Described as “someone pulling signal from static”, Berlin-based experimental electronic punk artist Cosey Mueller releases her second album ‘Embodiment Of Denial’ via Bretford Records.
Championed by Iggy Pop via his show on BBC Radio 6 Music and with a feisty attitude reminiscent of Peaches, Cosey Mueller has procured an increasingly driving danceability to her work while ensuring there are potential “Ohrwürmer” within the hooks. But behind this backdrop, she raises questions about love, power, equality, honesty and the media.
Even though the various topics might seem uncomfortable and dark at first, everything is lubricated by a playful sense of humour that serves to ease any tensions. For example, the album’s trailer single ‘Der Politiker’ parodies sloganeering and reclaims the declarative statement for the forces of good to gets you dancing while it pulls back the curtain. “It’s the denial to embody anything forced upon us by the outside and by others” she says.
Cosey Mueller spoke to ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK about the making of ‘Embodiment Of Denial’ and how it balances seriousness and wit, body and mind, and form and content across its eight relentless tracks.
How did your journey from the punkier bands DAS DAS and GLAAS develop into going solo and using more dominant electronic sounds?
Well the truth is that my solo project Cosey Mueller was myself experimenting with a synthesizer and drum machine in 2020. It was deep in the pandemic times, I had no job, a lot of time to kill and some ideas. I didn’t know how to record, I just recorded everything on cassette. And I never thought it would become a live act, it was just experimentation with sound and words. When I realised that it’s quite unique and has a life of its own, I decided to continue and it has been a road full of “learning by doing” ever since. The fact that the sound is more dominated by electronics is simply because I used a drum machine and synth, it was not a conscious decision.
Photo by Johannes Bünemann
What sort of music did you grow up enjoying?
All kinds of music. I was born in Greece and actually grew up with traditional Cretan music and 90s pop which was on TV and radio. The big change came when I was about 11 years old and we started having internet at home (which was a new thing). I started discovering artists like David Bowie and Lou Reed but also discovered the history of contemporary music in general, which fascinated me. Then of course the German electronic stuff, KRAFTWERK, DAF.… but also a lot of punk and rock ‘n’ roll. Anything that sounded good and had some honesty, energy, good lyrics and artistic value in it.
Do you have any preferred software tools or synths for composing?
I prefer analogue machines and use Ableton for recording. My favourite synth for composing is the clone version of Roland SH-101, I wish I had the original.
How do you look back on the making of your first solo album ‘Interior Escapes’?
Well it was a good and bad time. As I mentioned before it was during lockdown, a super weird time, there was not much to do. I really love the album because I feel like it captured some kind of magic: the naiveté of not really knowing what I was doing is something I will never be able to repeat (it was the first album I produced). And I put a lot of ideas in it which had accumulated in the years before when I was studying art in UdK, doing a lot of word collages and stuff like that. The art and music and personal feelings all came together. There was no intention to go anywhere with it, it’s a very pure album.
Are you naturally ‘Antisozial’?
Yes but I can’t be anymore since I play so many shows and work together with people. I guess I have ended up being more ‘sozial’ now, which is kind of ironic.
There is a lot going on around the world and closer to home which is disturbing yet accepted so before we know it, it could be “TOO LATE”; so how did ‘Embodiment Of Denial’ develop as a track and become the focal point for this new politically charged album?
Well we don’t live in easy optimistic times obviously. The track ‘Embodiment Of Denial’ is more personal though. I never followed the path of having a normal life with a job, house, car, kids etc. In the past 5 years, I have given myself completely to making music, which offers no security and is kind of wild sometimes. It can get hard to communicate with normal people and to function in everyday life. I feel that I am the “Embodiment of denial of reason” sometimes, although I am a very reasonable person actually.
Two years ago I wrote the song ‘Falsches Ding’ which means “The wrong thing” and it has a similar theme. For some reason I feel like there is something wrong in unapologetically doing your thing. But this feeling is not mine, I did not come up with it, it was planted in me by society, parents, teachers etc. It’s important to resist embodying something you are not or something that is forced upon you. And I think it’s never too late to do that. So at the end there is optimism and hope. That’s what it’s about. And obviously it’s too late to stop me now.
‘Nimm Mich’ translates as “Take Me” and retains your post-punk spirit, how do you balance your guitars and synthesizers in your solo work?
I don’t know. I try to combine sounds I love. I really love punk, rock ‘n’ roll and the guitar playing of Link Wray or Chuck Berry for example, which has nothing to do with electronic music. But I also love synthesizers and drum machines, so I just try to bring those elements together.
The hypnotic ‘Contraddict’ gets down to the alternative disco, how did you become more interested in doing something more danceable?
This track is obviously inspired by the song ‘Los Niños Del Parque’ by LIAISONS DANGEREUSES, but it became something completely different. There was a lot of experimentation, I had no idea how to sing it so I just improvised the lyrics following some written notes and kept the first take, doubling the vocals later. I have an artist’s education so sometimes I just do stuff and if I like it I keep it, if not I throw it away, there’s often no intention, no plan, no expected outcome. I had no idea this might become more danceable.
‘Obey’ is a superb lo-fi electro number that is quite different from the other tracks on the album with its charming primitive beatbox and Divine intervention, how did this one come together?
Actually ‘Obey’ was a jam session at first. The beat comes from a Yamaha keyboard, the song is not quantized and all the instruments are played by hand. So I guess that’s why it sounds different. The lyrics came later, inspired by the atmosphere of the song, it has something serious and urgent in my opinion. I could even imagine this one as a soundtrack.
You talk about the “New discomfort” on ‘Neue Ungemütlichkeit’ which has a bit of a klassik kosmische vibe, what was this song influenced by musically?
I would say this song was influenced by my own music. I tried to do something similar to ‘Parallel Gekreuzt’. The difference is that I worked on the structure of the song much more, put some breaks and changes in it whereas ‘Parallel Gekreuzt’ happened through experimentation and is more organic.
‘Der Politiker’ is more obvious and quite NDW, is there any particular politician you are taking aim at?
No, it’s not directed to one person in particular. I felt that people have a general dissatisfaction with politics in 2024/25. And I noticed that people’s love turns to hate very fast and very easy when it comes to politics.
The angry ‘Verlogen’ refers to untruths, how do you find navigating the internet and social media?
It’s hard and has changed our perception of reality. Because there is no truth or untruth and this creates disorientation. The real becomes the unreal and the unreal becomes real. Like in a dream. I have started to not believe in anything anymore. It’ s a bit sad.
So who is the ‘Media Maniac’?
It is the men in positions of power abusing it, using the media to manipulate individuals. But also you and me because we receive whatever is thrown at us by the media and it can influence our thoughts and feelings.
What is next for you?
Touring, playing concerts in places I have never been to, as much as I can. And continuing to write, think and create music. Thank you!
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its sincerest thanks to Cosey Mueller
Additional thanks to Dina Paschalidou Brudi at Eclectica
Comprising of Andrea P Latorre and Sergi Algiz, Spanish duo SEMIOTICS DEPARTMENT OF HETERONYMS have realised their promise and made their best album yet in ‘Rider’.
Commonly known by the abbreviation SDH, the pair started releasing music as members of post-punk band WIND ATLAS who by their final album ‘An Edible Body’ sounded like there was an electronic act waiting to escape, as the 2025 interim single ‘Threshold’ would later prove.
SDH released their self-titled debut in 2018 which has since been reissued by their current label Artoffact Records. 2023’s ‘Fake Is Real’ with potent songs like ‘Balance’ and ‘Talk In Dreams’ went out search of nightclubs where the dress code specified mischievous EBM and electronic psychedelia.
The new album showcases further growth and with their dark but accessible songs possessing a club-friendly gothique rich in anxious emotional tension, this “crash body music” is intended to be heard after the impact with “Bodies exposed to external forces, subjected to repeated impacts, and evaluated after the damage”. Everything sounds as if each track were a test of endurance.
On behalf of SDH, Andrea P Latorre spoke to ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK about their creative journey to date…
You mentioned on social media that with ‘Rider’, you “composed most of this album during a turbulent time when, frankly, it’s hard to hold onto hope”, were these personal matters or more existential?
Both. Obviously we are in a turbulent and terrifying time where neoliberalism is clearly failing the most vulnerable individuals on this planet in a resounding way. Faced with this situation, it is complicated to keep acting as if nothing is happening, or to keep releasing music and playing as if nothing were wrong — but somehow it is the only thing we have left. The little good that remains. While we keep resisting and fighting, making music is still something we can do for free and in a free way. We are also going through a complicated time as individuals; everything becomes harder and more uphill as the years go by, especially for a DIY band — but if we are still here, I suppose there is some inner force, or a force of some kind, that demands it of us.
How do you look back on your previous full-length album ‘Fake Is Real’, do you see ‘Rider’ as a natural progression? What in the creative approach was different with the new record?
Yes, I think everything we do is a natural progression of what came before. Not in a deliberate way — we don’t compose like that — but from a much more intuitive place. It has always happened to us that we are unconsciously searching for more precise ways of expressing what we sense. I can’t put it any other way. For me, the approach has been much freer. Sometimes, when you are a small, under-resourced band from Spain, the effort you have to make is so titanic that it is easy to lose your way and forget why you do things. It’s understandable — it comes from exhaustion — but with ‘Rider’, I feel that we have pushed ourselves to do what we truly wanted to do, which is no easy thing. Even so, I feel we can still be even freer.
Did Spain’s own dark 20th Century history have any influence in your thinking for ‘Rider’?
I mean… I think that, whether you like it or not, we are all influenced by the place where we grew up, for better and for worse. Not only by the Spanish Civil War and the authoritarian dictatorship — which lasted a long time, ended very few years ago, and left us in a state of complete isolation from the rest of the world — but also by our history: as a colonizing empire, by an exacerbated Catholic Christianity. All of that exists, and it is absurd to think that it doesn’t form part of who you are, or that you don’t react to it — in our case, by rejecting it. I think all of that defines you, yes.
