Author: electricityclub (Page 22 of 434)

“I don’t like country & western, I don’t like rock music… I don’t like rockabilly! I don’t like much really do I? But what I do like, I love passionately!!”: CHRIS LOWE

“Good taste is exclusive”: NICK RHODES

Vintage Synth Trumps with CHINA CRISIS

11 April 2025 /

Having ended 2024 opening for popular American indie band VAMPIRE WEEKEND at London’s Brixton Academy plus their usual seasonal appearances at The Cavern in Liverpool, 2025 sees CHINA CRISIS busier than ever on the live circuit.

Gary Daly and Eddie Lundon started CHINA CRISIS in 1981; signing to Inevitable Records who launched the careers of WAH! And DEAD OR ALIVE, their debut single ‘African & White’ was championed by John Peel. CHINA CRISIS were picked up by Virgin Records and on the release their first album ‘Difficult Shapes & Passive Rhythms, Some People Think It’s Fun To Entertain’ in 1982, the pair were opening for SIMPLE MINDS with the profile helping to achieve their Top20 breakthrough ‘Christian’.

The second CHINA CRISIS album ‘Working With Fire & Steel – Possible Pop Songs Volume 2’ produced by Mike Howlett spawned their biggest hit single ‘Wishful Thinking’ in 1984. But a fresh approach the following year saw their third album ‘Flaunt The Imperfection’ produced by Walter Becker of STEELY DAN fame. With the subsequent tour featuring what is often considered the classic Chinas line-up of Daly and Lundon with Gazza Johnson on bass, the late Kevin Wilkinson on drums and Brian McNeill on keyboards, this most successful of the CHINA CRISIS long players celebrates its 40th Anniversary in 2025.

With show formats ranging from synthpop quartet to full 9 piece band, today the live nucleus includes keyboard player Jack Hymers and saxophonist Eric Animan; the pair were involved in the recent reworks collection ‘China Greatness’ issued on independent label Last Night From Glasgow. It took CHINA CRISIS back into the Top10 of the UK album chart for the first time since 1985.

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK had a long entertaining chat with Gary Daly over a game of Vintage Synth Trumps about the workings of CHINA CRISIS through the years and much more…

The first card is a Roland SH-3a…

Oh gosh, I know nothing about that AT ALL! I didn’t know it existed!

It is a rare one, but I saw a synth that you used from the Roland family on your solo album ‘Gone From Here’, the RS-202 String Machine…

That belongs to my friend Chris Barlow from Manchester, he would have brought that to the session and known his way around it. It was great, we had David Berger who was the engineer and also the drummer in a band called OUTFIT, he’s Swiss-French and lives in Liverpool.

What we were trying to do was recreate the Bowie / Fripp / Eno thing. So David would be engineering and sort of messing the sound as we went along, then Chris who knew the equipment inside out and there was me trying to come up with the lines and melodies to the song. It was a lovely way of working, it was very productive because we knew what headspace we were in, so it was “let him get on with this, you get on with that and I get on with this”, it really does free you up if you work as a team with synthesizers.

You said a few years ago that one of the early influences on CHINA CRISIS was MAGAZINE and their keyboardist Dave Formula had a Roland RS-505 which superseded the RS-202…

I would have seen Dave playing it!  I would have seen them a lot… I originally saw them at the De Montford Hall, then The Empire. It was always with John McGeoch on guitar, Barry Adamson on bass, I thought they were amazing, there was something about them. I’ve just got the MAGAZINE boxed set for Christmas.

I’d listened to a lot of prog rock and my favourite ones were the keyboard-based bands like YES… although they are not considered “a keyboard band”, I consider them a keyboard band because of Rick Wakeman. I liked ELP and even HAWKWIND as they were a bit sonically synthesized. So when I moved to new wave, that’s what helped because there was the likes of MAGAZINE who were a bit rocky and a bit proggy, but it was new enough for me to go “oh, that’s not what I’ve been listening to, it’s almost punk”.

Around that time, everyone was using synths differently. There was SIMPLE MINDS’ Mick MacNeil, Vini Reilly in THE DURUTTI COLUMN along his guitars, OMD, THE HUMAN LEAGUE, HEAVEN 17, all these people I suspect had no formal training and were all self-taught, inspired by KRAFTWERK and all of that. It became that we could do it as well.

It’s interesting to look back now that all these groups were lumped in together as “synthesizer bands” but who all sounded so different, which perhaps isn’t so much the case now… so you’ve mentioned John McGeoch, Dave Formula and Barry Adamson, so did you like VISAGE?

I did, I bought the records when they came out and I was so excited about it. But I was originally put off for a little bit by the New Romantic thing, I didn’t really like seeing members of MAGAZINE in there, I wanted them to be completely MAGAZINE…

So you wanted them to do another ‘Sweetheart Contact’! *laughs*

Oh my god, absolutely!

What about Midge Ure and Steve Strange’s involvement in VISAGE?

I wasn’t too keen on Midge Ure at the time, only because he seemed a gun for hire, I knew of SLIK and RICH KIDS so I was like “What the hell?”; Midge was a bit of a “Mexican flea”, jumping from one act to another… obviously Midge is amazing and the sound of VISAGE.

D’ya know what? We actually met Steve Strange about 12 years ago, we did this gig with him at the O2 and he had to share a dressing room with us! We had a few people in the band then who were quite badly behaved with various stimulants and what not! And that poor guy Steve is trying to recover from all manner of addictions and our band are bouncing off the walls before even going on stage! *laughs*

Steve seemed really lovely, I wish I’d met him before and it would have been nice to chat, we did a tribute gig to him in Port Talbot with all these friends of his after he’d passed. He was like one of those little figures, there he was in the video to ‘Ashes To Ashes’, that was an amazing song and put Bowie totally in the ball park of new wave. But the fact that Steve was there walking on the beach with him in that weird video effect, it made you think “oh, he’s not just a Blitz Kid”!

The thing is, in the North, we had a very negative view of that whole New Romantic thing, we thought “why would you do that in front of your music?” without realising you could do anything. We weren’t brought up in families like that where you were encouraged to be as individual as possible or to express yourself as much as you want, with synthesizers or without. Ours was big working class families, Eddie was one of 10, I was one of 8! EVERYONE went to work, the fact that me and Ed ditched our jobs at 17 was AN OUTRAGE because everyone went to work, but we stayed at home and tried to come up with these songs all that time.

Another card, this one is the Roland Jupiter 6…

Oh, that I don’t know! I’ve had two Jupiter 8s, one I owned twice in that I sold it and then bought it back and sold it!

The Korg Polysix was your first polyphonic synth but was it a bit of a revelation once you upgraded to a Jupiter 8?

The Jupiter 8 is my favourite synth, I would kill to have one of those again. Mark Phythian who mixed the last couple of CHINA CRISIS albums and my solo album, he was our tea boy during ‘Working With Fire & Steel’ and then goes on to win 3 Grammys! These are in his studio room at his terrace house in Liverpool where he’s got a Jupiter 8 but his isn’t working, it’s faulty… that instrument, the big thing about it was we could sequence it with the drum machine. So we could trigger it. You could imagine, all of a sudden, I was arpeggiating all the basslines in different kind of ways, it sounded very convincing, that we knew what we were doing but really, we weren’t! *laughs*

So was the sequencing at the start of the ‘Working With Fire & Steel’ song, was that done by triggering the Jupiter?

Possibly, it sounds like it would have… I think that wasn’t me sequencing that, the producer Mike Howlett did that later, triggering it via the gate through the desk, I think he might have done it like that.

You’d mentioned Mark Phythian and his Grammys, but you’ve had a habit of working with young producers who go onto big things, like Gil Norton who did half of your first album?

He was our original engineer who would have introduced us to the 8 track at Amazon Studios in Kirkby and then to the 16 track. Working with Gil was so enlightening and fantastic. For all our inexperience,  Gil would set the desk up and he knew we’d been working with the Portastudio for a few years, so we knew about slowing tape down, speeding it up, turning it over, reversing it, what you could do with delays, how you could stereo them… so Gil would be more than happy to have us go in with the bare pickings of a tune like the 4 tracks of our Portastudio and spend the whole day coming up with stuff. That doesn’t happen like that, so he was happy to set it up and let us get on with it while he went to have a cup of tea. Then he’s come back in, see what we’d been doing and get it to tape.

