from Italy to New York to the West Coast and back to Sheffield. So you got your first synth on on a higher purchase because you you were working as as in computers. So tell me about that.

• 1:20:14Speaker 06

  Um, all right, yeah, this this is funny as well. So um there used to be only one uh musical instrument store for professional musicians in in Sheffield. It was called Musical Sounds. Imagine the name. It was full of, you know, ex hippies, long hair, beards, bike rider jackets, you know, awful shit, you know, denim jeans. I was a look like they they they look like status quo roadies. And it and these this shop was quite big and it it was basically ninety five percent guitars.

• 1:20:51Speaker 06

  But when the when these first synthesizers came out, they they obviously thought, the owners of the shop obviously thought, there's this new thing, I suppose we'd better try it. You know, it's like it's like running a deli and going, oh, well, you know, I suppose we'd better get some sliced venison in because somebody might want it. Um, so in this big shop full of hippies and everybody playing Stay Away To Heaven, uh we walk in and there's the Cork seven hundred S. And I wish we were on video, I could show you. It's I'm stood right next to it, sat right next to it.

• 1:21:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  The actual one that you got?

• 1:21:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, wow, yeah. No, well, no, it's not the actual one because I got rid of it. This is one that Vince bought for me.

• 1:21:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:33Speaker 06

  He tracked it down and.

• 1:21:36Speaker 06

  We played it and of course at that time, the only way you could play these things was through like a guitar amp. So it sounded a bit muffly, but I thought, fuck me, I want that, I'm gonna have it. And so we bought it on high purchase. And the next thing you know, being boiled, you know.

• 1:21:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  You must have a really, I, I, I like, when it comes to creativity, the fear of failing is, is often what will stop a person creating. And you mustn't have given a shit about failure because to go, I'm gonna get a synth and I don't play piano, but I'm just gonna make something for the sake of it. There's a lot of confidence there, like what, what, what was going on? Did you, was this just a bit of crack or did you actually wanna make it?

• 1:22:21Speaker 06

  Precisely, crack.

• 1:22:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:24Speaker 06

  It was, it was all an artistic project as far as I was concerned. I didn't go to art college. Um, I knew a lot of people who did, um, and we mixed in those kind of, uh, those kind of, you know, kind of circles. We did, did things like did our own, um, fanzines and stuff like that. So it was very much a do it yourself, uh, you know, make stuff, a maker culture in Sheffield. You know, it's in the blood. Uh, so people make stuff, they don't theorize about it, they just go on with it. It's very Sheffield there. And, and so we were like that, it's just like,

• 1:23:04Speaker 06

  you know, we'll do it for our own pleasure. We're not doing it to be famous, we're not doing it to get a record contract. And actually the moment of realization for us that possibly we might be able to,

• 1:23:22Speaker 06

  there might be a future in the distant future somewhere, uh, as a professional musician, was we put together a, um,

• 1:23:31Speaker 06

  A kind of proto supergroup with members of Cabaret Voltaire. Was that the future, was it? No, no, this was a band that only existed for one gig called VDK and the Studs. And Glenn was called Voice Decay, which I thought was quite good. Yeah. And he was the singer, also playing three string bass. I was playing dual stylus stylophone at this point. There was members of the cabs playing tape treatments and Richard Kirk and Chris Watson, playing tape treatments and I think they had an EMS synth, suitcase model.

• 1:24:14Speaker 06

  And then there was a guitarist and a drummer from my friends at 2.3 Punk Band. Anyway, we played a gig at the Art College and it was like a fucking happening, right? Okay. We'd only had an hour's rehearsal. We said, what we're gonna play. None of us could really play our instruments. I know, we'll play the Doc Two theme tune. We'll just go da da da da, da da da da, da da da da, da da. Because we could all pick up a tune, right? So we did that and then we thought, we need at least one more song. So and Glenn said, why don't we do Cock in My Pocket by U-Pop?

• 1:24:55Speaker 06

  Because it's great. It's like three chords and it's like, you know, I can learn the lyrics overnight. So we did that.

• 1:25:03Speaker 06

  Anyway, so on the same bill were two punk bands, one called Slaughter and the Dogs from Manchester. And the headliners were called The Drones. And both, we did our thing. We got booed off. In fact, the manager of The Drones came on stage while we were playing and said, The Drones want to come on now. So the song turned into The Drones Want to Come on Now, which was quite good.