Photo by Fissura
Do you think being based in Barcelona offers you a unique perspective in that many of world flashpoints are all around you?
Yes. I am from Valencia, but I moved to Barcelona very young, at 19, and without a doubt, my perspective on the world — and, I would like to say, my openness and my musical knowledge — is thanks to having grown up as a young adult in a bigger city that was more open to the world. Valencia is fantastic in many ways (I have now come back to live here), but I wouldn’t trade for anything having spent 12 years in a city that gave me the best in terms of music, literature, (free) education, culture… also the worst, socially and economically, but I am kind of grateful for that too.
So was the standalone single ‘Threshold’ in 2025 an important transitional recording in the lead up to making ‘Rider’?
Actually, no. Threshold was a song we made for our former band WIND ATLAS which was more post-industrial à la Chris & Cosey, COIL, PTV… but it did make sense to us that the single should be something unusual for SDH, not so dancefloor-oriented.
How did the car crash metaphors in the songs on ‘Rider’ come into being?
It all came together in a fairly organic way. We are both obsessed with the movie ‘Crash’ (the good one), and on top of that, I personally had a very serious motorcycle accident that left me unable to walk for a year — so pain and collisions are things I think about often and that are part of my life. Also, for some reason, when we proposed the concept of the album to the people at Fissura who did the cover design, they themselves suggested that the cover should feature a dummy — one of those mannequins used in crash tests. Everything came together in a very organic way.
Was the intensity of the composing and recording affecting your personal well-being, like having insomnia or dreams in English, that kind of thing?
Yes. In previous records there is more novelization or intellectualization — ‘Rider’ is a very visceral album that draws heavily from my own experiences. Obviously, what is real? I think fake is real and vice versa — that is, every construct is fictional and every fiction is true insofar as it produces realities — but yes, the writing of this album uncorked something that plunged me into some very dark months that I have found quite hard to come out of.
With the ‘Rider’ song and the album in general, you show off a diverse vocal range, not just from an octave point of view but timbre, tone and style… what is the process in deciding how to vocalise a song?
There is no process. That is, there is one, but it’s not deliberate. I naturally pay attention to those things without meaning to — I have always been drawn to singing, but even to the way people speak, to phonetics. So I suppose my brain and my voice are unconsciously searching. I have always been afraid of learning too much about vocal techniques, because for me singing is something very natural and fluid and irrational — but I suppose it’s an absurd fear, and that if I knew what I was doing, I would probably do it better, haha.
Who is the target in ‘You’ve Lost The Keys’ or is it multiple?
That I’ll keep to myself. But let’s just say it’s directed at a specific person with whom I have been through some difficult times.
The current trend in dark electronic music production, particularly in “darkwave” appears to be this horrible overblown artificial distortion, but SDH manage to have a punchy energetic emotive sound that doesn’t hurt the ears… what tools, hardware, software and synths are you using to achieve this?
Honestly we hardly listen to darkwave music. Maybe years ago, when we started the band, we were a bit more interested in that style, but nowadays we’re pretty disconnected from the scene. That probably makes us unaware of what bands in this style sound like today. Although I suppose we could be defined as dark electronic music, our influences come from other places, especially on this album. Before ‘Rider’, Sergi sold the little hardware he had and spent all the money on records, and for this album he hasn’t used anything but his computer and various software synthesizers and samples.
‘Dawn Fawn’ shows you still like to be dance friendly, is maintaining this important, especially for live performances?
Yes, and because I genuinely like lightness. It’s difficult because what comes naturally to me is intense, but we always try to laugh at ourselves and take some of the weight out of the idea of making music or writing songs. Even though it is tremendously difficult, I think the best songs in history are, even when dark, light — and they laugh at themselves.
Who is it that you “despise” in ‘Keep My Hands’?
I’ll also keep that to myself, but not everything one writes has an exact correspondence with reality. It’s more complex than that, at least for me.
‘Cruel’ displays a rockier approach and even has guitars! What was this influenced by?
Including guitars on the album was something Sergi had in mind for a long time, and we really would have liked to have included more, but some ideas were left on the back burner… I don’t know what was the direct influence but I remember Sergi told me he listened to the first GARBAGE record for the first time in years when he decided to include guitars… maybe it has something to do. Also, ‘Ultra’ era DEPECHE MODE maybe?
How did the collaboration with LUST FOR YOUTH come about, did you work together or remotely on ‘Night Visit’?
We have known Hannes of LUST FOR YOUTH for a long time, from when we were putting on shows in Barcelona completely DIY. He is one of those friendships that form in moments that are truly genuine and that, somehow, has held on over the years. We have crossed paths here and there but have always kept in touch. It’s one of the things we take away from those years of learning. Basically we made the song and Sergi was certain that it needed Hannes’ voice. We sent him the song, he liked it, wrote lyrics, recorded his part, and then we passed it on to Jack M!R!M! (another good friend we have found along the way over these years of touring) and he produced and mixed it. For me, it gives ‘Night Visit’ a very important dimension. It has been a dream come true.
Photo by Fissura
‘Behind This Dream’ is a glorious club-friendly closer to the album, how did this come together?
Haha, it’s one of my favourite songs on the album. At first I didn’t know how to approach it — the instrumental wasn’t suggesting anything to me — but one day, both of us were at Sergi’s place feeling quite frustrated, after I had finished watching ‘Northern Exposure’ (the series), it just came out of me. Exactly as it is now — the lyrics and the melody. For me it’s one of the best lyrics I have ever written, and I suppose I had been carrying it inside, pressing to get out, for a long time. It’s about disappointments, about unmet expectations, about accepting defeat.
Do you have any favourite songs from ‘Rider’?
My favourites are ‘Behind This Dream’, ‘Something Sublime’… I love ‘Defeated’, ‘Keep My Hands’ and ‘Rider’, I think? Actually I like them all, haha. Sergi has a special fondness for ‘Dawn Fawn’ and ‘Rider’.
It is a good period for dark female-fronted electronic acts, do you feel any affinity to artists like LINEA ASPERA, BOY HARSHER, PARADOX OBCUR, DINA SUMMER, DLINA VOLNY and NNHMN?
Well, yes, of course we like some of those bands! But as I told you before, the truth is we don’t listen to much darkwave — female or male fronted. Personally I listen to a lot of ambient, dark ambient, noise and more experimental electronics, and then pop along the lines of Faye Wong or COCTEAU TWINS. We have always felt very grateful to be part of this scene — the promoters and audiences we have encountered along the way have been absolutely wonderful — but also a little outside of it, both because of the music we make and listen to, and because there aren’t many bands from Spain in it, or that we have come across out there.
What is next for SDH?
We hope to play a lot. We would like to tour Latin America, do another European tour… playing the songs live is what we are most looking forward to right now.
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its special thanks to SDH
Releasing their first single ‘Electricity’ on Factory Records in 1979, OMD are one of the leading lights of the innovative Synth Britannia era with their exquisite hooks and fascinating unconventional lyrical gists that included phone boxes, planes, oil refineries and historical figures.
Often using beautiful melodies to tell of terrible things, even when love was in the air, there could be a twist; in a 1992 co-write with Karl Bartos, ‘Kissing The Machine’ imagined a romantic liaison with a sexy AI robot, a Sci-Fi situation which today is close to becoming fact!
Inspired by their love of KRAFTWERK, NEU! and LA DÜSSELDORF, the Wirral duo of Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys realised their passion for European electronic music after the purchase of a Korg M500 Micro-Preset synthesizer. With numerous hit singles and albums across the world, OMD released their most recent album ‘Bauhaus Staircase’ in 2023.
2026 sees OMD’s ‘Summer Of Hits’ tour visit a number of outdoor locations in the UK and Europe. But a special indoor date takes place on Sunday 28th June at Brighton Centre, arranged by JOY Concerts as part of its NHS My Music series. Bringing a number of major live shows to venues across Sussex while raising funds to support local NHS services, 100% of profits from ticket sales and merchandise will support NHS projects across the seven hospitals of University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust directly benefiting patient care, staff wellbeing and hospital environments across the local community.
The constant throughout the 48 year career of OMD has been Andy McCluskey; he kindly sat down on a call with ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK for a round of Vintage Synth Trumps and have an enlightening conversation about instrument technology, artificial intelligence, new music, obscure B-sides and much more…
The first Vintage Synth Trumps card is a MemoryMoog…
I actually do own a Minimoog that somebody painted white before I bought it, so it looks like some sort of kit Moog! I quite like the sound of the Moogs but you do have to leave them on for a quite a while to let the oscillators settle down and stop drifting, although maybe that’s part of the charm that they create their own harmonics, drifting out of tune with the oscillators *laughs*
That MemoryMoog… is that a digital one?
Yes, part digital… FIAT LUX had one and the producer Zeus B Held who produced FASHION, DEAD OR ALIVE and John Foxx, it’s his favourite synth… the MemoryMoog was Moog’s last polyphonic synth before they went bankrupt! *laughs*
OMD were not really a Moog band, we were definitely a Korg and Roland band, almost exclusively Korg and Roland, largely because they were cheaper than bloody Moogs!
You seem to have had two periods of acquiring hardware synths, first to equip The Motor Museum and then for the OMD reunion? Have you always been purposeful when buying synths as opposed to collecting them for the sake of it?
Yeah, I’m not really a collector for the sake of collecting, they take up so much bloody space! Funnily enough, when you talk to younger bands now who are “purists”, people like Martin Swan from VILE ELECTRODES and the MIDI-hell on stage, they are like “why haven’t you got your old synths… oh dear, what happened to them?” – they never stayed in tune, I don’t like to MIDI, you had to write down notes of every sound you’d created, otherwise you wouldn’t remember how get the sound back! And quite frankly, they took up too much space and they were too heavy to carry around!
I’m sitting in my programming room here, it’s all “in the box” in my G5 and I’m happy about that. Actually, I don’t have that many bass guitars either! But I’ve just had my original Fender Jazz bass put back in its original colours! That is my 1974 bass that I played on ‘Enola Gay’, ‘Souvenir’ and ‘Joan Of Arc’; when we had the exhibition in BIM in Liverpool, this was black but when I bought it, it was sunburst blue and red.