With the Portastudio, because you only had 4 tracks, you had to make decisions about what to keep and what to lose and what to bounce. So when we got onto the 8 track and then the 16 track, we knew how to do that with Gil. The great thing with Gil was that he taught us; so if he said we should bounce this with that, then it freed up another 4 tracks. So that meant you had to commit to the sound you were making, because it was going to be there at the finished mix. So by the time you go to the end of your recording, there was very little that you had to do because you had been doing it as you went along.

It was funny  how Gil became so successful, working with bands like THE PIXIES and FOO FIGHTERS, I was like, that’s not the Gil I knew, the Gil I knew was very unassuming and I don’t remember him wanting an amazing career, it was like he was happy just to be in Kirkby and doing what we were doing. The clientele that came in ranged from SAD CAFÉ to Ken Dodd to ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN, that was the centre of our universe really. We only went away because we were in a band and working with other producers, but I always thought Gil would stay there and become the chief guy.

So Gil co-produced the second “Entertainment” side of ‘Difficult Shapes & Passive Rhythms’, had that been the intention to keep it 8 track, because the impression I get from reading between the lines was that the more sophisticated “Difficult” first side and particularly the sessions produced by Steve Levine weren’t that smooth?

No, it wasn’t great at all… it was great working with Steve, he’s lovely guy but we felt like he was… what we heard coming out of the speakers, we weren’t entirely happy with really. He was sort of getting a bit too involved, he was playing us too many of his ideas and committing them to tape… we were like “What are you doing? That’s not your job! This is OUR track and this is OUR job!”

He was committed to recording the rest of the album, so me and Ed walked out a bit unawares that he’d been booked to the whole album and a contract had been signed, that’s money and people’s wages and everything! And we’re just going “Oh, we’ve tried a couple of weekends with him, we don’t like him, we’ll do it ourselves! See ya!”, Virgin must have thought “WHO THE F*CK ARE THESE KIDS? WALKING ON STEVE LEVINE, WALKING OUT ON PETE WALSH?” *laughs*

What happened was, we OK’ed him to mix what we’d done with him, so three tracks, one was a version of ‘No Ordinary Lover’ which we went “no, that’s not happening”! The other two ‘Seven Sports For All’ and ‘Feel To Be Driven Away’, we thought “oh they are quite good actually, he’s done a great job there”; and I think had he done it all, it most probably would have been a very successful record actually! *laughs*

Having said that, my experience of working with Pete Walsh and the three tracks he did (he did four but one didn’t make it), I thought he was the best on that record, he could have done it all, it would have been an incredible record. Oh, you want to see the track sheets for ‘Christian’, there’s nothing on it, there’s literally NOTHING on it, and that’s him! Pete, he knew! He was so great!

They’re all great these producers, honest to god, every one of them know their job… ok Steve overstepped it a little bit but only a little bit, they all of them kept exactly what we’d done of the demos and then elaborated on them or supplemented or replaced, but they all did it in such a way where they were like “whatever these guys played to the record company, they must have liked it, we’ve got to keep that ingredient”.

Even when Walter Becker was like “Gary, you can’t play… not the kind of playing I know”, he still made sure that he got every single thing I’d done on the demo onto the tracks before we worked with anybody else. They were all like that. With Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, even though by then we had Brian McNeill on keyboards, he wouldn’t have played on my demos for ‘Arizona Sky’ or the tracks off ‘What Price Paradise’. So when we went in, I would have done mine  little bits and Brian would have recreated them. It’s a great thing that method of production, holding onto the essential thing. I suspect they didn’t do that with FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD *laughs*

The next card is a Roland SH-101…

Ah yes! I would have worked with that, I can’t quite remember on what, but we would have had one, although not for long. Gazza most probably would have had something to do with that. I didn’t like it when they started doing like faders and quality of the plastic casing felt a bit… it wasn’t as robust as the SH-09 or the Yamaha CS-10 which were solid little things that had a weightiness to them. The SH-101, that could almost be “oh, we did this on a 3D printer!” *laughs*

I remember in your second Smash Hits interview that you’d said you felt sort of obliged to keep up with the technology and were buying lots of equipment but then regretted it, did you ever feel the pressure as a band to keep up technologically?

No, because by the time Brian McNeill had taken over on keys, it was him who was in charge of whatever we needed and I just had what I had at home to do my demos on. Brian had a rack mount of DX-7s, about 9 or 10 of them, he would have used them on CHINA CRISIS for brass and this and that, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near that. Sequencers, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near them, anything that was digitally programmed, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it.

If I worked on the DX-7 which I had and the DX-7 II, say I went into the algorithm, I didn’t know what I was doing so then I would say to Gazza to teach me how to save stuff, he understood it a bit more. I was one of those guys who when I got something out of the box, I discarded the manual whereas Gazza and Brian didn’t, they would sit and get their heads around it. I was always intuitive, as in I liked to get involved and hear it and feel it, as opposed to read how to do it. I’ve never read how to do anything, I left school and I wasn’t entered for any exams at all because my thing was not to open the book.

Another card, it’s the MicroMoog… did you ever own a Moog?

No, but Brian did, he’s got the proper Minimoogs. This was when they started making them more plastic. We did have a Moog in Amazon, it was the one Gary Numan used…

Oh, the Polymoog?

Yes, it was beautiful. It was in the studio and it wasn’t ours but when we went in, we always used that, it was fantastic. It was warm and rich, I saw Gary Numan with it and I was like “YEAH! THIS IS IT!”

What have you been listening to lately?

I’ve just been listening to some old live tapes, CHINA CRISIS live in the USA, OH MY GOD! F*CKING HELL! It’s such a rubbish recording, it even has all the tech credits at the end, y’know “A Star Systems production by Ray Skidberry, mix engineer Kevin Clark…”, but it sounds like dogsh*t! It hasn’t been mixed at all! But it’s always interesting hearing a little bit of them *laughs*

Something much better I’ve also been listening to is this ‘Shanghai’ 12 inch single by  Albert Au released on EMI Hong Kong, the B-side of this is ‘Black Man Ray’ in Cantonese; it’s lovely y’know, in the middle he uses steel drums… we got it at the time, it’s so fun. Everywhere I go, if I come across a record shop, I always go in it… the other day at a gaff that had a café near where we were playing, I got the ‘Black Man Ray’ 12” for a fiver… ok, I HAVE obviously got it but you can never have too many copies of ‘Black Man Ray’ *laughs*

Next card is the Oberheim OB-Xa, was that a synth you worked with?

That’s the ‘Flaunt The Imperfection’ era, I really don’t know how we ended up with it. It might have been something to do with SIMPLE MINDS and Mick MacNeil. I remember for the life of us that we couldn’t get to grips with it, not like we did with the Poly 6, the Jupiter 8, the SH09 and the Yamaha CS10, they were magic really, I completely got engrossed with them.

The Oberheim’s sounds were incredibly rich but it wasn’t completely user friendly, it didn’t have that arpeggio thing which the Jupiter8 had, which was gold for me… I wasn’t a musician as such so even up to ‘Arizona Sky’ and stuff, I was still using drum machine to trigger the arpeggiator and then use the echo unit to get that wondering motoring kind of sequencer effects.

The Oberheim would have been the melody line on ‘Bigger The Punch I’m Feeling’, Walker Becker would get me and Eddie to all the parts we’d done on the demos with all the sounds we’d used, then that would be it and Nick Magnus would be involved to bring in chords and getting sounds quickly. We weren’t like that at all, our approach was a lot more organic and painstaking. And then… it fell out the back of a van outside The Ritz in Manchester!! *roars of laughter*

That was in 1989, ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE to get the f*cking insurance on it!!! We were touring ‘Diary Of A Hollow Horse’, things were tight and management had sort of hinted “do you really need that? We don’t need it, could it fall out of the lorry!”… Hahahahaha! I WASN’T personally involved in that deviation but what a mental thing to do! Smash a synth to get the money! It shows you where we were at, mentally with each other, with the record company, with management, everything was just going *******!!!

But that’s the kind of band we were! You’ve got to remember me and Eddie were from Kirkby, we’d grown up in big families and all our friends, nobody had anything and you wouldn’t be completely light fingered but you’d by hook or by crook, you’d make stuff happen, do you know what I mean? Amazon Studios, me and Eddie would bunk in through the window in the night with our Portastudio and mic to record the piano! Out of necessity, you would!

You recently got back into the album charts with ‘China Greatness’, what was it like revisiting the back catalogue to select inclusions, particular the “lost” jewel ‘It’s Never Too Late’?