• 1:25:31Speaker 06

  And our drummer was wearing a boiler suit with cut student grants on the back.

• 1:25:40Speaker 06

  And he got a bucket of pigs' ears because he was a butcher. And he was throwing them into the audience. He was six foot four and he was built like a brick shit house. So nobody was going to argue with him. Well, it was basically us going, we'll show you what punk is, right?

• 1:25:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  You got booed off stage. Was there something about the energy of that?

• 1:25:58Speaker 06

  We watched the drones and slaughtering the dogs and they were worse than us.

• 1:26:05Speaker 06

  And this was, they'd both got independent record contracts.

• 1:26:10Speaker 06

  So we thought, hold on a second.

• 1:26:14Speaker 06

  We are not worse than them. We're definitely more interesting. Maybe, just maybe, we all started independently thinking. There might be something in this.

• 1:26:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  And was this before you went to fill with Georgia Marauder? And said, this is possible?

• 1:26:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is before we, this is before the future, in fact, I think.

• 1:26:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  So seventy five, seventy six?

• 1:26:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's before, because you lads were before Gary Newman was on top of the pops too, wasn't it?

• 1:26:47Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, definitely. When Gary Newman was on top of the pops, I was gutted. Because I thought, oh God, he's beaten us to the punch. Although we did, we did like Chibwe Army very much. But, you know, when they brought out.

• 1:27:04Speaker 06

  It's called outside, you know, and all that. I just thought, they've just nailed it because the synth sounds sounded great. And I just thought, oh my God, you know, we've put so much hard work into this and then we've just been overtaken on the home straight, you know.

• 1:27:22Speaker 06

  But anyway, we're getting on really well now. Me and Gary are good mates.

• 1:27:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  You were listening, I'm assuming too, to Bowie's Berlin trilogy?

• 1:27:30Speaker 06

  Oh, that was a low change in my life, but that was as as transformative as listening to Rox's first album.

• 1:27:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  The thing that you were doing then, right, was weird and radical and strange. And now it's so, it changed music so much, it's nearly impossible to see it as being. It's like, like, I love the Beatles, okay, but I heard the Beatles in the early 2000s. That's when I first heard the Beatles. And what used to kill me was, I wish I could hear this back then. How can I listen to Sergeant Pepper's and, and see this as being as revolutionary as it is? Cause it's changed so much after it. And synth pop is just mainstream now. But you lads were pushing it forward when it wasn't a thing, when it was, is this gonna work? I mean, how does it feel to be, to be so influential?

• 1:28:27Speaker 06

  Um, it's very flattering. I mean, it's hard to imagine, um, I mean, we got dropped from Virgin in 1986. And I'd got, I, I did, you know, well as a producer. I went on to do directly after that. I thought, well, you know, I was upset, but, um, I was lucky in as much as I was doing lots of productions. And the one that really struck a chord was, uh, Trangtrang Darby's first album, which I produced. And, uh, you know, which went on to sell like 15 million records and stuff. And, uh, so I got a kind of career going on anyway.

• 1:29:07Speaker 06

  And, um, but then I realized when it came to the nineties, what started growing was the, the massive, uh, massive surge of, uh, dance orientated pop acts.

• 1:29:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Who are you talking about now? Do you mean the Stock Ake and Waterman type stuff?

• 1:29:26Speaker 06

  No, it's post that. I mean, I'm talking about the more credible end of it, you know, from kind of Massive Attack through to.

• 1:29:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:29:34Speaker 06

  Uh, through to, you know, Chemical Brothers or.

• 1:29:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Prodigy stuff like that, yeah.

• 1:29:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, and stuff like that. And, um.

• 1:29:44Speaker 06

  And a lot of them, not massive attack, but a lot of the more purely electronic acts did actually credit early Human League and HEM 17 as being a major influence. And I thought, we are, I mean, you know, and then kind of during that period, DJing became the kind of lingua franca around the world of entertainment for young people. That kind of made our kind of legacy and reputation more credible over time. And then, of course, in the late 90s, we decided to start performing live. And now we've been performing live for nearly 30 years.

• 1:30:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  I want to finish with, you've been really solid with your politics throughout your career.

• 1:30:31Speaker 06

  And Yes, let's do some politics.

• 1:30:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, outspoken about Palestine and stuff, which is great. Where did that come from? Where did your left wing politics come from?