So as this IS the one that I played, I thought for the sake of putting it on display, I would get in back in the same colour. The company that made the scratch plate for me, I asked them for an orange one and they said “why?”… so I sent them a picture of me with it in the ‘Enola Gay’ video and they went “Oh my god! Tell you what, we’ll repaint the one that’s now black” and they even did the scratches to make it look exactly the same as when it was in the ‘Enola Gay’ video!
Are you using the Fender Jazz bass again?
Last summer, we got asked to play the 600th edition of ‘Taratata’, the French equivalent of ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’ and because my other basses were in America for a tour, I took the Fender Jazz bass to a guitar tech called Ross Scott who got the pick-ups rebound and completely replaced the electrics because it sounded terrible! The original pick-ups had been replaced in the 90s with noiseless pick-ups, but they were so dull because there was no top end! He got his mate to rewind the pick-ups and I played that live at ‘Taratata’ on ‘Souvenir’ and ‘Enola Gay’, it sounded fantastic.
Here’s another in the room, THIS is THE Korg Micro-Preset, that IS the one that we got from my mum’s catalogue that we painted black! It wasn’t working when we reformed… so you know the story of myself and Paul bidding against each other on eBay!? *laughs*
I got that one and after we sampled it, I got someone to cannibalise the good bits to fix the original one up which had broken keys and some of the electrics weren’t working. So it’s 99% the original, the one which we did ‘Messages’!
How did you come to support JOY Concerts’ NHS My Music which will benefit hospitals and community care initiatives in Sussex?
Quite simply, they asked us. We thought it was a very good cause and would like to support it. It fitted perfectly into the fact that we are touring this summer doing festivals, so we thought we’d come down to Brighton and have a party there to celebrate all of the amazing things that this is supporting.
This date is part of OMD’s ‘Summer Of Hits’, how are you choosing the setlist?
Basically, we going to play every hit single barring ‘Genetic Engineering’ because it’s a bast*rd to play on stage! *laughs*
‘Walking On The Milky Way’ will be back in the set. Obviously when we’re doing our full gigs where we are the headline act, it WILL be other things as well so we’ll probably still do ‘Veruschka’. It’s not going to be only hits because I think we’ve only had 16 or 17 hits, although that’s not bad for most bands! *laughs*
Has the OMD audience increased and changed since all the various adverts and syncs recently?
I don’t know if it’s just the adverts and the syncs but certainly the age demographic has expanded. When we first reformed, it was predominantly the fans from the first time around who’d come back to see us again. I don’t exactly know why, but now it seems that it’s a broader demographic. It could be because there’s newer bands out there that reference OMD as being influential, it could just be because in this post-modern era, there’s nothing “new” so there’s nothing “old”, nothing in-fashion, nothing out-of-date! *laughs*
So if you’re considered to be “iconic” within your genre which it seems we are, then people will come and find out about you and I’d like to think that we’re good live. So once people have seen us, they come and see us again. It’s just kept growing ever since we reformed in 2006.
Next card and it’s a Roland Juno 106… I know you had a Roland Jupiter 8 and some of the smaller Rolands?
The 106, we never had one of those but I use the 106 in my Roland Cloud Group quite a lot when I’m writing songs these days because I do like to go for the analogue synth sounds, although these are digital-analogue. I defy people to tell the difference… the purists say you can but you can’t!! We had the Jupiter 8 and they were unbelievably heavy those things! We got a bit lazy and we used a lot of that on the ‘Junk Culture’ album, ‘White Trash’ is ALL Jupiter 8! I still use Jupiter 8 from the plug-ins as well.
It’s quite fascinating with the Juno 106 and that series of synths, it’s the one that’s still knocking about as the vintage synth on stage, do you remember MIRRORS had a Juno 60?
I was so sad that MIRRORS split up, I thought they were so good. But listen, the Roland Juno, the reason why it’s still used is because it’s not as heavy as a Jupiter 8 and it’s cheaper! DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH JUPITER 8s GO FOR ON eBAY?!!?? *laughs*
WALT DISCO have got their third album coming out this year, I’ve got everything crossed for them because I think they’re a brilliant band and it’s so sad to see great new bands not make it!
Would you like a recommendation? Have your heard A THOUSAND MAD THINGS?
So in hindsight and yes, it was a long time ago but was it a mistake for OMD to get a Fairlight?
No! Absolutely not! There was no problem with the Fairlight, it allowed us to write songs… there’s nothing inherently wrong with any type of instrument, NOT EVEN A LEAD GUITAR! It’s what you play on it! It wasn’t the Fairlight but the situation we were in that made for some issues with particularly ‘The Pacific Age’ album but also to a lesser degree ‘Crush’.
Can I just say by the way, we has issues with ‘Crush’ and with ‘The Pacific Age’, largely because we have painful memories of their inception; we never had enough time to finish them, we were always right up against it! So the first 10 things we wrote were the album and particularly with ‘The Pacific Age’, there’s at least 2 tracks which SHOULDN’T have been on there in hindsight!
The other thing that was a negative influence on our recollection of those albums was the European fans’ negative response to them going “oh, you’re making this because you want to break America, you’ve got much more polished (and that was partly down to Stephen Hague producing) and writing about American subjects”; but I wasn’t writing about American subjects because I wanted to break America, I was just fascinated and it was new to me, it was just a new thing to sing about.
So these two albums, that fact that we made them under the cosh and the original European fans weren’t that knocked out by them, made me feel negatively. I don’t listen to the old albums, but I was really pleasantly surprised when I went back to listen to ‘Crush’… I went “that’s a really good album”, yeah it’s not ‘Dazzle Ships’ but there’s some great songs on there!
Photo by Brian Griffin
‘Crush’ got the expanded reissue treatment last year, what’s happening with ‘The Pacific Age’?
With ‘The Pacific Age’, we are actually going to re-release it for its 40th birthday BUT we are changing it! 7 of the songs have been remixed by Tom Lord-Alge because the original mixes were absolutely bombastic, the kick drum and snare drum were SO bloody loud! You couldn’t hear anything else. So Tom has remixed 7 tracks, ‘If You Leave’ is going on the album because it WOULD have been on ‘The Pacific Age’ if it wasn’t for the fact that Paramount Pictures still owned it at the time and we couldn’t get the licence.
AND we’re taking off 2 tracks!! This is going to cause a real issue with people who will go “YOU CAN’T RE-RELEASE IT AND TAKE OFF 2 TRACKS!” but yeah, they shouldn’t have been on there in the first place! You know what, if you like the original, you’ve still got it! OK, you don’t have to buy this one! It always gets me so annoyed, people start spitting their dummy out but you’ve got the original! *laughs*
So ‘Stay (The Black Rose and the Universal Wheel)’ is coming off, it’s NOT a good song and ‘Shame’ is coming off as well! ‘If You Leave’ and ‘This Town’ are going on the album, they should have been on ‘The Pacific Age’ first time around and 7 of the tracks have been remixed. So it’s going to be interesting, I think it will p*ss a lot of people off but we’re putting out the album that we WANTED to put 40 years ago! *laughs*
Another card, and it’s a Yamaha CS60…
NO! YOU’RE PICKING OUT ALL THE ONES I NEVER OWNED! *laughs*
They were like battleships these big Yamahas…
The Korg MS20 was confusing enough for me! They had that template on it and then you ran out of templates and you couldn’t buy any more! And forget the jack plugs, I never understood how the f*cking jack plugs worked! Considering we were a synth band, I’m absolutely a luddite when it comes to synths!
So which was your favourite synth, the one perfect one for your ability?
What’s the black Roland, the one that had 2 oscillators?
That sounds like the SH-2…
I hated it when Roland started making the SH synths in that horrible grey plastic, but the black ones in the metal cases were great. I’m not a synth geek, I can’t even remember exactly which one it is but it’s probably the SH-2 because we had an SH-09 and an SH-2.
I’m still a huge fan of the Mellotron but I have a digital copy, not the original one where we had to mess around with the tapes.
The Korg Micro-Preset, it’s f*cking horrible! That’s why we rammed it down the Eventide Harmoniser and triple-tracked it to try to make it sound acceptable! It’s got all these presets on it like ‘String’, ‘Wood’, ‘Voice’, ‘Bass’, ‘Synthe 1’, ‘Synthe 2’… doesn’t matter which preset you hit, it just went “EEERK”! *laughs*
Photo by Tom Oxley
Out of the four albums since the 2007 I think ‘English Electric’ comes closest to the imperial legacy of the first four albums… now you’ve had some distance, how do you look part on the 21st Century quartet?
I think that ‘History Of Modern’ was a good restarting of the engine, there’s some good songs on there; but it was a bit hit and miss, it’s a collection of songs that were lying around for a while. I think ‘History Of Modern Part 1’ is great which is why we still play it live. Although I think the live version is better than the album version! *laughs*
From ‘English Electric’ through ‘The Punishment Of Luxury’ to ‘Bauhaus Staircase’, I’m hugely proud of all three, we put a lot of time and energy into those and I think it shows. The songwriting, the ideas, the sounds, I’m exceptionally proud and I would say those three are up there with the first four! That’s my personal opinion.
My favourite on ‘Bauhaus Staircase’ is ‘Don’t Go’ which came out as an interim single first, but the way it sounded and was structured with all that KRAFTWERK Synthanorma sequencer stuff, did it date back to ‘English Electric’?