Once we saw people doing that orchestrations thing like OMD at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, people were coming up to us and saying “your music could be amazing like that” but we were like “yeah, it would but it’s never gonna happen!”. So we were of a mind and what happened was a guy Steve Hammonds who was in charge of all the CHINA CRISIS deluxe editions, I said to him “if I wanted to get hold of our masters, could you get them for us to work on?” and he got back to me and said “yes, tell us what do you want”.

So me and Eddie chose 7 songs each, we wanted ones we really liked and we had to include some of the singles. It took 3 days to send the files because they were so big and hi-res. I went through these with Dave Berger who worked on my solo album and you’ve got to remember I’ve not heard these since we recorded them and it WAS a moment. Then we gave Jack carte blanche to do whatever he wanted. We tried to use the strings from our 40th Anniversary concert because we’d recorded them but had to replace them because they were out of tune which always happens when it’s a live thing. So Eric transcribed the new brass parts that Jack had done. ‘China Greatness’ is literally all Jack’s and Mark Phythian’s work. We might have made a couple of suggestions but not much at all.

So had ‘It’s Never Too Late’ always been preying on your mind, that it was shelved for ‘Working With Fire & Steel’ and then when it finally came out, it was tucked away on the bonus 12” of ‘Black Man Ray’ so wasn’t really heard by many people, even fans?

That was just bad management really… I wrote that song on guitar and possibly one of the first songs I ever wrote on guitar because I couldn’t play guitar. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, I thought it was a little bit wet but it’s quite lovely really, I think it is a bit special in a pop way, it’s got that thing of what CHINA CRISIS had. We had all these lovely melodies and lines that would introduce the song like on ‘Wishful Thinking’, every one of our songs (almost) has an introductory line that catches your attention doesn’t it? Same with ‘It’s Never Too Late’.

Yes, it was us who made the decision to drop it, but someone should have took us to one side and said “That song is very much like the song we think will be the big single off the album, we should really keep hold of that because you are going to want a follow-up”! But we f*cking followed it up with ‘Hanna Hanna’ that was NOTHING like ‘Wishful Thinking’ and people were listening going “we don’t even know what group that is, you don’t sound like that other song, different singer, different everything!”

I remember ‘It’s Never Too Late’ was never even on the sleeve tracklisting or the label of the ‘Black Man Ray’ bonus 12”, there was just this sticker. I remember when I heard it, I thought it was a great song but to be fair, I can understand why it wasn’t included on the ‘Working With Fire & Steel’ album…

 Yeah, because some of the songs already on the album like ‘Here Come A Raincloud’ and ‘The Soul Awakening’ were more what we wanted to be…  ‘The Soul Awakening’ to me was like ‘Julie With…’ from ‘Before & After Science’ by Brian Eno, we were trying to be bit like that. ‘Here Come A Raincloud’ was beautiful, it was a reaction what was going on, the strikes, the miners, a lot of unemployment and stuff that wasn’t great. We were going home to that from our lovely lives in the Roosevelt Hotel in LA with Iggy Pop in the swimming pool,  then all of a sudden in Kirkby, all the factories are closing down, the police are battling with miners, oh my god! So ‘Here Come A Raincloud’ when you hear it on the John Peel session, I’d written it on bass guitar…

That ties in nicely with my next question as there’s ‘The Complete Sessions 1982-1983’ which features CHINA CRISIS recordings for the John Peel show and released by Last Night From Glasgow… this isn’t doing down the album version but I actually feel the John Peel session recording of ‘Here Come A Raincloud’ is better, the overdriven drum machine just gives it that extra eerie tension which fits the lyrics…

Yeah…

…the John Peel version of ‘This Occupation’ is particularly interesting because it’s full-on synthpop! What’s the drum machine you are using?

That’s a Roland TR808 triggering the bass synth, it was us trying to get a bit A CERTAIN RATIO and ABC, it was all getting a bit funky and we were quite keen on doing that because we loved Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ and that kind of thing… the fact were doing it all with synths was what we were involved with, that was just a natural thing to happen. But lots of people were making a racket then like CABARET VOLTAIRE and all these people, I can remember listening to all that thinking they were great with the solidity of what they were doing, it was forceful and solid with great sounds, but they lacked songs and melody.

We were so involved with melody and when we were out on the road, we would have mixtapes that would have everyone on it, songs like ‘Wichita Lineman’ to THE BEE GEES to Dusty Springfield, Dionne Warwick, all these great songs… we didn’t have any snobbery in our band, there’s so much music out there.

You sent me a photo of your Boss Doctor Rhythm drum machine, was that a bit of a revelation when you got that?

Yeah, ‘African & White’, we wrote that around that drum machine. We didn’t know how to programme it so we were just hitting stuff and pressing play. One morning we pressed play and it did this “tsk-tsk-tsk, tsk-tsk” and straight away I picked up the bass and did that “boom-boom-boom-boom, boom”, its f*cking Motown, all the music we’d grown up with! Then Eddie did that echoing guitar sound, although he never replicates that live and I don’t sing it the octave down with the high octave… I often think, we should be trying to do it to see if people will respond. It’s difficult because music mutates over time, especially live.

Talking of live, 2025 sees the 40th Anniversary of ‘Flaunt The Imperfection’…

What, Walter Becker’s debut solo album? *laughs*

What are you favourite memories of making this record?

I must admit, the actual making of it, I had such a lovely time and my roles had changed so much. What you have to remember is we’d done two albums, we’d had chart success, Top10, we’d lived and toured, stuff like that… so we were really not wanting to see each other again. Eddie and Gazza were working together, I was working on my own. That only lasted a few weeks but it would have felt like a long time. But we’d written ‘Black Man Ray’, ‘Bigger The Punch I’m Feeling’ and stuff, y’know…

Once Walter was involved, I was neither here nor there… I was resigned to the fact that I was in “a band” now, it’s not me and Eddie anymore with Gazza, Kevin and Walter being this incredible rhythm section, making what me and Ed had done really sound amazing. But at the same time, I was still “this isn’t how I’d have it” but I was happy to go along with it. That’s why it’s not my favourite CHINA CRISIS album, it’s like my third favourite but I’m not even sure it’s that! *laughs*

But it was such a happy time for us because Kevin rejoined the band, Walter so lovely and really enjoyed being with us… I think we reminded him of STEELY DAN when they had Skunk Baxter and all these people in, having success with ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ so he slotted right in.

I had such a great time singing for him, he thought my lyrics were genius and he’s actually in print saying that, he thought ‘Black Man Ray’ was like THE BEATLES… I was just stoned all the time and he was very happy for me to be like that. We’d sing in the evening and it was very meticulous, lots of tracking and lots of takes but I was just having a laugh. So when he was telling me to do things and repeatedly do it, I was like yeah, not a problem. And when they were comping and all that, I could have a smoke and then come back in *laughs*

It really was a great time for us, so I have very fond memories of the album even though I don’t think it’s the best album. I can see WHY people think it’s the best album because it’s got that sonic thing to it, a cohesion that makes it. But I’m of a mind that if you really want to hear CHINA CRISIS and US playing and US performing, then that’s ‘Working With Fire & Steel’. That’s because that is me and Ed, Gazza and Kev have just joined us, there’s no session keyboard players, everything you hear is me with a bit of Ed. But I do think ‘Flaunt The Imperfection’ is like Walter’s solo album but we were the writers for it and he used our band but with his ideas *laughs*

With the Flaunt The Imperfection’ tour, it was like you were finally enjoying playing live for first time because I’d seen you at the London Lyceum in 1983 and you weren’t very good then…

Yeah, there was no stage presence and no stage craft in 1983, because we weren’t particularly interested in that. I certainly didn’t want to stand up in front of people, there was a lot of pressure on us to become a band. Everyone else was enjoying being in a band but I wanted be at home with my Portastudio and Jupiter 8, I was generally the only one who ever turned up for albums with a finished demo. I might get Eddie or Gazza round to do a bit but mostly everyone was happy to just elevate the band thing.

My favourite CHINA CRISIS album is ‘Working With Fire & Steel’, I do like ‘Flaunt The Imperfection’ but it is music of its time which was more Americanised, more FM radio-friendly with more live playing… but the album of yours which despite its highlights that I’ve never got on with as a whole is ‘What Price Paradise’…

What happened with ‘What Price Paradise’ was we got a residential rehearsal place and then made the songs. Y’know, I can’t stand the sound of that album… quintessentially the drums were the wrong sound and they were used for all of it. I was like, you can’t fix it if you’ve used it for all of it! Again, we got into a position where it’s moving at such a pace, it wasn’t me and Eddie anymore and more so once we’d got to ‘What Price Paradise’.

