I Wanna Jump Like Dee Dee | journal

D: 6-

M: NOV-

Y: 24-

Low Harness' Hannah Gledhill and Ed Shellard fire the first salvo....

ed-

Han and me have known each other for 12 years or so. I met Martin, our guitarist, at Fish Factory (Penryn, nr Falmouth). I worked down there and he does too - he was doing the sound. I didn't really even know he played guitar, to be honest.

I knew he did a lot of electronic, techno stuff…he has an electronic project called seamouse. I got to know him, really nice guy and we would just chat about shit. And then our friend Charlie Murphy actually recommended him as a guitarist, because he wanted to kind of restart your old band, Han, but as a new band.

hannah-

I was a bit fed up, really, because we’d both been in London for quite a long time, and I'd been in the same band called H. Grimace for a while, and they were doing quite well, but the pandemic meant that it ended, as happened to lots of other bands. All label interest disappeared and we had an album that never got released. I still have this album, still unreleased. I just sort of gave up with it all, and we moved to Cornwall. And then three years later, I was like, I'd quite like to play again. There’s a very good music scene here: Ed and me play in another band called Broken Arrow, and I joined a local group playing bass.

We’re very lucky to have found the band mates that we found. I mean, there aren’t many drummers around here.

Ed’s a multi-instrumentalist, but drumming is not his main instrument. Charlie, our mate, who runs loads of punk things here, asked us if we’d thought about Martin on guitar. And we hadn’t. He’s a bit of a wizard. Pretty smart when it comes to music. He recorded and mixed our album in a chapel, so it has a really nice sound to it, especially with the drums and stuff. So, yes, and then he brought a mate along, Alex, who wanted to play bass in a band. And then within a year, we’re on the point of releasing our first album.

ed-

It’s happened very quickly and it was quite time pressured because Martin was living in this chapel, and then the chapel got sold, so he was facing having to move out. We just didn’t have much time, so we basically tracked the whole record in one day. We did do the vocals at home, though.

The main thing is that I feel like the music's good, I really like how it's come out. Like Ed said, we didn’t really have much choice with time constraints. We didn’t have time to do the vocals in the studio or anything – we did them at home. So even with that, overall I’m very happy with it.

Is it normal for you to work at such a quick pace?

I think everyone is quite surprised that we've got an album coming out within the year. That's quite quick for all of us, I think. But because of money, financial pressures, whatever, we very rarely take more than a few days for an album, really.

Yeah, the recording was a bit rushed, but I think in terms of the writing, it comes down to who's in the band. We’ve been lucky with Low Harness. We just got on with it, and we were writing very quickly together. Martin had a load of ideas. Alex is very good. We brought in two or three songs, one of them didn't work, and then we wrote the other nine that are on that record in the space of a couple of months. It’s just been very easy.

hannahhhhhhhhh

And we’re all a bit more grown up now. People are very respectful and they want to come to rehearsal. When we were in London, it was a lot of drama, a lot of hard work to have a band, actually.

I find there are so many more reasons for things not to happen in London.

edddddddd-

Just getting to practice is a problem. There’s a bit more space here. We're a bit less tired too.

We’re not as distracted. We basically do music and work. And we've got a cat - she likes to be involved. We did our best in London, but I guess we never got a break or anything with any of our bands. If we get a bit of exposure with this record, that’d be great.

One of my podcast guests said that when she moved to New York from a smaller US town, NYC became the fifth member of her band. She was basically saying that the energy of the city really inspired her.

You've done the reverse by moving away from the city, so how do you perceive the importance of your physical environment?

Do you think you’ve taken some inspiration from London and brought that to Falmouth?

Or learnt some things in London that you’re quite happy to leave behind?

I think London was very inspiring. There were loads of bands. There's always something happening. I certainly got a bit caught up in the social side of city life, I got quite indulgent, and that made me lazy and sloppy in terms of making music. I think we've got the best of both worlds now, because we've been in bands in the city, and now we’ve kind of escaped it with those experiences under our belts.

Being there definitely informed our playing. There was a really active music scene when we were there around the Power Lunches time. Do you know of that? Yeah, so we were starting out and we played there a lot. I probably played more there than anywhere, because you could play all the time, you know. But the difference here, for me, is the people have got a lot more time on their hands, and they're much more gracious with it as well. They want you to do well. The small music scene here is just very supportive, so, for example, a local label (Krautpop!) is putting our record out. Video making is interesting: in London, I might have known a filmmaker or something, but here I'm having to do it myself, you know, but people will help me. We're friends with people who work at the Uni, so they're letting me have a camera. And there's an abandoned swimming pool which we're allowed to use as a location. There are a lot more opportunities here if you're experimental, and if you are up for doing it yourself in sometimes unorthodox ways. So, I'm not finding that it inhibits our creativity.