Not quite that far back but it was written as a potential B-side for ‘The Punishment Of Luxury’. I really liked the sequencer, all we had was that and we didn’t have a lyric but when it changed chord, I had the “A-ha” part. I kept playing it, trying to think of a lyric and in the end, I said to Paul “Let’s not use this, there’s something about this is so good, let’s not do a half-baked version as a B-side, let’s just keep that”
So we hung onto it for a couple of years and in the interim time, I managed to get the verse vocal and then when Paul wrote the melody for the middle eight. I don’t know how we do this but when you reprise the melody, it fits! It dovetails across the lead vocal so you can play the melody and the vocal at the same time and they’re not really clashing with each other! If ‘Don’t Go’ had been released in the 80s, it would have been a massive hit! It’s a great song, I’m so proud of it *laughs*
Written in 1992, first released in 1993 with ELEKTRIC MUSIC and then reworked for ‘English Electric’, ‘Kissing The Machine’ has turned out to be quite prophetic, so have you experimented with AI yet?
Both Paul and I fully intend to buy some really high end AI software and programming. We have to check the small print because the last thing we want is for them to actually own what we create. We’re going to play around, we’re going to try. The thing about AI, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, it’s what you do with it. Now if you use it to pastiche other people or make fake new videos that looks like somebody famous doing something they shouldn’t or never did, that’s morally WRONG! But if you actually programme it and this is the thing, it’s not actually going to do anything that you don’t programme it to do… and if it does, it will be absolutely sh*t because it will be filling in so many gaps that it will just be pants!
However, I have not yet heard any music written on AI that sounds to me like a pastiche of music because it can only work from algorithms and programming, so it can only generate what you’re telling it to do a pastiche of. There’s no capability (yet) for any kind of genius synapse like would happen in your brain, where for no reason that you know the reason of, you’re just going to go “I want to try that” or “why don’t I sing this?” or “why don’t I play that note?”; 99 times out of 100, it’s shit because it’s just a brain fart but just occasionally, you go “WOW! THAT SOUNDS GREAT!”
Even if you could programme AI to do that and “throw in a note that shouldn’t work” or “throw in words”, it still wouldn’t know if it was a stroke of genius or just a piece of sh*t! So I’m not worried about AI music taking over the world at the moment because I haven’t heard anything that’s really that good, but I want to find out!
Photo by Ed Miles
Is there any new music coming up?
We do have a project that will hopefully come out next year in the “quiet” year that has a working title at the moment of ‘Requiem’. I’ve got all these pieces that are very linear and once Paul finally stops changing nappies and gets down to working again on these tracks, I need him to cut them up, look at this chord change and that middle eight to make the sort of thing he does on loads of things that I write. There’s no lyrics, it’s a series of very ambient funereal musical vignettes.
Is this the “piano” thing you mentioned at the 2024 talk event in Düsseldorf?
Yeah! But it’s not all piano, there’s now 5 pieces… the reason this has all come in my mind is that Andy Whitehurst who made all of the ‘Bauhaus Staircase’ videos has finally decided to try out AI and he made a couple of video demos to my music demos… I was just blown away, it re-inspired me! Now I am sitting in this room, doing more work. I don’t know what it’s going to be, I don’t know if it’s going to be a Bluray, a DVD, a video to download but it’s going to look and sound gorgeous.
I hope it can be released as OMD once Paul starts doing some work on it, he’s done work on one but he hasn’t played it to me yet. We are going to have to pitch it properly to people and say “listen, this is not what you’re going to expect from us, it sounds a bit like ‘4 Neu’, things like that”. I’d rather do that and be honest about it rather than say “It’s a lot easier not to write lyrics and not write a catchy melody!”; the people who like our more ambient B-sides back in the 80s will enjoy it.
It will be beautiful ambient music but the visuals will take it to another level. We did say ‘Bauhaus Staircase’ would probably be the last full studio album because Paul hasn’t got the time with 2 young children and why wouldn’t he want to sit in his swimming pool drinking wine in the South of France instead of writing music… smell the roses that you’ve planted over the last 50 years!
The ‘Souvenir’ boxed set had the ‘Unreleased Archive Volume1’ which recently came out separately on vinyl for Record Store Day 2026, will there be a “Volume 2”?
Unbelievably when ‘The Pacific Age’ reissue comes out, there’s going to be unreleased tracks that have been found! I thought we’d gone back through the archives and that there was nothing left! BUT THERE IS! So while there won’t be a standalone volume, there will be a separate CD and a separate vinyl album with ‘The Pacific Age’ of interesting unreleased things. 2 of them, I didn’t even remember and some of the others, I was like “Oh my lord!”…
I remember when I listened to ‘Unreleased Archive Vol1’ for the first time and really loving the ‘Liberator’ song and its “computer rock and roll” thing, why did you keep that under wraps for so long?
Oh, the chorus wasn’t good enough, I loved everything else and the line “Fell in love with a Liberator”, the verse was great and the backing track was great but the chorus wasn’t good enough!
The final card and it’s the ARP Axxe, I don’t recall you having any ARP stuff, or did you?
I love the ARP 2600 and I use it all the time, it is the sequencer in ‘Anthropocene’ and it’s also in other things… I’ve never had a real one but I love working with the one in my computer, I understand it. I start with a preset and then I start fiddling until I change the notes or whatever. Again, don’t ask me to plug jack leads in, I wouldn’t know what I was doing! *laughs*
PET SHOP BOYS did their ‘Obscure’ residency in April, would OMD ever consider such a run of gigs with no hits at all, it’s the complete opposite of ‘Summer Of Hits’?
How many songs did they do?
23 with 35 songs rehearsed…
So they mixed it up?
Yes, over the five nights…
…if I thought we could do five nights and charge the money THEY charge, then YES! *laughs*
There’s a dilemma with doing one-off shows… for example, we did the Royal Albert Hall the first time when we did all of ‘Dazzle Ships’ + ‘Architecture & Morality’, we lost money on that because so much work went into rehearsals. Normally when we tour, we’ve got a memory bank of songs that are in there, so we just play them once and we remember that. But when you have to go back and dig deep into your catalogue, you’ve got to do a lot of rehearsing. I like the idea is the short answer but it would have to make sense financially because otherwise, there’s so much time rehearsing which means crew, rehearsal venue hire etc, it’s not worth it, that’s the sad thing. What did PET SHOP BOYS charge?
£100 per ticket in the Electric Ballroom, 1000 capacity…
OK, yeah! That’s still a lot of money! *laughs*
Fair play to them… I mean, 5000 people came from all over the world to come see us play ‘Dazzle Ships’ at the Royal Albert Hall… we’ll think about it! 😉
The thing that’s on the horizon is we’re hoping to play with the Liverpool Philharmonic next year and we are looking towards 2028 for a MASSIVE tour because it’s our 50th Anniversary would you believe?!? Although that might start at the end of 2027 just to get it all in! It’s going to be a huge undertaking!!
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its grateful thanks to Andy McCluskey
Special thanks to Alix Wenmouth at Wasted Youth PR
OMD play Brighton Centre on Sunday 28th June 2026 for NHS My Music – tickets available from https://omd-brighton.com/
HUE & CRY may be best known for their sophistipop hits ‘Labour Of Love’, Ordinary Angel’, ‘Looking For Linda’ and ‘Violently’ but for their new album ‘Everybody’, they have surprised all by expanding their sonic palette and going “electro”.
Finding success of the wave of soul jazz tinged acts making use of modern music technology such as JOHNNY HATES JAZZ, BLACK and PREFAB SPROUT, the transition therefore is perhaps not as surprising as first thought. Formed by brothers Pat and Greg Kane, HUE & CRY have used DeepMind arpeggiators, hydrasynths, wavetables and classic drum machines accompanied by future-facing lyrical subjects for ‘Everybody’.
Exemplified by the first single ‘Stronger’ with its message of resilience and hope, the Kanes certainly cannot be accused of replicating their past. As well as electronic pop, the album also features experiments in related sub-genres like Latin House and Future Disco but the biggest surprise is the frantic Germanic thrust of ‘Everybody Deserves To Be Loved’.
The songs on ‘Everybody’ confront powerlessness, polarisation, climate change, authoritarianism and technological overreach, while also championing active love as a counterforce. A true labour of love, Pat and Greg Kane chatted to ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK about why ‘Everybody’ matters…
Nearly 40 years after the breakthrough banger ‘Labour Of Love’, having already experimented with folk, latin, country, jazz, drum ‘n’ bass and acoustic along the way, Hue & Cry have gone “electro”, what has prompted this new direction?
Greg: My brother Pat was pushing for this. I knew a bit about synthesizers, but I hadn’t been that hands on with them. I found out that I actually knew very little about them. But I researched. Using podcasts like Sonictalk, Why we bleep, Data Cult Audio etc, I chose synths that resonated with me. We built an arsenal of over 20 synths, Moog, Roland, Arturia, Dreadbox, Berhinger, Korg and I set about learning and studying. It was a long slog, but I got good enough that we could write songs with them.
Pat: We’ve always been a little bit electro–composing demos on computers, being excited by the latest synth sounds. I was an addict of John Peel’s radio show, and I remember being fascinated by the harsh hypnoticness of CABARET VOLTAIRE, DAF, Thomas Leer, which lead me on a pathway to the first few albums of SIMPLE MINDS, particularly the track ‘I Travel’.
Were there any particular acts using synths that you particularly enjoyed or admired?
Greg: I always liked THE HUMAN LEAGUE, but during my research I was drawn to acts like Surgeon, Clark, Colin Benders.
Pat: In recent years, I’ve loved what bands like BONOBO and DISCLOSURE do with EDM – all the rhythmic twists and tricks of dance, but a real chordal depth and even jazz sensibility to their music. But I’ve also come to reappreciate SCRITTI POLITTI and THE HUMAN LEAGUE – outrageously catchy and deeply moving songs, but sounding like they come out of a few square black boxes.
Traditional singer-songwriters like Neil Young, Paul McCartney and Leonard Cohen have gone “electro” before with varying levels of success in the past, while Lloyd Cole has successfully made the transition with his recent albums ‘Guesswork’ and ‘On Pain’, did you feel the artistic challenge was a risk worth taking?
Greg: Yes, I have followed Lloyd Cole on his Patreon site for a while (I didn’t move to Substack with him). He is more drawn to modular than me, but I like the stuff he produces. The sonic palette that our synths provided really excited us. I did not use a computer when we were writing with them. The machines kinda lead us. It was chaotic at times, many times, but they inspired us to write in ways we hadn’t before.