Of course, Brian McNeill had joined as the keyboard player and happy to be involved. So even though I would arrive with ‘Arizona Sky’, it would be completely redone sonic wise. I was resigned to it being “this is the band” and not being about my little demo as great as that sounds… I feel the band went a bit “blokey” on ‘What Price Paradise’…

I’d never thought of it like that before but it makes sense and I’ll try and use an analogy… it’s like those two NEW ORDER albums without Gillian Gilbert, they’re a bit rock and not that good yet when she’s back on ‘Music Complete’, some of the old magic reappears. You know yourself that it’s often the chemistry of the people you have that makes a band successful rather than musicianship or contribution… I seem to remember from reading the deluxe reissue booklet notes you weren’t that keen on the live drummer you had for the ‘Working With Fire & Steel’ tour?

Oh Traxie O’Toole, he went on to do quite well actually and ended up playing for Steve Hackett who was in GENESIS. But for us, he was f*cking shocking man! He just couldn’t help himself, he paid no attention to what Kevin had done or was on the tracks, but he couldn’t restrain himself, he’d be doing proper jazz fills and stuff inappropriately, in the wrong place in the wrong song *laughs*

He sounds like the live drummer that DEPECHE MODE have now! *laughs*

Yeah!

OK, next card is an Octave Cat… you had one and it was supposed to be an ARP Odyssey copy but with knobs instead of sliders, was it ever any good?

 Oh yeah! It felt a bit cheapskate, it just wasn’t made very well. We used it on a memorable occasion when we were playing Kirklands in Liverpool 1981 for the release of ‘African & White. We did three Mondays as a kind of residency, first Monday hardly anyone come, second Monday f*cking mobbed, third Monday hardly anyone come. It was me, Ed and Dave Reilly on drums while we had backing tracks on the Portastudio. At one of the gigs I remember, I played a topline on the Cat and managed to detune the oscillator! I couldn’t f*cking get it back so I had to turn the volume off and mimed to look like I was doing something with the actual music everyone was hearing! *laughs*

So not a great synth?

No, I think we gave it away! It didn’t make an appearance on any record! You sort of fall in love with what you are working with which is why guitarists have their favourite guitars. Keyboards have their particular sound.

So there’s a 10th anniversary reissue of ‘Autumn In The Neighbourhood’ as a vinyl LP coming as well which will see it more widely available?

The only reason it’s happening is to get it in the shops so that people around the world can get it. I won’t be keen to make it available for too long, I do like having ownership of that record and I want to retain that really. A lot of those songs originally were me starting my solo album. I convinced Ed that we should send them round to a few people to get a reaction and they all thought it was CHINA CRISIS. I knew nobody was interested in me doing a solo record so that was it. I want the album to get the credit it deserves, the fans absolutely loved it but otherwise, it was like nobody knows about it. Why hasn’t it been reviewed, why hasn’t Mark Phythian won a Grammy for the mix, y’know?

A bouncy little ditty called ‘Everyone You Know’ came from those sessions and was given away free as part of the original Pledge Music crowdfunding campaign, it wasn’t on the CD but was an added bonus on the first vinyl issue of the album, will it remain?

It wasn’t on the original CD because I felt the approach we took on ‘Everyone You Know’ was a bit too poptastic and I was like “Ooooh! Who’s that?” *laughs*

It’s a great song, a Gary and Eddie one because that’s his riff, although I played it. He had that in another tune but he did nothing with it so I started playing it and then the next thing you know, I wrote a song and showed it to Ed, he absolutely loved it.

I made a bit of a mistake, when we put it on the first vinyl, it didn’t seem to fit into the running order. The end of ‘Autumn’ with ‘Wonderful New World’ just seemed correct as its about loss but you’ve got to look forward, it’s beautiful… and then it goes “BANG!” into ‘Everyone You Know’, it’s not f*cking right! So we might think of about maybe changing that running order for this edition. It will be a great one live though, it would suit the CHINA CRISIS synthpop quartet format but it’s a bit of a one that…

2025 also sees you opening for SIMPLE MINDS somewhere in summertime, that’s going to be a nice reunion as they were important early champions of CHINA CRISIS weren’t they? You supported them on the ‘New Gold Dream’ tour…

I’d never seen anything like it. We’d toured with ORANGE JUICE and played little gigs with ALTERED IMAGES and stuff, but when we were with SIMPLE MINDS, they were the hottest f*cking band in the country! Every gig was mobbed, it all had an atmosphere and then the whole place would go mental when they opened with ‘New Gold Dream’! I can imagine for me and Ed, we’re stood there, a couple of nice boys with their nice songs looking at the whole theatre jumping, it was SO electric, it was like F*CKING HELL MAN!

They were so kind to us, they took us on their bus, we stayed in the same hotels and in the US, they were the same… they didn’t have to, they could have insisted we buy onto the tour and we do our own transport. It did help that Bruce Findlay, their manager was about to start managing CHINA CRISIS so he would have told them that we were going to be part of the Schoolhouse Management set-up. But they were like us, working class lads who taught themselves everything they know and we were learning just being with them, experiencing what it was like. They were so self-assured, they’d been doing it for a good while so they were ready and they were great.

It’s a shame about what happened to that line-up of SIMPLE MINDS, oh my god! Mick MacNeil, I’ve never heard a keyboard player like him, the fact that it was all on the Jupiter8 was like WOW! And Derek Forbes, those basslines and Charlie was just like, he was so handsome and his sound was so great, y’know. I originally saw them supporting MAGAZINE at The Empire and then on their own at Eric’s. So me and Ed would have seen them and bought ‘Life In A Day’ and ‘Real To Real Cacophony’. I remember the first song I wrote, I tried to do something like the ‘Life In A Day’ title song.

In 2025, it’s like CHINA CRISIS are playing live everywhere, in the US, Canada, Scandinavia, Germany, Holland, plus dates opening for SIMPLE MINDS and SQUEEZE, how does it feel to be almost busier than back in the day?

I think we’re good at it now, which I don’t think we ever were back then… I mean, if we could have the classic band of Kevin, Gazza and Brain now, we’d be unreal.

We started CHINA CRISIS so we didn’t have to get a job, the jobs they wanted us to have were on an industrial estate or in a factory if you know what I mean. I feel like after 40 years that we’ve made it our job so we are very workman-like, we’re professional about it and we make sure we turn up at the right time, we make sure everybody goes home relatively happy, that kind of thing.

I do love getting to play for people who may never have seen us before. Last year we played Singapore for like only the second time and there’s families there who can’t believe they’ve finally got to see you, their kids listen to your music in the car and on holidays, they’ve come with mum and dad; that’s a really lovely thing, that’s the positive in that we can still do it and still enjoy it. Even when I’m annoyed, I have a laugh, I let the audience know that I’m having to work tonight but guess what? Let’s have a laugh, you have to enjoy your work.

When you’re a creative person, I feel you do need a bit of space, don’t be that person who’s an entertainer for a bit, be another person who plans to go into a studio and plans to get the songs recorded. With it being self-produced and stuff, the amount of energy and effort, you don’t appreciate it when you’re younger but I can tell you ‘Autumn In The Neighbourhood’ was a gargantuan f*cking task of just getting everybody available and everybody paid, all the bills met, keeping the quality control up etc, the level of teamwork you have to inspire in people… you haven’t really got the time and energy for that if you’re out the door every other few days entertaining people. The pro plus is you get to experience it all with everybody and everybody loves it so much including yourselves. We’re a great band at the moment, everybody’s happy and focussed and mostly sober. The only downside is I do feel it encroaches on the creativity being so busy.

It’s funny isn’t it when you’ve achieved so much, even though I don’t think it was a lot… if it was a school report, I would say it was “fair to middling, could have tried harder”. People respond to the hits so much and you’re lucky to have them, but actually it’s a lot of the other songs that I properly enjoy, I really do. Over the last 20 years, me and Ed have not stopped, we’re now in a position where you don’t ever have to stop… if you don’t want to, you can literally carry on. People have connected with us in such a way, they’re quite happy for you to still to keep coming and be around. We were so privileged to be indulged by our families when we were 17-18. And then we were 18-19 when we got signed.

