<h2 class="p1" style="text-align: center;">“We’re not giving up”</h2>
<h3 class="p1" style="text-align: center;">Stephen Davidson</h3>
Brighton 20.09.15
Tellison <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/tellison--hope-fading-nightly-exclusive-album-stream-10485618.html">released Hope Fading Nightly</a> last week. I caught up with Stephen Davidson in the suitably sombre location of a toilet in Brighton to discuss the pain behind making the new record, how happy the band are now and how they have no plans to give up.
The last time I spoke to you was four years ago in Southampton, a few months after the release of The Wages of Fear, so how’s it going?
“Good, we’ve been through some highs and lows since we last spoke. The Wages of Fear (2011) didn’t really do anything in terms of getting us further ahead or getting us played on the radio, which was sort of the aim of that record. 
“We were impressionable children, so we listened to these so called professionals, he says bitterly. They were older and we thought wiser, they said if we put a little bit more polish on what we were doing then things could go really well and we could be a full time band.”
“We were all young, you learn a lot and we’re a lot more comfortable in our own skin now. I think that comes across in the new record. We just went to a studio with all our own gear and figured out how to make an album from scratch. This was much more of an attempt to make the songs sound like how they sounded when we first wrote them.
“So much of Tellison is about growing up, because it’s a band I’ve been in since I was 13, and I’m 29 now. This record is explicitly about feelings of failure, or feelings of potential not reached and roads not travelled.”
The songs in the new record seem to be a little bit more forthright, even aggressive in places?
“There’s definite anger and disappointment, with feelings of betrayal. But I think I was feeling that way, and for me songwriting is a big cathartic process. It’s about taking that negative energy  and putting it somewhere creative and positive, rather than just stewing on it miserably, sat on the bus wanting to die. We’re not depressed people, but I do think that’s how I personally deal with that stuff. 
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<h3 class="p1" style="text-align: left;">“It does quite suck to be in your twenties in 2015”</h3>
</blockquote>
“Equally it does quite suck to be in your twenties in 2015. I was obviously naive, but I just believed it when people told me to work hard and you’d be okay. So it was grim to find out it’s not true.”
I don’t see any of the hard stuff you have to do to keep Tellison going, but I do often see you play shows to a hundred people shouting your lyrics back at you. To me I see a successful band that’s endured – so I can’t help but wonder what  ‘success’ for Tellison would look like?
“Those shows are something we’re definitely aware of, particularly in London. It’s insane, and I wouldn’t want to take anything away from that. 
“Much of the record is about a period of time a year or two ago, where we didn’t have a third record on the horizon and I was just on my own in my bedroom, not knowing if we were going to make another album, or break up. I was working in rubbish jobs, and commuting, feeling really bad about how I’d spent my life up until that point.
But in a way this entire problem has created this album.
“I totally agree with you there, it’s really important to be aware of that. And there is an important distinction to be made with what was going on when we were writing the album and what’s going on now, because I think all of us are really happy with how it’s going.
“We’ve all figured out how to make it work with our own lives. And we used all of this pain to make fire wood to make this thing, which we’re all pleased with. Maybe we needed to get all of that out of ourselves, to be confident and happy, and realise it’s okay.
“I’m just imagining what success might look like, but maybe we’re here in fact. In lots of ways we’re doing what we set out to do.”
There are a lot of places in the new record which feel almost like giving up, so what comes next?
“As far as giving up goes, I don’t want to. I’m not planning on giving up. I’m working on another record at the moment.
“There was a need to put it all out there, literally apologise to the rest of the band and talk about the negative stuff we were all thinking, sitting in silence on the van back from Derby, having played to two people. Once it’s out there, it becomes more manageable, and it’s made us feel more of a team. Because we all felt like this, but we had an unspoken agreement that we would set our jaws, and carry on.”
<blockquote>
<h3 class="p1" style="text-align: right;">“We had an unspoken agreement that we would set our jaws, and carry on.”</h3>
</blockquote>
Having lost a friend to suicide earlier this year, I wondered if My Marengo is about someone in particular – or rhetorical?
“It’s about one of my best friends who killed himself. It was ten years ago, and it’s taken me this long to say that inarticulate thing, because what do you say? Even now I have no idea where to even begin trying to unpick it all.
“It feeds back into what a lot of the record’s about, because it’s about feeling unhappy and hopeless. If you pursue that to its end point, this is one solution that people come up with. But the song pointedly rejects it, because whilst I’m so far away from understanding it, all I can talk about is what I do think and feel. And the song is my rejection of it, because I wish he hadn’t done it.”
It’s interesting that having had so many songs that are almost giving up, that when you get to the darkest point of the record, there is a rejection of giving up.
“Yes, definitely. I was thinking about this when we were making the record.”
The first time I listened to the album I felt uncomfortable and sad, that a band I admired for putting a hopeful spin on real life experiences, had made something that felt very bleak, but the more I listen to it, the more it feels hopeful.
“That’s the tension that exists in talking about misery and unhappiness, that by doing so you’re dealing with it. So it’s a fun bit of artifice, which is therapeutic for us. To speak your worst fears, and by doing so, overcome them hopefully.
“As a band we talk about how we’re failures, we release an album called ‘Hope Fading Nightly’ about how everything’s going wrong and we hate it all. But we released an album. It took four years, but we did it and we’re still going. The silent point is that we’re not giving up.
“With the title Hope Fading Nightly, you could read it one way and say you’re getting less and less, but also in another way it’s a recurring act, hope fades nightly, sun comes up, and you start again. That’s life really, isn’t it?”