Pat: Totally. I love the way an arpeggiator or Moog simulator just throws out a musical part of such elemental power, and the best that we can do as songwriters – which is what we are – is to hang on tight, and see where the ride takes us. A few years ago, I listened to the NASA sound library, which has clips of sonic renditions of deep space phenomena – quasars and pulsars, background radiation, black holes, etc. Truth be told, the universe at its basic level sounds like Giorgio Moroder! Just to annoy people, we’ve taken to say that what we’re now playing is the ultimate folk music – you can’t get more “rootsy”, gritty, elemental or ground-level than a Hydrosynth working on a wave-form.
As a duo, has the songwriting and demo process always been technology-based before?
Pat: Yes, my dear bro Greg can give you a rich history of the tech we’ve used over the years.
Greg: In the 80s, our demo writing had elements of technology, mostly drum machines, but I remember using a Roland MC-500 for sequences at times. But over the last 20 years we’ve mostly written around a piano.
What have been the tools and tech which you have been using to realise and perform this new sound?
Greg: The live set-up to perform these new electro songs was a bit of a head scratcher for me. I didn’t want to load it all into Albeton and just hit the space bar. I wanted to create the chaos live on stage in front of audience, be able to adapt to different venues. I use my trusty Nord Grand piano live and the music stand with is wide enough to accommodate some synths. I thought about loading it with Volcas, but gigs are dark environments and the Volcas are small… so I stuck my Roland TR-8s on the stand and augmented that with an iPad Pro running the Loopy Pro App. That worked great in our studio, but iPads don’t like hot sweaty gig environments, so it wasn’t stable. So I looked at the Roland MC-707 to take over from the iPad. It was a steep learning curve, but I got there.
So my current live setup is:
NORD Grand stage piano
Roland TR-8s
Roland MC-707
Electro Harmonix Voice Box
Pat: Again, I defer to Greg here. But I have marvelled at the way Greg has wrangled with scores of specific devices and sound generators in the process of making ‘Everybody’ – often misunderstanding them, but thereby producing some unexpected weirdness (or sweetness) in the process. I’m an intuitive, non-technical musician – but I know what makes me surge. And Greg has the mastery to make that surge real.
The ‘Everybody’ album has a rawer aesthetic with stranger things like vintage drum machines and squelchy textures when compared to the more sophisticated pop usually associated with HUE & CRY?
Pat: That was deliberate!
Greg: Yes, our synths and drum machines were allowed to veer off. I’m glad you can hear that. We kept as much of the initial chaos when we first wrote the tunes on the final mixes.
‘Stronger’ is a self-explanatory opening statement, what was its genesis?
Greg: Musically I was exploring complex bass sequences and atonal arps with sweeping resonances. They had a tension that really influenced how the song took shape.
‘Everybody Deserves To Be Loved’ is very rhythmically Motorik which will surprise people, what brought this energy about?
Greg: I’d not heard the phrase ‘Motorik’ before. And I guess this song does adhere to this. Its tempo is 194bpm! I introduced Pat to the Moog DFAM. He immediately took to it and started tweaking it. I left him for 15mins and I came back to him dancing round the room to the Motorik beat he had managed to create with it. It was so fast I just started playing 1/8 note pedals on a bass sound on the Moog Subsequent 37… as a kinda playful reaction to this beat, but it worked!
Did your soul sensibilities make it more natural to adapt to the more house-based material like ‘Make My Day’ and ‘And Then You Bloom’?
Greg: Yes I hear lots of latin influences in house music, so it’s easy for me to get off on EDM. I still reach for mid 90s Jeff Mills stuff when I down tools. The more I studied EDM, the more I realised the precision they go into when it comes to grooves, I like that. But I come from a more “loose” jazz place, so I guess ‘Make My Day’ and ‘And Then You Bloom’ are a mixture of both.
The synth bassline of ‘In Our Ruins’ sounds like it was inspired by the comparatively obscure DALEK I LOVE YOU track called ‘Two Chameleons’ which OMD used to cover live in their earlier days, was this intentional or pure coincidence?
Greg: Just pure coincidence. Again I was experimenting with complex bass sequences, this one does not start on the downbeat, but on the AND of ONE. It does not deviate from its form for the whole duration of the song, so sometimes it seems out of sync, but it’s not. I had to change the odd note for the clashes not to be too jarring, but I get great joy form listening to that bassline cause havoc throughout the song. A fave of mine.
There is this PET SHOP BOYS vibe to ‘Kinda Blue, Kinda Love’, so had they been an influence on this album?
Greg: I wouldn’t say they were an influence, but I do like them. It was the simplicity of the their early productions in the 80s I was most drawn too. I also like their humour.
‘Force Majeure’ has this uplifting musical backdrop but is there something darker going on lyrically?
Greg: I liked when Pat brought this lyric into the room. I had never heard the phrase ‘Force Majeure’ before and I enjoyed hearing his explanation. That really did inspire how the music was formed.
‘Broken Gods’ utilises these cutting and detuned synth sounds to close the album, how do you think your usual fanbase will take to these more avant sonics?
Greg: ‘Broken Gods’ was my fave song for ages whilst the album took shape. It’s hard to play live, but when we get it right, it’s so right. We are blessed to have enough fans that are as musically adventurous as us. They’ve hung about for over 40 years, so guess they know what to expect (or not). We built our Patreon site a couple of years ago, the fans on there can go pretty avant sometimes. We’re all in this together I guess.
Which are your own favourite tracks on the new album?
Greg: For me it is between ‘In Our Ruins’ and ‘Force Majeure’. ‘In Our Ruins’ for its quirky popness and nod to 70s synth TV theme tunes. ‘Force Majeure’ for its beat and pulse… I love its poise and the chord change to the bridge… and the chromatic resolve at the end of the chorus, which is a nod to early 80s PET SHOP BOYS I guess. The synth sounds made me do it! 🙂
Have you rearranged the older songs like ‘Labour Of Love’, ‘Ordinary Angel’ or ‘Looking For Linda’ to be more electro for your live shows, or would that be a step too far?
Greg: We have. But in a simpler, songwriter way. Pat is pushing me to go further with them though. I’m looking into it.
What would be your pitch to those reading who perhaps have not been into HUE & CRY before, to give the ‘Everybody’ album a try?
Greg: ‘Everybody’ is a synth album made by 2 musicians who have enjoyed successful careers in music for over 40 years. We are drawn to the avant-garde, but succumb to soaring melodies and head bopping grooves. Feel the love in EVERYBODY.
What is next for HUE & CRY?
Greg: Positive promo of ‘Everybody’. Get it great live. Go again soon.
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its sincerest thanks to HUE & CRY
Special thanks to Asher Alexander at Republic Media
‘Everybody’ is released on 29th May 2026 as a limited-edition ultimate collector’s box set, CD, vinyl LP and digital download
HUE & CRY 2026 live dates include:
Manchester Bridgewater Hall (9th October)*, London, IndigO2 (10 October)*, Cambridge Corn Exchange (11th October)*, Birmingham Symphony Hall (16th October)*, Gateshead ICM Glasshouse Sage 1 (17th October) **, Inverness, Eden Court (22nd October)**, Aberdeen Music Hall (23 October)**, Edinburgh, Usher Hall (24 October)**, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall (30th October)***, Perth Concert Hall (31 October)***
* Co-headline with ROACHFORD
** Special guest: ROACHFORD
*** Special guests: JOHNNY HATES JAZZ
Peter Coyle is probably best known as the lead singer of THE LOTUS EATERS, a band which he formed with Jeremy Kelly who had previously been a member of the cult Liverpool trio THE WILD SWANS.
Ged Quinn, another former member of THE WILD SWANS also joined THE LOTUS EATERS while the rhythm section eventually settled with drummer Steve Crease and bassist Michael Dempsey who had been in THE CURE and ASSOCIATES. They were signed by Arista Records but in a coincidental twist, the label also signed CARE, the new project of THE WILD SWANS’ singer Paul Simpson with Ian Broudie who would later find mainstream success as THE LIGHTNING SEEDS.
Their debut single ‘The First Picture of You’ reached No15 in the UK charts and seemed to be a permanent fixture on daytime radio during the Summer of 1983. However a successful follow-up hit proved elusive for THE LOTUS EATERS and the album ‘No Sense of Sin’ released in 1984 stalled at No96.
After the single ‘It Hurts’, THE LOTUS EATERS were no more and Peter Coyle released the solo albums ‘A Slap In The Face for Public Taste’ (1986) and ‘I’d Sacrifice Eight Orgasms With Shirley MacLaine Just to Be There’ (1988). But Coyle found solace in the emergence of rave and club culture to found 8 Productions and the G-Love nightclub, working with a number emerging artists in Liverpool’s dance scene.
While there have been reunions of THE LOTUS EATERS over the years, Peter Coyle has since 2020 been focused on his “Fractal” umbrella. In March 2026, he released three new tracks ‘Rewind’, ‘My Shadow Self’ and ‘The Interface’, all recorded in his home studio in France. Drawing on his long-standing love of electronic music which perhaps hadn’t been apparent during THE LOTUS EATERS, Coyle’s keeps his songwriting fresh and unmistakably his own while embracing new technology.
With an artful new song ‘The Choice & The Meaning’ just issued, Peter Coyle kindly talked in-depth to ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK about his career to date and his continuing creative motivations despite being assumed to be a “one hit wonder”….
So how does Peter Coyle Fractal musically differ from just being “solo” Peter Coyle and how has it evolved?
There is no grand plan — and that’s precisely the point. I’ve had so many different names and projects over the years that even I was losing track of what was what. Fractal became a way of drawing a clear line in the sand.
Musically it’s more uncompromising, more instinctive. It’s not shaped by what might get airplay or approval — it’s shaped entirely by what feels honest and necessary to me in the moment. Other projects have carried certain expectations, certain sounds. Fractal carries none of those. It’s me going for the jugular.