Finally, is there a synth favourite of all time? 

That would be the Jupiter 8, that IS ‘Working With Fire & Steel’… the Korg Polysix is ‘Difficult Shapes…’, the DX-7 is ‘Flaunt..’ and Roland D50 was ‘What Price Paradise’, I lose track after that! *laughs*

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to Gary Daly

‘China Greatness’ and ‘The Complete Sessions 1982-1983’ are released by Last Night From Glasgow and available as a vinyl LP or CD from https://shop.lastnightfromglasgow.com/collections/china-crisis along with the pre-order for the 10th Anniversary reissue of ‘Autumn In The Neighbourhood’

CHINA CRISIS will be performing ‘Flaunt The Imperfection’ for its 40th Anniversary throughout 2025 – for information on these and other 2025 live dates in the UK and internationally, please go to https://linktr.ee/chinacrisismusic

https://www.facebook.com/chinacrisisofficial

https://www.instagram.com/chinacrisismusic/

https://www.threads.net/@chinacrisismusic

Vintage Synth Trumps is a card game by GForce that features 52 classic synthesizers, available from https://www.juno.co.uk/products/gforce-software-vintage-synth-trumps-2-playing/637937-01/

Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
11th April 2025

UNIFY SEPARATE Heavy Meta EP

9 April 2025 /

With a backstory in Scottish indie and Swedish synth, UNIFY SEPARATE have always been a bit different and continue their development following two acclaimed albums ‘First Contact’ and ‘Music Since Tomorrow’.

To cut a long story short, Andrew Montgomery was the front man of GENEVA who were Nude Records label mates to SUEDE while Leo Josefsson is something of a Stockholm synth veteran as a member of LOWE and STATEMACHINE. A 2023 tour opening for German darkwave act DIARY OF DREAMS exposed UNIFY SEPARATE to a new audience and opened up more aesthetic possibilities.

A lot has happened in the world these past few years and the premise of the new ‘Heavy Meta’ EP is to build on the duo’s majestic sense of drama with a deeper and harder sound. This has been achieved with the rousing opener ‘Dark Heaven’ where the bass drum has got some almighty thump. Also thrown in are the ringing metallics of ‘Music For The Masses’ era DEPECHE MODE, the percolating synthbass of ULTRAVOX ‘The Thin Wall’ and even THE SMASHING PUMPKINS when they went briefly electropop on ‘Cyr’.

In a deep swoop of musical styles, the superb ‘DETOX’ initially enters stuttering techno territory, but things are turned on their head with Montgomery’s raw choirboy delivery lifting the tune over a switch to straight fours while the surprise of Josefsson’s distorted vocal cameo leads to a classic Scandi middle eight.

Stark expletive-laden commentary on the phenomenon of psychological manipulation, ‘Gaslighted’ captures its toll on a frustrated Montgomery over a backdrop of throbbing bass, sparkling arpeggios and textural six string with the final declaration that “your problem IS YOU!”

The influence of German IDM trio MODERAT takes hold on the building anguished dance stomper ‘Excuses Excuses’ where “when you try to make everyone happy, someone will get hurt”. Making a fine EP closer, ‘Return To Exile’ drops down to something much starker to recall the emotive ballad ‘Glassy Eyes’ by KITE whose soaring vocal melodies have much in in common with UNIFY SEPARATE.

In an increasingly dystopian world where the two biggest nuclear nations are being led by unhinged egomaniacs, UNIFY SEPARATE have provided their “sanity clause” as they confront an existential crisis that is more than about midlife in the ‘Heavy Meta’ EP, the crowd at this year’s prestigious Amphi Festival in Cologne are going to love it when they perform there in this summer.

‘Heavy Meta’ is released on 11th April 2025 as a digital EP, available direct from https://unifyseparate.bandcamp.com/music

https://www.unifyseparate.com/

https://www.facebook.com/usmusicspace

http://www.instagram.com/unify_separate

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0h9f9Dz3aVBP41aEF3GDON

Text by Chi Ming Lai
9th April 2025

HEAVEN 17: The Sound With Vision Interview

31 March 2025 /

HEAVEN 17 are making a documentary and their audience will feature as its stars.

Celebrating 45 years of HEAVEN 17, this upcoming film will be directed by the BAFTA-nominated James Strong and go behind-the-scenes with Glenn Gregory and Martyn Ware on their ‘Sound With Vision’ tour while also interviewing fans from around the world.

Formed after the split of THE HUMAN LEAGUE Mk1 in 1980, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh recruited their friend Glenn Gregory to front a new pop project HEAVEN 17 named after a fictional band mentioned in the dystopian novel and film ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Their 1981 debut long player ‘Penthouse & Pavement’ gained much acclaim. After a few near Top40 misses with the singles ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’, ‘Play To Win’ and ‘Let Me Go’, HEAVEN 17 finally had two Top5 hits ‘Temptation’ and ‘Come Live With Me’ in 1983.

Despite this success and with the parent album ‘The Luxury Gap’ certified platinum, HEAVEN 17 remained a studio only concern. The following albums ‘How Men Are’, ‘Pleasure One’ and ‘Teddy Bear, Duke & Psycho’ were unable to replicate their sales impact. However after a hiatus of several years, Messrs Gregory, Marsh and Ware released a comeback album ‘Bigger Than America’ and sprang an even bigger surprise by opening for ERASURE on their ‘Cowboy’ UK arena tour in 1997.

Beginning a new phase, there  was even a live album ‘How Live Is’ but following the album ‘Before/After’ in 2005, Marsh bid farewell leaving  Gregory and Ware to develop HEAVEN 17 as a performing entity over the past 25 years with engaging shows that have brought the remaining duo closer to their loyal followers.

In his eighth interview with ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK, Martyn Ware chatted about the concept of ‘Sound With Vision’ and the ever changing notion of fandom.

What is the idea behind this ‘Sound With Vision’ tour?

Essentially, a friend of ours James Strong runs a production company called Strong Pictures and is also a successful writer/director/producer who has won Emmys, he did ‘Mr Bates vs. The Post Office’, and ‘Broadchurch’, he worked with Glenn who did the soundtracks for his series ‘Liar’ and ‘Vigil’ with Berenice Scott.

He saw us perform at Shepherd’s Bush Empire and was struck by the unusual connection between the stage and the audience and between Glenn, myself and the band. It’s a warm experience, you’ve been, you’ve seen it, we make an effort to communicate and empathise that a lot of this audience are coming out as a relief from the existential nightmare that we’re all in, to understand that people want you to break that fourth wall. It gives them the sense that every gig they come to is a unique experience.

So James has seen us play loads but he was struck by how it had grown over time and how we have got loads of diehard fans… it is really nice to come onto stage and see lots of people who you are familiar with because it gives you a sense of confidence, it’s like having a home crowd at a football game.

In the background, James and Glenn had been mulling over the idea of doing some kind of documentary film about HEAVEN 17. For ages we thought it was a good idea but to be honest, does the world need another documentary backstage with the band and the great and good, lots of concert footage and a few jeopardy moments?

Then Glenn rang me with an idea… why don’t we make the hook of the next tour about a documentary celebrating that connection with the audience and our fans.  When we were doing VIP meet ‘n’ greets before the shows on the last tour, there were all these people who came up to us going “I’ve been to see you 30 times” and  we didn’t know who these people were, we didn’t recognise them from the audience or anything. We knew there were an obsessive hardcore following us like a football team, but this was new revelation for us and much more widespread than we thought.

We started thinking about our friends in this 80s and electronic scene, how there is a kind of zeitgeist at the moment for people of a certain age and their offspring who have no interest as to “when” the music was made. We started moving into a situation where 10-20% of the audience are new. So we thought we’d celebrate this by making a documentary that is as much about the fans as it is about the band, a little bit like Louis Theroux… so whatever, even if you are looking at it from the outside wondering what the hell is going on, it’s still going to be entertaining.

So how will your fans take part in the documentary, will there be a filming booth at each show which people can queue up for to volunteer their comments?

 We haven’t figured that out yet, but that’s one way of looking at it. I think it will be quite nice to see them in their homes…

SPARKS did that for an MTV featurette…

Anyone who has an interest will get on it, we want as many people from as many different countries. Like there’s an 80s nostalgia thing going on in America… incidentally next year, we are doing an 80s cruise with Gary Numan in the Caribbean.