• 1:30:43Speaker 06

  My dad was a shop steward, trade unionist.

• 1:30:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Same as mine, yeah.

• 1:30:49Speaker 06

  I mean, basically, I've always been left wing. The majority of Sheffield has been, you know, solid left wing. It's only since the kind of reform bullshit, you know, came along, that the edifice has started to crumble. But my kids, I'm glad to say, are extremely on board. And pretty much all their friends are on board with the left wing politics and the Green Party. And I've abandoned the Labour Party now. I was an activist for years. I was actually,

• 1:31:27Speaker 06

  I used to canvass with Keir Starmer in his ward.

• 1:31:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:31:32Speaker 06

  And I saw him at Close Quarters. He is a snake. He's a place, he's a place man. He's been placed there by the dark forces of the establishment to, what's that, what's the metaphor? The parasite that gets inside insects and takes over the brain?

• 1:31:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, the cardiseps.

• 1:31:56Speaker 06

  He's that, basically. He's been placed there to destroy the Labour Party from within. And I have to say, him and Morgan McSweeney have managed it.

• 1:32:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, we're all very fucking pissed off with him. He's Irish, like, Jesus Christ. Fucking hell.

• 1:32:09Speaker 06

  Well, he's not a good advert.

• 1:32:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  No.

• 1:32:11Speaker 06

  For the Emerald Isle, I have to say. But anyway, I saw him at first hand before he ever got elected to be Prime Minister. He should never be Prime Minister. It's a disaster. I saw what he did to, I went to a big meeting after, you know, when they tried to get rid of Corbyn.

• 1:32:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, I had Jeremy on the podcast speaking about that, you know.

• 1:32:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I'm a mate with Jeremy, so, you know, he's a proper.

• 1:32:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:37Speaker 06

  Proper good man. And he, and I went to the big meeting in St Pancras Church of the constituency party. The whole meeting directly after that, everybody turned up furious with Keir Starmer because it's the first time he revealed his hand. The whole thing was jerry-rigged and gerrymandered. They basically ran the clock down so he didn't have time to answer any questions. And I thought, right, that's it. It's all over. The Labour Party's finished because if this guy is going to be the leader, we are fucked.

• 1:33:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now you're liking the Greens.

• 1:33:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, I like Zach Polanski. I mean, I'm always prepared to be disappointed by politicians, but he seems to be the real deal. Oh, can I just give a shout out for Gaza, by the way?

• 1:33:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Of course.

• 1:33:29Speaker 06

  Because I did actually visit Palestine with an organisation called In Place of War, which was a cross a cross faith mission. And I saw with my own eyes what's happening, not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank. I came back and I was, this is before all this kicked off. I was utterly shocked that it had never been reported in the West. So I actually put it out on my YouTube channel and spoke about it and I got vilified for it.

• 1:34:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, that's like, you're quite outspoken about it. Have you?

• 1:34:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like are there people not returning their calls in the industry?

• 1:34:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, and close friends that have abandoned me.

• 1:34:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:20Speaker 06

  It's very sad, but fuck them.

• 1:34:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:24Speaker 06

  You know, I know what the truth is, so.

• 1:34:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Absolutely. And at the end of the day, you got it. It's about human rights. And what I always say, if I get criticism about speaking out about Gaza, it's like the UN have called it a genocide, the international criminal courts.

• 1:34:39Speaker 06

  Amnesty International.

• 1:34:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, fuck off, you know?

• 1:34:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, we could, this is like another hour's discussion, but I mean, we are in the middle of the information wars at the moment. That's World War III.

• 1:34:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Thank you so much, Martin, for chatting to me.

• 1:34:57Speaker 06

  It's great. I've really enjoyed it and I hope to do it again at some point in the future.

• 1:35:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  So thank you very much to Martyn Ware for that chat. That was wonderful. Um, check out Martin's autobiography, which is fantastic. It's called Electronically Yours. And also Martin has a podcast called Electronically Yours, where he speaks to artists whose work he is passionate about.

• 1:35:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I'll catch you next week. I don't know what week. We'll be into April there next week. It'll be the first 10 days of April, as I always mention, are very significant within Irish weather folklore. So I'll probably mention that and see how we get on over the next week. In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, genuflect to a worm. Dog bless.

• 1:36:53Speaker 07

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• 1:40:04Speaker 08

  Subtitles by the Amara.org community