The music that comes out of it has to mean something — to me first, and hopefully to others once it exists. But I’m genuinely not playing the game of being popular or likeable. That freedom changes everything about how the music sounds and feels.
What interested you in pursuing a more explicit electronic direction?
The synthesizer has always been in my soul — right back to Brian Eno and Bowie on ‘Heroes’ and Low, and then TUBEWAY ARMY’s first album. And ‘Being Boiled’ by THE HUMAN LEAGUE is honestly one of the greatest pieces of music ever made. So this isn’t a new direction for me, it’s more like a homecoming.
What people might not realise is that I was heavily involved in dance music back in 1988 — virtually everything we were making then was synth based. So the electronic world and I go back a long way.
I started out in bands where guitar was the predominant force, which I think obscured that side of me for a while. I had a Prophet 5 back in the day — cost a fortune, wouldn’t stay in tune, and honestly it was a beast to operate. I’m not technical by nature. I have no real knowledge of music theory, chords, any of that — I work entirely on feel and instinct, never quite knowing what I’m doing in a conventional sense.
But that’s where technology has been genuinely liberating. Plug-ins have made the synthesizer so much more accessible, and when you’re working alone that matters enormously. And the sound palette available now is just beyond beautiful. I think that’s ultimately why the electronic direction has become so dominant — it suits both how I hear music and how I actually work.
Are you still writing songs “traditionally” or has modern tech helped you a lot? What are your preferred tools?
My songwriting has changed enormously — technology has genuinely freed everything up in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
But I want to be honest about what the life of a songwriter actually looks like, because it’s rarely what people imagine. Almost every hour of the day you’re asking yourself where the hell you’re going with this — whether it’s going to work out. The dead ends are scary and relentless. And then somehow, if you persevere, things come together. That bit never changes regardless of the tools you’re using.
What technology has changed is the space in which all that happens. I love everything about it — but I feel strongly that the agency has to come from the soul. The artist has to get out of their own way, lose the ego, lose the desperation to make something stunning. But equally you cannot let the machine do all the heavy lifting — because then it just becomes generic, and life is genuinely too short for that. I’d rather get a job in a bank. Not that they’d employ me — but you get the general picture.
My early days were built around improvising — just throwing myself in and seeing where things went. And now, working with technology, that’s exactly what I still do. I improvise with it, follow where it leads, stay open to accidents and surprises. The tools have changed but that instinct is the same.
In terms of what I actually use — Ableton Live and Pro Tools have been absolute game changers for me. They’ve transformed how I work and what’s possible. But equally important is a kind of awareness I’ve developed — recognising that something throwaway, something you created when you weren’t even trying, or a mistake you almost deleted — can turn out to be the most exciting thing on the session. I’ve learned to listen to those moments rather than dismiss them.
Technology is full of what I’d call tools of love — instruments and possibilities designed to help the musician find themselves and express the image that exists inside them. That’s a beautiful thing when you think about it.
You released a mini-album in 2023 called ‘Phasing’ which featured two collaborations with Martyn Ware on the title track and ‘Out Of His Depth’, how did that come about?
I’ve been a big fan of Martyn Ware since day one — since THE HUMAN LEAGUE, since everything that followed. And now I’m lucky enough to call him a friend, which still feels remarkable to me. The boy is a genius. His way of seeing the synthesizer, his understanding of space within sound — it’s a genuinely lovely thing to behold. He never stops, never settles, and he’s a wonderful human being on top of all that. An absolute joy to work with.
The way it came about was relatively simple — I sent him the ideas and e just loved them and shaped them in that beautiful way he has. Martyn was working on the tracks with Chaz Stooke, and together what they brought to the material was something I couldn’t have anticipated. They elevated everything in ways I couldn’t have done alone and I learned so much from the experience.
And that’s one of the key characteristics you notice about truly great musicians like Martyn — they are always on the go, always absorbing something new, always searching for that fresh momentum that seems to emerge out of nowhere. That energy is infectious. Being around it and being trusted with it meant a great deal to me.
The trancey hypnotism of one of your new releases ‘Rewind’ will surprise those who may be more used to the more “acoustically” spirited songs of THE LOTUS EATERS, how did this song come together?
I think people who have followed me for a while understand by now that I simply follow my own instincts and do my own thing — I don’t really look over my shoulder at what came before or what might be expected of me.
Rewind actually has a very specific origin — I’ve been asked to perform at the Rewind Festival at Henley on Thames in August 2026, which is incredibly exciting. But beyond the performance itself, the word started living in my head. ‘Rewind’. The way it suggests rewinding time, rewinding sound, rewinding memories. I loved the interplay between all those ideas and what they meant to me personally.
The lyric at the heart of it — “we dreamed we could have it all” — pretty much sums up that genuine joy and excitement we felt back in the day when we were young and invincible. That feeling of boundless possibility. I wanted to capture that honestly rather than sentimentalise it.
And that tension is where the interesting stuff lives for me creatively right now. Bringing the old head into the cutting edge — writing real melodies and meaningful lyrics within a very modern electronic and dance context. It’s not about nostalgia and it’s not about chasing trends — it’s about finding a place where melody and rhythm connect in a fresh and unexpected way rather than retreading old well-travelled terrain. Anyone can do that. I’d rather take the road that feels alive.
The trancey hypnotic quality in ‘Rewind’ wasn’t something I planned — it emerged organically. And those are always the most exciting moments in the studio — when something takes on a life and a feeling entirely of its own.
‘The Interface’ is full of IDM vibes but what is the song a metaphor for?
It’s a deep song that works on many levels simultaneously — which is exactly how I wanted it.
At its core I think the main theme is about reaching a point in life where you completely lose the urge to fit in and conform. Not that I ever really had that urge particularly — but it becomes even more pronounced as you get older. There’s a liberation in that. Getting on the weird bus, as the lyric says — and genuinely not caring anymore.
The interface itself is a metaphor for all the layers we hide behind in modern life — the masks, the performances, the carefully managed versions of ourselves we present to the world. The polygraph line cuts through all of that — because ultimately the truth always finds a way out. The interface is the flaw. The interface hides it all. But it can’t hide everything forever.
And underneath all of that it comes back to love — it always comes back to love. Without it you become a slave to the sequence, you’re just going through the motions, digging holes full of secrets. That feels very true to me.
What I find exciting about the song sonically is the clash of contexts — it sounds quite melancholic on the surface but the grooves and the sounds lift it and give it these positive, almost euphoric edges. That tension between the emotional content and the musical landscape is what makes songs genuinely interesting to me. The repeated “I I I I I” is so simple but feels incredibly heartfelt in context — sometimes the most naked moments hit the hardest.
Watching this one evolve in the studio was genuinely exciting. I’m learning something new every single day and songs like The Interface are proof of why that process never gets old.
‘My Shadow Self’ takes a real about turn 3 minutes in after starting off all moody?
Even though I say so myself — ‘Shadow Self’ is really something special to me.
The lyrics live in a very sensual, almost dreamlike space — there’s desire and hunger and intimacy running through the whole thing. But it’s not straightforward — nothing I find interesting ever is. The shadow self is that hidden part of you, the part you don’t show the world, the part that perhaps only another person’s love or touch can reach and release. That’s what the song is really about — that moment of complete vulnerability where someone else cracks you open.
It starts off introvert and sexually charged — almost chained down, as you say. There’s a moodiness and a weight to it. And then without any explanation or warning the whole mood shifts and transforms — real freedom just explodes out of the love. That transition at around three minutes isn’t something I planned or engineered — it felt like the only honest place the song could go.
Life and love are messy and constantly changing — life is quantum and wild and free. The song mirrors that completely. There’s an exhilaration and a complete enigma to the whole feel of it that I find endlessly fascinating.
The line ‘I’m not asking for rescue’ feels crucial to me — because it’s not a song about weakness or dependency. It’s about that extraordinary thing that happens between two people when the walls finally come down. “Crack me open with your fingers under the sky of silver release” — that’s as honest and raw as I’ve ever been in a lyric.
And the way the music and textures play around with the words creates whole new fractal worlds — which is exactly what excites me so deeply about working this way. That word fractal keeps coming back for a reason. It’s in everything I do now.
On the spiky ‘YOu ARE not the MeDiA’, who or what are you taking aim at?
The song is pretty direct — it’s taking aim at a very specific modern phenomenon that I find genuinely troubling.
In a word — Marxism. But not necessarily in the old traditional sense. What I’m really talking about is this new wave of people with absolute so-called moral clarity who have appointed themselves the arbiters of what can and cannot be said, thought or expressed. When I encounter that mindset it triggers something very visceral in me — it takes me straight back to being a young Catholic boy faced with the same kind of unquestionable dogma and authoritarianism. Different packaging, same controlling impulse.
Authoritarianism is very much back in fashion right now and it frightens me. The idea that private property is the root of all human suffering — that if we just dismantle enough structures and cancel enough voices everything will be fixed — I firmly and completely disagree with that outlook. Human suffering exists because we refuse to genuinely work together and bring out the best in one another. It’s not about ownership — it’s about connection and contribution.
The doublespeak in the lyrics is very deliberate — because that’s exactly how this mindset operates. It presents itself as liberation while practicing the most rigid form of control. It claims to speak for everyone while silencing anyone who disagrees.
And here’s the thing — I don’t care that there are musicians infinitely more talented than me. I cherish that fact. I’m genuinely and eternally grateful for it. It’s a beautiful thing. What matters to me is my contribution to the human story — not my control or manipulation of the narrative. That distinction feels more important than ever right now.
The song needed to be spiky and confrontational — because that’s exactly what the subject matter demands.
One of your other more recent tracks ‘Utopia’ does have one of those euphoric rave-styled backing vocals, courtesy of Kim Shepherd?
‘Utopia’ is in many ways a companion piece to ‘YOu ARE not the MeDiA’— but it approaches the same territory from a more universal and perhaps more sorrowful place. Where that song is confrontational and spiky, ‘Utopia’ is almost a lament.