Photo by Richard Price

I was wondering if this fan relationship is a relatively recent phenomenon because of social media, but also because HEAVEN 17 didn’t tour back in the day, so you were sort of detached from your fanbase until the 1997 ERASURE tour which even then, it is likely people were almost treating you as a new act?

That’s absolutely quite perceptive of you may I say Chi; I think it’s true and we weren’t confident that it wasn’t just a bunch of weirdos out there… one fan Sumo who has been to 250 shows now, when I first met him, he brought this scrapbook and rather than keeping it as a memento, he gave it to me… this was like a different level of fandom that I wasn’t particular familiar with. I mean, I’ve never seen an act more than a dozen times at most.

But it was something we always wanted to happen, we always liked to build some kind of artistic conceit, a cinematic universe if you will, where everything is connected artistically and there is a deeper meaning to most of the stuff we do. The thought that there were people out there then (it’s all weird kind of time travel stuff this!), the fact that we only started performing live in 1997, so this is 28 years ago! This was 17 years after we formed ironically, so we have had an unusual career in that respect. So people didn’t get a chance to thank us I suppose.

One thing I noticed researching old CDs and all that, HEAVEN 17 were one of the first acts to have an email contact address in the booklet, so how did people respond to you?

We’ve always tried to allow contact, we’re in a fortunate position where we are not Taylor Swift and don’t get half a million emails! There’s a definite intention from both Glenn and myself , and Ian when he was in the band, that we wanted to be an open as possible with the fans and have as much contact. In fact, it was even more important when we didn’t perform live so we had the HEAVEN 17 Plan fan club which Lindsay, Glenn’s wife used to run.

We’ve tried to encourage as much contact as possible with the fans. But it was a bit of a dichotomy because we liked the idea of people on videos, you’re almost like an actor and a fantasy thing, then one day Robert De Niro says “you can email me if you want”… of course, I’m exaggerating it to make a point but you know what I mean?

An interesting flip of this contact, and this is something Neil Arthur of BLANCMANGE said to me, is that you are more accessible so people start approaching you about weird stuff, telling you their record is scratched and asking what you’re going to do about it… how have you dealt with the more intrusive side of being more open to your fanbase on social media?

 I have to say it’s only a tiny amount, maybe 5% or less. But if we have a tour or a record coming, the most common annoying things are messages like “what time are you coming onstage?”, I sometimes respond and sometimes I don’t.

Then there’s people having issues with Ticketmaster or the venues themselves. But because I’m a point of contact and Glenn is in the background not having to deal with it, if something goes wrong and there’s a mistake in the publicity, Muggins here has to deal with it, they don’t contact the venue or the promoter… so I’ve had to back off on all that stuff. But it’s a rare thing.

Another thing about this approachability on social media, it means the artist has to regularly do postings but now there’s this trend for reels… CHINA CRISIS used to be quite mousey and quiet on socials but have taken to these filmed promo reels quite well but poor TEARS FOR FEARS look like they’re in one of those hostage videos! How do you feel about doing this kind of shortform in-person publicity?

We have PR for this ‘Sound With Vision’ tour which the promoter is paying for, they’re doing it properly and have got us on TV. This is no small thing getting on BBC1 at peak time but I have to say their research is sh*t because it’s always “WHAT AN AMAZING COMEBACK” when we we’ve been doing it for more than 27 years! But the great thing is they go “Oooh! ‘Temptation’”, “Ooooh ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’, you should put that out again”, like that’s an original thought, I don’t get one of those emails every day! *laughs*

We do make an effort, it’s building and building ad building until hopefully this tour will sell out, it takes a long time this to do that stuff.  But I do think it’s good to be out of the public eye for a while so that you don’t bore people to death, so my view is to keep it until when you need it.

I know what you mean about researchers who are getting younger, did not grow up with this music and not getting things right… but do you make allowances for this?

No, I’m very unforgiving, I think it’s easier to research than ever before, I think it’s laziness… it’s not the game it used to be, I was talking to someone the other day that the notion of journalism is going to sh*t basically!

Yes I agree, but I suppose a young BBC intern isn’t going to know who HEAVEN 17 are, but what annoys me much more are these so-called electronic music media outlets who see it as their specialism but don’t have a clue or do the research…

Well, they can’t all be you Chi but I’m harsher on the BBC and the major radio stations who literally can’t be arsed!

HEAVEN 17 have done the VIP package thing and everyone does that now, but the notion of it has been flipped by Ticketmaster who have been selling tickets as “VIP” which get nothing more than a lanyard, a poster and a bar nearer the seat… I know of people who bought these packages who really did think they were going to meet Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift… so this rise in concert elitism through VIP, what do you think?

Well, we thought about the VIP thing for a while before we started doing it but we regard it as a valuable tool to help support the costs of the tour. Fundamentally, there’s me and Glenn, then everybody else on the stage, all the staff, the drivers, front of house engineer and lighting etc all have to be paid. We only get paid at the end on the bottom line after. Fortunately the last few tours have done really well. But when we did the tours with the full band in 2010-2013, we looked at the figures after the tours, me and Glenn made zero money, we barely broke even. We were mugs for quite a while and I know we are not stupid business wise, but things are expensive and things have got more expensive now.

We were approached to tour America a long time ago and asked our manager to do an illustration of what it would earn us and it was like peanuts, but everyone else would have got paid. So that went back and forth every 3-4 years, the offer went up a little bit more each time and eventually we did it. When we got there, it ended up being more expensive than what our management had projected and we ended up losing money. Then we were asked again so we started asking ABC, THOMPSON TWINS, OMD and almost to a man, they said “Oh, we’re not doing it for the money, we’re doing it because we want to do it!” but me and Glenn aren’t really in that situation, we’re not poverty stricken but…

The whole live thing is getting more polarised all the time, we did the support for CULTURE CLUB with Tony Hadley on a UK arena tour last year, we had a great time, the O2 was sold out at £100 a ticket or more. Very nicely, the promoters SJM gave us a nice bonus at the end which wasn’t part of the contract, so they must have made an absolute killing! But in the mid-range, there’s not much killing going on and at the bottom, it’s almost like pay-to-play a lot of the time.

I don’t think fans really understand the economics and this is one thing that really p*sses me off about social media, we announce a big tour and put an effort into it and you just get a load of people going “why aren’t you coming to Stourbridge?” or “why aren’t you going to Skegness?”. We go where the promoters tell us to go, the tours are designed by them, not us! So the routines, the places available of a particular size that are hard to find now these days and the areas of the country that are covered are determined by the promoters, NOT by the band!

Of course, if you are a huge band, you can go “I don’t want to play in Tucson, I don’t want to play in Springfield”, you have more power to determine that but as a mid-range act, it’s difficult… it’s a point some people don’t get.

What do you hope the ‘Sound With Vision’ tour and documentary will achieve for you ultimately?

Firstly I think it’s an interesting idea and I can’t recollect anybody else doing it, the closest was probably the SPARKS one which was a little bit of an inspiration although that was still super focussed on the band. I really liked the KING CRIMSON one, that made me laugh a lot. The premise that the band is this all powerful entity that must be worshipped is the exact opposite of how we feel about the world. If people come to the gigs, there will be a good chance people will get filmed if they want to get filmed and there will be specific people that we talk to who we will visit in their world.

It will hopefully be a feature length documentary that will be shown on Sky Arts or Netflix or whatever, who knows? It’s really about fandom, that’s the larger issue. Boomers I suppose, are the fans of that kind of 80s music largely all over the world and a lot of people think it’s the happiest time they’ve ever had, not just because they were young but because it was an extraordinary decade in music. So that audience has grown older, a lot of them have got a bit more affluent and they want to relive their youth, which is perfectly reasonable and I suppose we are in a certain respect. But they don’t want it to be patronising and feel like a nostalgia trip, they want to feel like they are living in the present when they experience that stuff.

So this is a new phenomenon, it’s not just us. It’s all the 80s acts that we love who I’m sure have similar fanbases. The rise of this kind of VIP thing is important element to it as well because when I was growing up and seeing loads of gigs, I was an obsessive music fan and the thought back then that you could actually meet these demi-gods who were on stage would have been amazing!

Were there any artists you would have paid VIP for had it been available?

Oh yeah! Bowie and Roxy, but you were never going to get to people of that ilk! There are people who take that properly seriously, Thomas Dolby, Martin Fry and Howard Jones for example and it helps support the band, it’s money going into the general tour pot. The mid-range of tours are not making a lot of money but it does provide employment and gives enjoyment for a lot of people. It’s only when you get to the £100 ticket level and beyond that serious money is made.