Interview:  Stephen Davidson of Tellison

Dexter Tortiorello is a music producer and maker, originally hailing from Chicago of the Northern American continent. In the last few years he has lost his job, lived on little more than a solar powered laptop with Ableton Pro in a remote Hawaiian jungle, started two different musical projects, and now he’s reached our tiny little island for the 2014 Camden Crawl.
Dexter is visiting us to promote his second full record as Dawn Golden, entitled <a title="Dawn Golden Still Life on SoundCloud" href="https://soundcloud.com/dawn-golden/sets/dawn-golden-still-life-exclusive" target="_blank">Still Life</a>, and on this warm Friday afternoon it seems like a suitable time to mull over what might possibly one day become a milestone for the humble American.

A first visit to the UK?
I actually played a show here in 2011 at Madame Jojo’s which was a lot of fun. It was a White Heat show with <a title="Halls on SoundCloud" href="https://soundcloud.com/halls" target="_blank">Halls</a>, who is really fantastic. I think I only realised after that he’d done a load of really big shit and I really should have been opening for him in London.
So I read about your trip to Hawaii, was there something deliberate you were trying to do with the <a title="Houses on Facebook" href="https://www.facebook.com/housesofficial" target="_blank">Houses</a> project there or was it a wholly personal endeavour?
It certainly started as a personal endeavour, as Houses only fully formed when I got home and began recording everything I had been working on out there. But the experience certainly influenced that first Houses record a lot, it was the first time I’d been off my own continent and to be in the middle of a jungle running on almost nothing was an unreal experience for me.
I had been fired from my job, sitting around and quickly going into the psyche of a generally unemployed person where you get into a routine of sleeping in and then doing nothing. So I decided I didn’t want to settle into that too much. I felt it happening and had to break out of it somehow.
When I came back, I found that I was in a really good head-space and wanted to make music that was a little bit more upbeat than I had before. So I did that, and immediately withdrew back into dark shit, which was when I wrote the first Dawn Golden EP (Blow).
To me your music is always striving lyrically towards a real human experience, whilst alongside that the electronic tracking and mixing adds a layer of abstraction. Is that always how you’ve approached writing music?
That’s definitely how I’ve always approached writing lyrics to my songs. I have a really hard time writing vague lyrics, and I’m envious of people who can write in that way, as if they’re writing about a feeling rather than an event – because it seems like people connect with it more. I just can’t write like that – I write about personal things from my life, and I’ve noticed particularly recently that it’s all very structured, almost as if I’m telling a story.
In terms of music, I used to just play acoustic guitar and sing – I’d write very sad and dark songs. There’s this guy who just released a record that really reminds of the stuff I used to write but I can’t for the life of me remember his name.
At this point Dexter rifles through his iPhone for a few moments before giving up. We decide to use the example of Josh T Pearson instead.
I remember playing SXSW one year, and he came on after us and I think it was his first show in Austin in ten years. So this guy comes out with a big beard, crazy eyes, a guitar and these super long fingernails, and he just starts plucking away. I stood there through the whole set and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was crying during one of his songs, and I just thought it was one of the most engaging things I’d ever seen.
But that’s what I used to try to do, though I wasn’t as good of an instrumentalist as he is, or singer for that matter.
Not an easy person to emulate, mind. It’s funny as you talk about writing style, I discovered your projects through a series of diaries you wrote on <a title="Portals Music" href="https://www.portalsmusic.com/" target="_blank">Portals</a>. Did you find it easier to write on the page first, and then decide you wanted to put it to your music?
I think so, I went to college for a short time and went for a creative non-fiction writing degree. It was all very arts school but it’s what I wanted to do for some time. I decided to quit fairly quickly, and I began working on music almost straight after.