The central idea is something that feels very real and very urgent to me — that the pursuit of utopia, any utopia, ultimately destroys everything it claims to want to build. Sacred cows everywhere. Ideology and blind loyalty blocking access to genuine human connection and love. Information that was supposed to liberate us has instead put us in chains. We’ve become cogs in a wheel with no humanity and no sanity. That feels like an honest description of where we are right now.
But what makes the song truly special to me is what Kim Shepherd did with it. When I wrote and recorded it I sang it in falsetto and it was deeply melancholic — almost defeated. And then Kim took that same melody and transformed it into something utterly euphoric. The same words, the same notes — and yet an entirely different emotional world. That’s a beautiful alchemy that I genuinely couldn’t have predicted or engineered. It just happened and it’s extraordinary.
The song also came together through a wonderful collaboration with Liam Saunders who created such a brilliant vibe with his bass and synths — and then the brilliant Connor Whyte on guitar added something truly mesmerising to the whole thing. That chemistry that evolves when you bring the right artists together is one of the most exciting things about making music. You create something that none of you could have made alone. It was a wonderful experience and a genuinely beautiful thing to be part of.
What did you find appealing about club music after THE LOTUS EATERS?
Escape. That’s the honest one word answer.
After THE LOTUS EATERS, I needed to keep moving — to stay still would have meant sitting with a personal pain I wasn’t ready to face. I needed salvation and I found it, as I always have, in the love of music itself.
Getting involved in dance music and club culture through our project Eight — where we were creating dance music and running club nights — healed me in ways I’m not sure anything else could have. There was something about that world, that energy, that community, that felt genuinely redemptive.
And the culture itself was just beautiful to be part of. I remember watching lads coming up to the DJ clutching a twelve inch record they were excited about — that image has never left me. That pure uncomplicated love of music with no pretension and no agenda. Just the music and the feeling it gave you.
But the single greatest feeling I have ever experienced in all my time in music — and I mean that — was being in a club when all of a sudden the crowd just erupts. Thousands of people in complete ecstasy. And it’s one of my tunes doing that to them. I will never forget that moment for as long as I live. It was humbling and overwhelming and I am eternally grateful for it. Genuinely one of the greatest highlights of everything I have ever done.
Music heals. It really does. And that period of my life proved it to me beyond any doubt.
Some might be surprised to learn you co-wrote and co-produced the Marina Van-Roy rave pop track ‘Sly One’ which came out on DeConstruction in 1990… can you remember how you ending up writing for someone else?
The story behind ‘Sly One’ is one of my favourites actually — because it perfectly illustrates how the bad moments can be the key to your best moments. You just have to ride the waves.
I had just submitted a song to Seal — I was completely in love with Adamski’s ‘Killer’, still am. One of the greatest pop tunes ever written and one of the best vocals ever recorded. Full stop. So I wrote something in that world — a song about living in a mad world and not really coping — and sent it off hoping he might cover it. They came back and said it wasn’t happening. I was gutted.
So I walked into the studio, picked up an acoustic guitar and wrote ‘Sly One’. Just like that. Out of that disappointment came something new. And here’s a lovely footnote to that story — Seal subsequently came out with ‘Crazy’, which I absolutely love. Same theme as what I’d sent him, but better expressed. Another brilliant tune. The universe works in mysterious ways.
At that point I had just come off the back of two enormously ambitious projects — the first was actually a triple album called ‘A Slap In The Face For Public Taste’, and the second was called ‘I’d Sacrifice Eight Orgasms With Shirley MacLaine Just To Be There’. As you can probably tell, I was not playing it safe. I had my voice all over both of them and I needed to keep moving, keep things fresh, try something completely different.
So I gave ‘Sly One’ to Marina. And what she did with it was extraordinary. She brought this beautiful vulnerability and atmosphere to the track that completely transformed it — landing it on DeConstruction. Though if I’m honest, Warp Records would have been the natural spiritual home for that record — but that’s another story entirely. Her vocal on that record is truly iconic in my opinion. A song written on an acoustic guitar becoming a rave pop record — that’s a journey I could never have planned and I love that about it.
How do you find the modern method of releasing music via these online singles and doing social media?
To be honest with you I have struggled with that side of things since day one — and I mean day one.
I never liked record companies. The boring offices, the suits, the gatekeepers — none of it ever felt like it had anything to do with music. And the old system could be soul destroying in its own particular ways. I remember releasing club records and DJs would come back saying it was the wrong tempo or not the right genre — and it would genuinely do my head in. You’ve poured your heart into something and someone’s telling you the BPM is slightly off.
The modern system has removed some of those gatekeepers which should feel liberating — and in some ways it does. The ability to just put music out into the world without needing anyone’s permission is genuinely extraordinary when you think about how different it was before.
But the business side of things — the social media, the marketing, the constant content, the algorithms — it’s a massive universe and I neglect it. I’ll be completely honest about that. It’s not ideal and I know it. But you only get one life and I have to make choices about where my energy goes.
My energy goes into the music. My real aspiration — the thing that drives me every single day — is to write a game changing song. That’s it. That’s what gets me up in the morning. Everything else is noise.
And I think that connects back to why I started Peter Coyle Fractal in the first place — this was never about being popular or likeable. It’s about going for the jugular and making music that genuinely matters.
Is the intention to rewind and do it the old fashioned way with a physical long player or has the album sadly had its day in your opinion?
Music is dead. That’s a strong statement but there’s a lot of truth in it — and paradoxically it makes things quite interesting.
The album was an emotional object. A complete emotional experience — like sitting with a poem from beginning to end. It had weight and intention and architecture. And poetry is about as relevant as music now in this TikTok and AI world — which is both a sad and a fascinating thing to contemplate. The modernist existence of making music as we understood it is genuinely over. That era has passed.
As for physical albums specifically — I love what they represented and what they meant. That ritual of holding something, reading the sleeve notes, experiencing the whole journey an artist intended — that was sacred in its own way. Whether that comes back in any meaningful cultural sense I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that I refuse to let that question paralyse me.
Because here’s the choice as I see it — we can be victims of these changes and say “woe is me”, the world has moved on and left us behind. Or we can say no problem. We will deal with it come what may. These are different times and they demand a different response.
And actually at the core of things musicians and music makers are problem solvers. Always have been. We take chaos and emotion and confusion and we turn it into something meaningful and communicable. That skill — that instinct — is needed now more than ever in this deeply problematic and fragmented world. The format may have changed beyond recognition but the human need for what music actually does has never been greater.
So music may be dead in one sense. But in another sense it’s never been more necessary.
When THE LOTUS EATERS formed, did you feel any of tension or rivalry with CARE from THE WILD SWANS ex-members, especially with both acts being signed to Arista?
I’ve spent a large part of my life doing sport — and the greatest thing about sportspeople is that they truly know what it feels like to both lose and win. They assimilate it into their whole way of being. That experience shaped how I see competition fundamentally.
The history here is complex and I won’t pretend otherwise. THE WILD SWANS were the forerunners to THE LOTUS EATERS — and the split that led to the formation of the band involving myself and Jeremy Kelly was bitter and painful for people involved. Paul Simpson has written honestly and extensively about how deeply unhappy he was about that whole period — feeling that his songs and his vision had been taken from him. That’s a real human hurt and I respect that he has expressed it.
But I want to say this clearly — Ian Broudie and Paul Simpson did brilliant things with CARE and I was a genuine fan. ‘Flaming Sword’ is a beautiful track. And life has a wonderful way of weaving things together in unexpected ways — I’ve worked with Ian Broudie on some tracks for THE LIGHTNING SEEDS since then. So it’s all far more complex and interweaved than any simple narrative of rivalry would suggest.
Liverpool was an incredibly intense place and the rivalries were fierce — and actually I think that’s a brilliant thing. That intensity pushes people to get better, to write better songs, to reach further than they might otherwise have done. The city has always had that quality and it has produced extraordinary music because of it.
The only downfall is when it spills over into the personal space. That’s where it becomes pointless and destructive. Because my competition has always been with myself. To try and do my best. To be better than I was yesterday. The Caligula whispering — that Machiavellian desperation to undermine and position and manoeuvre — it’s just not my cup of tea. It never has been. I don’t respond to it because life is genuinely too short and that energy belongs in a tacky soap opera, not in a recording studio.
And at moments like that I always think about James Joyce. He told a friend that he had spent the last eight hours writing a single sentence. Eight hours. One sentence. And his friend asked what was so difficult about it — and Joyce said he knew what order he wanted the words in, he just wasn’t sure about the comma. But what a sentence it was — “the heaventree of stars hung with humid, nightblue fruit.” That is where the focus should always lie. Not in rivalry or politics or positioning. In finding your own heaventree of stars. That’s all that matters.
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‘The First Picture Of You’ was literally everywhere in the summer of 1983, did you figure you had something special when you wrote it?
No — not at all. And that’s probably exactly why I agreed for it to be released.
The honest truth is I wasn’t ready for success. I was a young man who knew that if I wanted to continue as a singer I needed to somehow find the skills to cope in the outside world — but I didn’t really have them. And here’s the thing — I’m not even ready now at 64. It’s genuinely not my vibe. I need my own space. It’s not good for me to be a famous person and I’ve made a kind of peace with that.
As far as celebrity culture goes — I would rather sit down with a glass of prosecco with Mark E Smith and Goya than engage in any of that world. That says everything about where my head is. THE FALL, Francisco Goya — that’s my kind of company. The radical, the visionary, the uncompromising.
But going back to the song itself — I knew I had written something romantic. Something that felt genuine and tender. What I absolutely had no idea about was the context it would land in. I wrote it in the coldest days of December — the middle of winter — so the idea that it would become this iconic summer song that was literally everywhere in 1983 was completely beyond my imagination at the time. There’s something rather beautiful about that — a winter song that became the sound of summer. Sometimes the best things happen when you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.
The follow-up to ‘The First Picture Of You’ was the wonderful ‘You Don’t Need Someone New’ and is something of an outlier in hindsight, it’s more “synthy” than other tracks by THE LOTUS EATERS and wasn’t included on the album ‘No Sense Of Sin’, what were the reasons for that?