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its sincerest thanks to Martyn Ware

HEAVEN 17 ‘Sound With Vision’ tour includes: London O2 Shepherds Bush Empire (6th November), Bexhill De La Warr Pavilion (7th November), Norwich Waterfront (8th November), Oxford O2 Academy 1 (10th November), Leeds O2 Academy (12th November), Glasgow Barrowland (13th November), Sheffield Octagon (14th November), Liverpool O2 Academy 1 (15th November), Newcastle Boiler Shop (17th November), Birmingham O2 Institute 1 (19th November), Bristol O2 Academy 1 (20th November), Bournemouth O2 Academy (21st November), Manchester O2 Ritz (22nd November)

Tickets available via https://www.heaven17.com/

https://www.facebook.com/heaven17official/

https://www.instagram.com/heaven17official/

Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
31st March 2025

JOHN FOXX: The Piano Interview

26 March 2025 /

No5 in ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s ALBUMS OF 2023, John Foxx’s ‘The Arcades Project’ was a beautiful instrumental suite based around the piano.

In the aural lineage of ‘Transluscence’, ‘Drift Music’ and ‘Nighthawks’, ‘The Arcades Project’ can be seen as a John Foxx’s tribute to his late collaborator Harold Budd. It was inspired by Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Arcades Project’ which gathered new ideas emerging from Paris in the 19th and early 20th century,

However, the new John Foxx solo piano album ‘Wherever You Are’ is a much more reflective personal work about the “mostly good, generous, bright people” he has met through his life. It was recorded at home in the weeks following a rare live performance in October 2023 as part of BBC’s Radio 3 ’Night Tracks’ event presented by Hannah Peel in London.

An album that says “simply, thanks. Wherever you are”, John Foxx spoke to ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK about the inspirations behind his wonderful ivory adventures…

Moody tracks with piano have been part of your music since ULTRAVOX! as with ‘My Sex’ and ‘Just For A Moment’, so which works with a piano aesthetic first attracted your ears?

Well, hearing a friend play a piece by Satie on the old lecture theatre piano, at art school. That was the turning point. I immediately felt I’d encountered a true, pure beauty. This was in the mid 1960s and Satie wasn’t at all well-known or well regarded then. Before that, I’d been impressed by a late-night TV series in the early 1960’s – ‘Play Bach’, by the Jacques Loussier Trio. They had a regular spot on late night TV.

From that and a few other pieces, I felt there must be something further, and I needed to hear it – a purer, less complicated sort of solo piano. It was so tantalising. A few more hints of this came from unexpected places – on the popular music front, there was ‘Cast Your Fate to the Wind’ by Vince Guaraldi, for instance. But hearing Satie made everything else fall away. That was really it.

Around the same time, my aunt gave me her old upright piano, which happened to be a reasonably good one. I was around sixteen years old. That’s when I began trying to make pieces of my own. A year or so later, at Manchester art school, my girlfriend had a copy of Satie pieces by Aldo Ciccolini – the album with the Picasso drawing of Satie on the cover. So I was able to hear more of his work. I began to wonder what form something like that might take in a modern context. A few years later, Brian Eno originated the idea of ambient music, which created a suitable context then along came ‘The Pearl’ – such a unique combination of talents – Harold Budd, quiet piano visionary, Dan Lanois, the Capability Brown of sonic landscaping, and Brian Eno, avant conceptualist. That record was really revolutionary for me – it brought Satie into the next century.

Who are your favourite piano composers?

Erik Satie, Harold Budd, some sections of Keith Jarrett’s solo concerts. After that, a few individual pieces – some Chopin Nocturnes and Debussy pieces – ‘Clair de Lune’, etc, a few slower solo pieces such as Beethoven’s ‘Fur Elise’. I also some of Arvo Part’s compositions – ‘Spiegel Im Spiegel’, ‘Fur Alina’ etc.

After ‘Metamatic’, piano made a notable return on ‘The Garden’ with ‘Europe After The Rain’ and ‘Walk Away’ but then kind of disappeared?

I had a grand piano in The Garden studio, so that was very convenient. After that, electronics took over again – there was also a period when I didn’t have an acoustic piano at home. That’s really the key – you need to be able to play whenever the mood strikes.

You did three albums with the late Harold Budd, the first pair ‘Translucence / Drift Music’ in 2003, so why have your own solo piano works taken longer to be forthcoming?

I was so completely focussed on making the work with Harold as good as possible that it took me some time to realise I hadn’t actually done a piano record of my own.

When working with Harold Budd, how would you describe your role? Did you contribute piano parts or did you leave that aspect entirely to him?

Well, I was default producer, organised the studio in a friend’s house, brought the piano over and set up recording equipment. When Harold arrived, we discussed his music – where we might take it, etc. I also recorded everything. I played around half of the piano pieces on those albums – sometimes Harold and I would swap piano chords then I’d improvise, other times I’d invent a piano piece from scratch. Other tracks were entirely his composition and playing.

Harold had the first and last word. The basic approach originated from him, a philosophy of simplicity, directness, finding the most beautiful notes, giving them space to develop, making use of the reverb and harmonic fields. We’d record as soon as it felt right. It all went very quickly and easily. The entire album was a delight to work on. Harold never played anything more than twice and mostly just once. He was so unassuming – simply came in and played, then we’d listen back and get on with the next piece.

Afterwards, I compiled what I felt were the most representative tracks and sent them off to him. He was fine with it all, so we ended up with two records, ‘Translucence’ – the piano, and ‘Drift Music’ – the more radically treated pieces. The idea of ‘Drift Music’ was complete abstraction – take reverb, echo and all sonic treatments as far as we possibly could.

By the way – It’s interesting how this has been taken even further now, by some characters on YouTube slowing those tracks down radically. I like that, and I’m absolutely sure Harold would, too. But all that’s just the technical side. The more central thing is the reason we do all this in the first place.

For my part, (and I feel this may also have some relevance to the way Harold works), it’s an attempt to capture a few small but valuable things from our passing lives. A glimpse of someone, a fleeting thought when you’re sitting on a bus looking out of the window at the city passing by, a moment of stillness and wonder, that sensation of imagining we recognise someone who vanishes in a crowd, the brief, long light at the end of a day. Nothing grand, significant or dramatic – just the opposite – and not resolved in any way, yet so recognisable when evoked musically. These small things are easily lost or overlooked, but they form a sort of undercurrent in our lives. They’re part of its fabric.

As I grow older, I begin to realise the so-called important times can often leave us unmoved, while a few odd, unexpected things will get through the defences. Some moments last forever. Music is such a great trigger, it’s capable of evoking something of the way these small things can affect us. Also, recording itself is such a strange and mysterious activity. You take a moment that would otherwise be lost forever and enable it to live forever. Isn’t that downright weird? Not to say magical?

And this can give a recorded moment vast significance. Something like using a microscope to see all the complexity inside a drop of water, or realising that a face in Cinema close-up is twenty feet high and transmitting fleeting expressions as subtle as changing weather. These recorded moments can be closely examined and re-experienced an infinite number of times, and through being captured in this way, they’ve become something quite new.

‘The Arcades Project’ was billed as your first solo piano album, how would you describe your approach? How was it different from your instrumental ambient works like the ‘Cathedral Oceans’ trilogy or ‘London Overgrown’?

‘Arcades’ is a lot simpler and absolutely direct. One instrument. All improvised. Occasionally, a discreet synth part. ‘London Overgrown’ and ‘Cathedral Oceans’ involved improvising over long delays then building multiple tracks. ‘Cathedral Oceans’ was intended as a technological continuity of ancient chant, through singing into huge, notional electronic spaces and harmonising with returning, reflected voices. Both had an entirely different premise from ‘Arcades’.

You have said that “Around dawn is the best time to play piano”, were most of the pieces improvised or was there some degree of notation beforehand, even if it was just to sketch a basic structure?

Very little was ever written down – the only time I ever saw Harold use any sort of notation was on ‘Spoken Roses’ – he referred to some brief notes he’d made, then he did two takes, one after the other, both good, before choosing one as the master. It was a revelation to hear that piece unfolding live. Truly gorgeous. Everything else sprang from a basic chord or two, then a note or two over that, then you were off – take it any way you feel. A few very basic, but vital rules – maximum beauty, minimal notes. Brevity, simplicity, joy.