Those Portals kids all have their own different blogs and together I think they are completely responsible for me having a music career. Dave Sutton from <a title="Stadiums & Shrines" href="https://stadiumsandshrines.com/" target="_blank">Stadiums & Shrines</a> was the first person ever to blog about my music, which at the time was the coolest thing I’d ever seen – ‘oh my god someone I don’t know wrote about this thing I did’.
I think I found Portals through Awd Castles.
Ah yes he has a new soundcloud blog which is unbelievable. All those kids are so dear to my heart, they’re doing something really cool and I hope one day soon they get a cult following – their writing is really good and their taste in music is impeccable.
Is your music intrinsically pessimistic, or is that unfair?
I don’t think it’s pessimistic. I think at first glance this Dawn Golden record is almost entirely dark, and there’s not a great deal of light at the end of the tunnel in terms of lyrics. But musically I try to brighten things up with synthesisers and drums. I’ve always loved bands that could do that, like The Smiths and Joy Division, where you’re dancing to a song but if you decided to listen to the lyrics you’d find it really dark.
What are the differences you’ve noticed going from Chicago to Los Angeles, and perhaps thinking back to your time in Hawaii – do you consider cities a stimulating environment or constraining?
I think both are very important. Going from Chicago to Los Angeles was very interesting, I’m still now realising how completely different those two cities are from each other. The people couldn’t be any more different, and the crazy thing about touring is being in a new city every night and seeing how different everyone is. And then you realise when you go back home that your own city has a similarly distinctive personality and atmosphere.
I fucking hate Rochester, New York. The people are weird, the clubs suck. This will be going out on the internet, but it’s fine – I don’t ever want to play there again.
Cities like that really make me really appreciate Chicago because there’s actually a lot of character and culture, and I find the young movements there really interesting but I’d say coming to Los Angeles I’ve realised how grounded a lot of the kids in Chicago are. As you see on the TV there a load of superficial people in LA, who would genuinely rather look the part of something than actually be doing it, because they just want to be an image, go to a bar and get laid. But still overall I think there’s more talented kids to work with in Los Angeles than Chicago – in what I want to do at least. If I wanted to make a noise band I’d probably go back to Chicago.
Are you sticking around for the festival?
I’m definitely sticking around for Dirty Beaches and I’m definitely sticking around for Atari Teenage Riot because they were one of my favourite bands growing up. I don’t know who else is playing tonight, or where. I have nothing to do tomorrow so maybe I should just head back down here.
You should. Thanks Dexter.
Dawn Golden can be found on <a title="Dawn Golden Facebook" href="https://www.facebook.com/dawngoldenmusic" target="_blank">Facebook</a>.

Interview: Dawn Golden

I was lucky enough to be invited to this year’s Reading, and whilst a little too hungover and sleep-deprived for my own comfort on the Sunday afternoon I was introduced by a friend to one of the bands selected a couple of weeks before to play the BBC Introducing stage.
With no questions prepared and little in the way of pressing points or time constraints, we were able to have a carefree discussion over a picnic bench in the sun. From this blossomed one of the nicer interviews I’ve had the pleasure of participating in and a remarkably telling story, of good things happening to ordinarily good people. Meet Big Wave.
 
So BBC Introducing has brought you from Devon to Reading, how did you find the whole process?
Mel: Well the only reason this all happened in the first place was because we uploaded a few songs to the Introducing web-site ages ago, and then got selected for BBC Introducing Devon. Then one night we got an email telling us we were being played on Radio One with Huw Stephens at this time, so I had to scramble to get everyone to wake up and listen!
We’d only done a few performances and one small interview with them before James Santer, who works at the BBC there, decided to put us forward for some festivals and we got to play here this afternoon.
 