So glad you appreciated it — yes it was our second single and it remains a really interesting piece of work to me. What people might not know is that we actually wanted ‘German Girl’ to be the follow up single — but the record company flatly refused. Those battles between artistic vision and commercial reality were a constant feature of that whole period. ‘You Don’t Need Someone New’ was the compromise — and actually it turned out to be a fascinating record in its own right.
It was a genuine hit in the New York discos which I loved — there’s something wonderful about that. A record that didn’t set the UK charts alight finding its audience in an entirely different world and context. New York in that era was the centre of the musical universe in many ways and knowing that record was being played in those clubs means a great deal to me.
As for why it didn’t make ‘No Sense Of Sin’ — honestly the simplest explanation is the right one. We had too many songs and something had to give. That’s always a painful process. The track was produced by Alan Tarney who is a remarkable figure — he worked with some of the biggest artists of that era and his production instincts were extraordinary. And yes — he absolutely loves his synths. It was at his house that I first encountered the Fairlight CMI synthesizer and sampler in person. I’ll never forget that moment.
The Fairlight cost around seventy thousand pounds — in early 1980s money. Just let that sink in for a moment. It was an absolutely extraordinary and revolutionary piece of technology and seeing it for the first time was like looking at the future. That experience fed directly into my ever deepening love affair with the synthesizer and everything it represents. Alan was a fascinating character and I learned enormously from being around him
What was the story behind ‘German ‘Girl’, the opener on ‘No Sense Of Sin’, is it autobiographical?
Yes. Completely autobiographical.
Her name was Stephanie Arnold. She is no longer with us sadly — and I want to acknowledge that because she deserves to be remembered. She was a remarkable presence in my life and this song is my testament to that.
She was never actually German — but she had a Louise Brooks haircut. That iconic, severe, utterly beautiful look that Brooks made famous in the classic silent film ‘Pandora’s Box’. There was something about Stephanie that existed in that same world — cinematic, otherworldly, unforgettable.
The whole song was written under the influence of Bertolt Brecht — that sense of heightened reality, of theatre and dream existing simultaneously, of emotion so large it breaks through the conventions of ordinary expression. Brecht understood that sometimes the most honest thing you can do is be completely and unapologetically artificial — because that artifice gets closer to the truth of feeling than straightforward realism ever could.
The song is extremely self-indulgent and doesn’t acknowledge so called reality at all — and I make no apology for that. It exists in another world entirely. Another dream. It is at its heart an insane love song built entirely on daydreams and passion and the kind of feelings that a young man carries for someone who seems to belong to a different and more beautiful universe than the one everyone else inhabits.
The fact that the record company wouldn’t let it be our second single still baffles me. But perhaps some songs are too personal, too singular, too much their own thing to be commercial propositions. ‘German Girl’ is exactly that. And I treasure it.
On your Bandcamp, your self-deprecating bio says you “had a hit record in 1984 with a song called first picture of you…”, it did prove to be a hard act to follow, so what is your take on what happened with THE LOTUS EATERS and not being able to sustain momentum?
I love that bio — I think self-awareness is one of the most underrated qualities a musician can have. And yes — ‘The First Picture Of You’ was a genuinely hard act to follow.
It was tough. Genuinely tough. And there was a point where I nearly packed it all in — but not for the reasons people might assume. It wasn’t the lack of commercial success that almost broke me. It was a personal betrayal that cut very deeply. I won’t go into the details here — some things deserve to remain private — but it shook me to my core.
And yet. And yet.
It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. I mean that completely and without any bitterness. Because the lack of commercial success, the not fitting in, the refusal to conform — all of that gave me something that no amount of chart positions could ever have provided. It gave me space. Space to breathe, to explore, to grow, to become the artist I actually wanted to be rather than the one the industry wanted me to be.
Every single conversation we’ve had in this interview traces back to that moment of apparent failure. The Peter Coyle Fractal project, the electronic direction, the uncompromising lyrics, the collaborations, the freedom to write songs that genuinely matter to me — none of that exists without that crossroads.
And so when I think about lying on my deathbed someday — and I think about it with complete equanimity — I can be at peace. Because I gave my music life everything I had. Not everything the industry wanted. Everything I had. That’s enough. That’s more than enough.
The Bandcamp bio will probably stay exactly as it is.
Although THE LOTUS EATERS were pictured as a duo, you were actually a five piece band, in hindsight were too many directions trying to be pulled at once?
Not at all — and actually the reality of THE LOTUS EATERS was quite different from the public image.
Ged — who was one of the original members — was first and foremost a visual artist. He went on to study at Oxford and eventually became a truly world famous artist. If Ged had stayed there would have been three of us in those pictures rather than two. He was extraordinary and his artistic vision was very much part of the early DNA of the band.
Michael and Stephen came later and added their own dimensions to what we were doing. THE LOTUS EATERS were never a simple or straightforward proposition — but I don’t think that was ever the problem.
The truth is we were serious outliers and genuinely ahead of our time — and that’s a difficult place to be in any era but particularly in the early 1980s when the industry wanted things neat and categorisable. We weren’t appreciated in the way we perhaps deserved to be at the time and that didn’t help. History has been kinder to us than the contemporary reception was.
In the end, Jeremy hooked back up with Paul Simpson and THE WILD SWANS — going back to pursue the success and the vision he had always craved. Given everything that had happened between those parties, that was quite a journey in itself.
And as I said before — it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. That phrase keeps coming back because it keeps being true. Every apparent ending in my story has turned out to be a beginning in disguise.
By the time ‘It Hurts’ came out in 1985, did you already feel it was time to move on from THE LOTUS EATERS?
Yes — by that point Jeremy had already made his decision. The writing was very much on the wall.
‘It Hurts’ wasn’t a hit at the time which was another blow — although the story has a wonderful footnote. An Italian band later covered it and took it to number one in the Italian charts. So the song found its audience eventually, just not where or when we expected. That feels very on brand for THE LOTUS EATERS somehow.
But looking back now it was a blessing — because there was already a major rift running through everything we were doing. The video for ‘It Hurts’ is actually a perfect illustration of where we were as a partnership at that point.
It was my idea to use Louise Brooks footage — that connection to her world clearly running deep in me, as anyone who knows ‘German Girl’ will understand. The video director asked both Jeremy and I to come up with separate storyboards and said he would choose whichever one he preferred. He chose mine. And that decision enraged and infuriated Jeremy.
So Jeremy made his statement. He played the guitar blindfolded throughout the video. And here’s the thing — looking back now I think it was sheer genius. I am genuinely so glad he did it. Because it is so utterly iconic in its weirdness — one of the great oddities of 1980s pop culture as far as I’m concerned. A moment of creative defiance that accidentally became something completely unforgettable.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere about how the most interesting things often emerge from conflict and tension rather than harmony and agreement. The universe works in mysterious ways and sometimes anger produces beauty.
You continue to perform live at selected events to sing ‘The First Picture Of You’ and do some cover versions, how do you choose them? Is there a song you haven’t done which you would like to cover?
There’s an important distinction to make here — when I do my own concerts, I only perform my own songs, both old and new. That’s nonnegotiable for me. That’s where my heart is.
But when you’re talking about the 80s festivals — yes, I’ll do the occasional cover and I do that out of politeness more than anything else. The audiences at those events are there for a good time and knowing the tune matters to them. So I’ll pull out ‘Ashes To Ashes’ or ‘Solsbury Hill’ from time to time — both songs I genuinely love and respect rather than just obvious crowd pleasers. But if I’m completely honest I would much rather be doing my own material. That’s just the reality of that particular world.
As for a song I’ve never covered but would love to — two tracks keep coming back to me and they couldn’t be more different from each other. ‘Ghosts’ by JAPAN — that extraordinary, skeletal, emotionally devastating piece of music that David Sylvian created. And then on the complete other end of the spectrum — ‘Paranoid’ by BLACK SABBATH. I love that riff, that energy, that vocal, that complete and utter commitment to its own world. I love everything about it. The fact that those two choices seem completely contradictory probably says everything about me as an artist.
The live landscape itself is becoming increasingly difficult for someone in my position. I’m too disparate as an artist and don’t have a conventional fan base in the traditional sense — which makes the whole thing genuinely problematic to navigate. And the broader culture right now isn’t helping. Cost cutting is rampant, venues are struggling and people seem to be retreating into the comfort of the familiar — reverting to the past because the present feels too uncertain and frightening.
I understand that impulse completely. But it does make the space for genuinely new and challenging live music smaller and smaller. And that’s a loss for everyone.
What is next for you?
There’s a lot coming and I’m genuinely excited about all of it.
First up there’s a new song out called ‘The Choice & The Meaning’ — and even that title feels like it connects to everything I’ve been talking about in this interview. The artwork is mine but it’s Andrew at Soft Octopus who really makes it work with his cover design. Andrew has done the last four or five covers for me now and looking at them together they work almost as a series — which was never planned that way at all. It just evolved organically. Another beautiful happy accident. Andrew and I have also made music together previously — a track called ‘You & I’ which is out there on Spotify and everywhere else — and I’m hoping we’ll do more of that soon.
Then in early May, ‘Beachball’ comes out on the BOH Label which I’m really looking forward to people hearing. And in the summer there’s a new album coming with the ESP PROJECT — a genuinely exciting collaboration with Tony Lowe that has been a wonderful creative experience.
And of course there’s the Rewind Festival at Henley-on-Thames in August 2026 — which feels like it’s going to be a very special moment for all sorts of reasons that anyone who has heard the song ‘Rewind’ will understand.
But beyond all the specific releases and dates — the honest answer to what’s next is simply this. As long as I feel like I’m learning something new I will keep making music. That’s the only metric that matters to me. Not the charts, not the algorithms, not the streaming numbers — am I still learning? Am I still growing? Am I still surprising myself?
Right now the answer to all of those questions is yes. And long may that continue.
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to Peter Coyle
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