In what ways does your new piano album ‘Wherever You Are’ differ in concept from ‘The Arcades Project’, it appears more personal?

Yes, I think it is.

I see Harold Budd and Conny Plank among the many photos on the front cover artwork of ‘Wherever You Are’?

Well, they’re both significant. Satie’s there too, on the inside cover. It all goes back to him.

How important is the visual presentation of these piano works to the music it contains?

I guess the imagery acts as a sort of entry point. Indicates the kind of emotional tone you can expect to encounter.

What types of piano have you been using?

A Yamaha grand, 6ft 2inches. Great fun getting it through the front door a few years ago, when I swapped it for the previous one, which was a few inches shorter. Occasionally I get access to other pianos. A Steinway or a Kawaii, and I can sometimes use a combination of sustain from an acoustic piano and play over that using Pianoteq.

In terms of recording, piano is known not to be easy to lay down and there was a time particularly when there was a lot of Roland CP70 electric baby grand piano direct input and then treated afterwards, what set-up did you use to record your pieces at home?

Simple as possible. A couple of decent mics placed inside the lid, an old Alesis mixer and an antique reverb unit. I’d begun to use some newer software reverbs, but the overall sound of the antique thing is richer, more interesting. Occasionally I’ve just used one mic, and that can be more solid an image, letting the reverbs do the stereo. You always have to move the mics around very patiently until it all feels cohesive. That’s the most important bit, really. You simply have to listen.

Photo by Brian Griffin

Although ‘The Arcades Project’ and ‘Wherever You Are’ are piano-based works, there are a lot of effects and occasional synthesizer, had you considered producing more something much barer and more minimal?

By the way, there’s no synth on ‘Wherever You Are’. It’s all piano and reverbs. I think the way I record is already fairly simple and minimal – single takes of an improvised piano piece, made mostly by reacting to the piano’s open string harmonics. You see, my basic premise is – there’s an aspect of the piano that has been completely overlooked, yet it’s what makes the piano completely unique. This is the harmonic field produced by the sympathetic vibration of all its strings.

By simply holding down the sustain pedal, you allow all the strings to make this wonderful, moving, harmonic field. No other instrument can produce an effect like that – perhaps the nearest might be a sitar – but that doesn’t have anywhere near the number of strings. A piano has over two hundred, so they produces an incredibly rich and complex sound, and I think this is the unique signature of the modern piano.

Yet no-one seems to have noticed it. No music I know of has ever been composed or recorded with this in mind – it’s simply never been investigated properly – so that’s what I’ve been doing with these recordings. The reverbs I use are designed to extend those harmonics, that combination creates a changing bed of sound for me to improvise over.

The origins of this go way back to 1977, recording the first minute and a half or so of the intro to ‘A Distant Smile’, with ULTRAVOX! I got Billy to play a few piano chords, having had the idea of getting him to hold down the sustain pedal in order to allow all the piano strings to vibrate sympathetically, then recording these until they died away, some time later. Then I asked Steve Lillywhite to take off the initial impact of the notes being hit, by fading in just the sustained sound afterwards.

In this way, we quickly built up several layers that make a beautiful bed of moving, sympathetic harmonics from the two hundred or so strings. You can hear these under the track’s beginning. I was tremendously excited by the beauty and potential of the sound this produced. It was obvious there was so much more to explore here, but also frustrating, because I couldn’t do that – we were in the middle of making a rock album to a strict deadline. So I had to stow the idea away for later use.

Have you any favourite pieces from ‘Wherever You Are’?

The first track, ‘When She Walked In With The Dawn’, because that’s when I got the sound just right, which triggered me to write and record all the other tracks.

With the piano, have you found your forte, as it were, at this stage of your creativity or is there something else you would like to try, say with artificial intelligence for example?

I do feel I’ve got a unique territory I can explore now – and that’s always a great feeling – your own territory, another adventure opens up. I like the simplicity and the entirely hands-on nature of it.

You set up the sound, than simply sit down and record – and that’s it, no overdubs or other complications, an entirely human response to what a piano and an old reverb unit gives you. It acts as a great release from all the other stuff I’m involved in. It’s the opposite of AI – and even of synths or multitrack recording. Much as I love all that, it’s just wonderful to take a step sideways.

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to John Foxx

Additional thanks to Steve Malins at Random Management

‘Wherever You Are’ is released on 28th March 2025 by Metamatic Records as a vinyl LP and CD, available from https://johnfoxx.tmstor.es/

Digital download available from https://johnfoxx.bandcamp.com/

http://www.metamatic.com/

https://www.facebook.com/johnfoxxmetamatic

Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
26th March 2025

KIM WILDE Live at Cambridge Corn Exchange

23 March 2025 /

To be still releasing great pop records 44 years after your debut is a fine achievement and that is exactly what Kim Wilde has done with her new album ‘Closer’.

Interestingly, the songstress herself has stated that ‘Closer’ is a companion record to her 1988 long player ‘Close’ which saw a revival in fortunes thanks to the hits ‘You Came’ and ‘Four Letter Word’. Coupled with a high profile tour opening for Michael Jackson, that occasion followed a few comparatively leaner years after the huge success of her self-titled debut and the sophomore offering ‘Select’.

Although Kim Wilde has never gone away, apart from a hiatus into horticulture which led to an award for best courtyard garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2005, while she has always maintained a loyal fanbase and continues to perform shows across the world, there is something in the air surrounding her latest work. Produced and co-written as usual by her brother Ricky Wilde with additional songwriting contributions from his daughter and her niece Scarlett, they stood stage right as part of a tight septet. Alongside was Steve Power with a Korg Kronos and Roland keytar while to the left were other long-standing Wilde-men Paul Cooper (bass), Neil Jones (guitar) and Jonathan Atkinson (drums).

With a funky opener in ‘Hey Mister Heartache’, the initially tentative audience were all on their feet for ‘You Came’, a classic pop tune in anyone’s book. The introductory showcase of the ‘Close’ album also featured ‘Never Trust a Stranger’ but slotting in perfectly were songs from ‘Closer’. The powerful ‘Trail of Destruction’ highlighted environmental and existential concerns while providing reinforcements was the synth rock statement of ‘Midnight Train’. What was particularly impressive was how Kim Wilde’s backing band left no rest for the wicked, energetically seguing straight into the next track without batting an eyelid.

Taking a breather, the audience sat back down for the soulful ballads section that included ‘Love’s a No’ and ‘Four Letter Word’. While the feisty Kim and Scarlett duet ‘Hourglass Human’ didn’t get the crowded immediately back on their feet, the evergreen ‘Cambodia’ did! This was followed a barrage of the early hits ‘Water on Glass’, ‘View From A Bridge’ and ‘Chequered Love’ which gave plenty of opportunities for singalongs and “Molly Ringwald in ‘The Breakfast Club’ style dancing”. Again, the band co-ordination in the segues made sure there was no sleep ‘til Indigo2!

A rocked-up ‘Love Is Love’ added some 21st Century momentum to proceedings and if there’s a song that could win Eurovision again for the UK, it is this one. Meanwhile, ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’ brought Motown and plenty of “woah-oh-oh-oh-oahs ” into the room.

For the encore, it was time to party again like it was 1981 and while the new wave power pop of ‘Scorpio’ is from the new album, it could have easily been mistaken to be a lost song from ‘Kim Wilde’. And as the band gathered in front the drum riser preparing to do battle for the final time of the evening and sharing a similar electronic pulse, there was only her fabulous signature tune ‘Kids in America’ left to do!

In fine voice and exuding her charming down-to-earth presence, joyous is the only word that could be used to describe the warm family atmosphere resonant throughout this enjoyable evening. If you’ve never been to Kim Wilde show before, now might be a good time to change that 😉

With thanks to Sacha Taylor-Cox at Hush PR

‘Closer’ is released by Cherry Red Records as a CD, black vinyl LP, limited edition white vinyl LP and download

‘Love Blonde: The Rak Years 1981-1983’ is also available on Cherry Red Records as a 4CD boxed set

Kim Wilde plays Lets Rock Exeter 2025 on Saturday 28th June and Tring Chilfest 2025 on Saturday 5th July

For more information on European tour dates and how to purchase tickets, visit https://www.kimwilde.com/tour-dates

https://www.facebook.com/officialkimwilde

https://www.instagram.com/kimwildeofficial/

Text and Photos by Chi Ming Lai
23rd March 2025

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