So do you think the BBC Introducing model works?
Mel: Definitely. I think it’s the first year they’ve done it in Devon, so it’s proven to be a vital opportunity for us. Last year we played End of the Road, which again was through a competition that we entered. I think they chose three bands out of a thousand so it was a massive stroke of luck to get that one too. We were the first band on and then we stayed for the weekend, it’s an amazing festival.
Rikki: The band’s been going for about a year and a half and initially we just got our name out online, by uploading stuff to bandcamp. Through that we got picked up by a local label called Art Is Hard, we then released an EP with a small Scottish label called Soft Power, and then another couple of tracks which is when we started getting picked up by the BBC and from then onwards has been a real upward curve.
Mel: I don’t think we expected any of it, but every month that goes by we seem to be asked to do a better gig. We got asked to do one at the Old Blue Last recently which was great fun too.
Rikki: Being on a local label like Art is Hard is great because even though many of the artists on it are now from all over the country there is a community feel and we all know each other and often gig together, everyone supports each other. Best Friends and Black Tambourines are good examples, they’re both amazing bands.
 
Has music ever been a career aspiration?
Rikki: Doing it for the money is kind of out the window for us, playing this weekend will cost us money but it’s so worth it because when we’re old and grey we can say we played Reading and Leeds. We all work full time to make the music thing happen, so on weekends like this where you get to play Reading and Leeds there’s a real feeling of having earned it and worked your way up in a lot of ways. You know, the driving’s a pain but you just get on with it!
I went to University in Bournemouth, I had perhaps a bit too much fun and need to go back and finish my third year now. I plan to be a primary school teacher in a couple of years, I might have to lose the beard for it but it will be alright.
Mel: I had never been in a band before this, other than playing keyboard at school. But I’m a hairdresser and have recently opened my own salon so that’s going great.
 
How is the transition from every-day life to the stage?
Mel: I think our first gig together was in the SU bar at Plymouth University, and that was such a scary experience. Now I’ve become more confident with it all and have been able to be a lot more creative as a result. We all write our own parts, and that is the bit I really struggled with at the start, I mean I can’t really play many songs other than our songs. But I feel a lot more expressive in it now.
 
Has playing Reading and Leeds been what you expected it to be?
Rikki: I’ve never been on the guest side of a festival before, which is interesting. Flushing toilets, that freaked me out! It’s perhaps not as glamorous for us as others but we got free food vouchers and were over the moon!
I’ll have a couple of beers before-hand to calm the nerves, and hope for the best really. I’m just focussing on enjoying it really, it might be the only time we ever get to play Reading and Leeds.
 
Big Wave are on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/wearebigwaveband">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/wearebigwave">Twitter</a> and have a lovely website <a href="https://wearebigwave.com/">www.wearebigwave.com</a>. Featured photo by Chris Hines

Interview: Big Wave

I really don’t know what to say about this show. It always takes me a while to put words to page to describe something that just happened in a room, but this time I really don’t know if the right words will ever come. I am equally as clueless to if that is because I was so blown away by what I saw on Thursday night, or because it’s all been said before about this band*. 

It was a set which by all means blew my shit in multiple directions, all over the sweat clad walls of yet another classic underground Camden bar venue, but that did not surpass my expectations in the slightest. It was everything I knew Japandroids to be, delivered to my face, and it felt weird. What do I say about something like that, ‘thank you’?
So there we have it, nothing. I will say nothing. Is this malaise of confusion that I now feel some kind of delicious and deliberate execution of ‘Post-Nothing’ as a concept? If so it is quite possibly the most audacious artistic delivery of existentialism the world is yet to see. A master-plan of four years in the making that even Beckett himself could nay have fathomed, laboriously scrawling self-conscious insanities over page after page, for little did he perceive the future power of Canadian rock. Well done you have silenced a British live music ‘critic’ (very loose application of the term) in London. Now we don’t have to listen to anything they have to say ever again. Fuck yeah Brian.
In reality, I will have been alone in feeling confounded afterwards, because I am the one that feels a certain pressure to try and dissect something about an experience that is so self-evidently the embodiment of what it is. It is a performance and it is music that is totally affirming to the fan. And that is why in truth the title of their second album, Celebration Rock, is a whole lot more to the point.
Japandroids are the kind of band that make you feel silly for taking life too seriously, or escaping its most fundamental purpose with divergent excuses that lead to nothing but an after-thought. To me at least, they are about what is in the room now. ‘Remember that night you were already in bed, said fuck it and got up to drink with me instead.’ You can never go wrong with what is in the room now. The most relieving thing I found watching them live, was to see that this spirit and vigour that you envisaged through their music was alive in these two people, and that they could deliver it in equally summoning force onstage.
After playing Latitude on Friday, Japandroids will have headed back to homely Canada to ponder what comes next after a solid four years of aggressively living in front of people’s faces. They said it would be their last stint in the UK for a long time, and they asked us to help them make it count. I guess the fact that I lost all sense of tally or measure means that we both succeeded with that one, bravo boys.
Even by our own <a href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/18211-live-review-japandroids-heaven-london-281012/">Rob Hollamby</a> – SG

Live Review: Japandroids at Dingwalls, London – 18th July

You could be forgiven for thinking that Jagwar Ma were formed a few months ago, such has been the rapidity of their rise in 2013. In fact their debut record Howlin’ is the culmination of two years’ work, a carefully plotted techni-colour explosion that shall see them play an eye-watering amount of festivals all across Europe this summer.
Announcing their arrival on the UK circuit with a weekend at Glastonbury seems a little like opting for heroin as your first drug. I decided to check up on the guys on Sunday to see how it had all gone.
 
Are there certain kinds of festivals that you look to play?
Gabriel: I don’t have any discretion as long as the line-up’s cool and the people that put it on are really nice. There are a few in Australia that I really want to play, like Harvest and another called Splendour, which we are actually playing, that’s near Byron Bay. It’s nice to play places that are so nice, like Calvi on the Rocks and even Glastonbury, it’s just such a beautiful area.
Jack:  This is our first festival run so I haven’t really forged my opinion yet. Obviously in Australia we grew up going to those festivals, but it’s our first time playing festivals in Europe and Glastonbury is our first festival in the UK.
 
Got a lot booked for the summer then?
G: Yeah, pretty full for the six months, I can’t remember all of them off the top of my head. All the obvious ones, Reading/Leeds, Bestival, Latitude, Ibiza Rocks, Number 6, T in the Park.
 
How long have you guys been playing together?
G: We all used to play in different bands, but all of our bands used to tour together, and we’ve all known each other since we were about 16. Me and Jono started it about two years ago and then Jack joined about a year ago.
 
When you sat down to write this record (Howlin’) was there a conscious idea of how you wanted it to sound?
G: I have sometimes sat down and thought I want to write a song that sounds like this. The song Four was very pre-meditated in that way, we’d just got back from Berlin, and I’d been to Berghain for the first time, so we tried to capture that feeling we had whilst we were there.
But then there are other songs, like The Throw and Come Save Me which came about in a much more natural process.
 
What was the idea that motivated the start of Jagwar Ma, compared to previous projects?
G: I think we wanted to simplify it, mostly. It started with just me and Jono in a room, other than that we didn’t really think about it too much.
Jack wasn’t in the room for most of the record, but now he’s jumped in to play the bass live, which definitely adds a new dimension as far as what it sounds like live. So in that sense it has grown. I’d like it to grow even more as well. With most electronic acts you find them constantly trying to confine it, but we’d like more people playing more things.
J: It’s trying to delegate as much stuff to human beings as possible so it has much more of an earthy quality to it. We don’t see why dance music should necessarily be electronic, because dance music has been around for much longer than all this technology.
 
So do you think it’s difficult to traverse that line between something gratifying that gets the tent going, with something that is more human perhaps?
G: Well I think it’s fairly easy to bring reality to the music, and to make sure that there are people at the front of the music. It’s about soul.
J: But that is how we would approach it, because we’re all players originally, not DJs. Whilst Jono in particular has gone quite far down that route, when we were teenagers we were all playing in punk bands. So that is the challenge, bringing our skill-set into the electronic world.
 
Is your music happy music?
G: I think so. But without going too personal, I was going through a break-up through the album so there’s definitely part of that in the lyrics, it can’t be more obvious than a song called That Loneliness?!
J: Yeah, there’s melancholy in there but overall I think the attitude of the band is of optimism.
G: We’re optimistic people, and I like that.
 
Have you ever considered not playing music?
G: No, I was born like this. My Dad played music, his Dad played music, his Dad played music. It didn’t feel like a choice, not that we were forced.
 
What would be the first thing you made sure you always brought with you to a festival?
J: A bottle of water and a good attitude. A map which is circled and underlined.
But as you do more festivals that desire to see all the bands you love just slowly drains away. We were on our way to see the Stones last night, and we were on the trek, and then just saw Public Enemy to our right, and there was this kind of magnetism that just sort of drew us away. We just started dancing and thought ‘I guess we’re watching Public Enemy!’ I don’t know, what do you bring to a festival?
G: Just vibes.

Crack in the Road

Interview: Stephen Davidson of Tellison

Interview: Dawn Golden

Interview: Big Wave

Live Review: Japandroids at Dingwalls, London18th July

Interview: Jagwar Ma