I’m definitely a fan of smaller communities, I think you can get more stuff done because you get deeper relationships with a smaller number of people. That DIY approach, I guess, is something that you’ve worked with in the past.

It’s surprisingly similar here to a small DIY scene in London. I mean it's a little smaller here, but it feels very similar. I was surprised by that, to be honest. I wasn’t expecting it. There are a lot of good bands here, and the people are a lot nicer, they have more time for you.

I think that really matters, doesn't it?

Yeah, I mean we had loads of friends and musicians, but we just couldn't seem to get it together in London, for some reason.

Maybe we can talk about the themes in the record and what’s been impacting you?

I think financially, we're all struggling a lot, and we are all affected by, you know, the wars, whether it's indirectly or not. It's really affecting our community, you know - the Gaza situation, stuff like that. We are all anti-war, and we're all activists in that respect. There’s a lot of activism here. I wrote the lyrics and Ed helped me a little bit as well. I don't want to put my opinions on the others, but I think it goes without saying that I don't think they mind that I’m writing about these things and, you know, loved ones that we’ve lost. Ed lost someone close recently.

Yeah, my brother died earlier this year.

I wasn't intentionally trying to make a song about that, but you write about what you're going through and it's been a very difficult year for us. I mean, it's not meant to be a negative album, but you know that's the reality of what we’ve been through

Some of it's more playful, but, I suppose the times are quite heavy, aren't they?

Very heavy. I get this constant feeling of powerlessness. Impotent, that my voice might get heard but it isn’t listened to.

"there are a lot more opportunities here if you're

experimental"

I think there might be some kind of strength in just accepting that powerlessness, that things are out of your control, and like, trying to make peace with that, I suppose. Because, the alternative is not an option. You can't actually take control of these things. Not to say that people shouldn't have a voice. Like Hannah said, a lot of our friends are very involved in activism, protesting about Palestine, so I don’t mean you shouldn't have a voice. But I think accepting that some things will be in your control and some not is quite healthy. I don't know if any of that made it into the lyrics, but it felt like a good thing to say!

I think the record has this tension running through it, even with some of the more delicate, subtler songs, they still coil me up, like they’re going to unleash something. I think it’s magnificent how you do this.

I think the tunings lend themselves to that as well. I mean me and Martin play with six guitars on stage, three each. We can't have any more! So we have to stick to the tunings that we've got at the moment. We can't be Sonic Youth! But our compromise is that we're going to have the guitars we need. So when we're playing in Berlin, it's a bloody nightmare getting that many guitars to Berlin. Practically, it's a disaster idea doing this type of band. But it’s very interesting to write in tunings like that. I've done that for H. Grimace. And Martin, too, he doesn't play in standard ever, so he's just like a wizard. He even changes his string gauge to the tuning. Each individual string has a different gauge, so it doesn't go funny while he's playing. I mean, it's amazing, really. So yeah, we've got a very nerdy band - apart from me {laughs}

We’re definitely in an age where singles and playlists are being pushed so heavily into our psyche by the whole industry – platforms, labels, A&R etc - so much fewer people are listening to an album all the way through – at least that’s my impression – and I find that really sad. An album is a document of an artist’s life at the time they write it…and similarly I also like to think about the thought process of how you put the tracklisting together….

It was quite communal in how it was put together. I think Alex said that Exit Plan had to be second. And we were like, okay, dude, that’s good. And then, I think we all made a list and compared them, and they were actually pretty similar. And then a couple of things got moved around, but it's definitely meant to be listened to as a whole. I mean, I'm the same as you, I grew up, where me and my best friend Chris, would go into town in Swindon, buy a CD every week, or every two weeks with our pocket money. And then, I'd have my walkman on the bus, going to school. And if I didn't like that CD, it was like, Damn, you know, I’ve nothing else to play. And, I remember I bought Loveless by My Bloody Valentine. I put it on, I was like, “What the hell is this? I This is awful”. And then years later I listened to it, and I was like, “Wow, actually this is fantastic”. Maybe something's getting lost in the way music is traded and listened to in the modern world. We don't give things a second chance or listen to things all the way through as the artist, quote, unquote, intends them to be heard.

Even with the single releases, they want the singing to come in quickly or they say that people lose their interest. So, some people didn't even review Salvo, our first single release, because the singing didn't come in quickly enough.

You're kidding!!

No, someone actually said that.

We were like, ‘Well, where are we going from here?’ And then we thought, right, well, we'll release a song where the singing comes in a bit quicker. But, actually, a lot of our songs have very long intros. But when we wrote it, we're not thinking about the listening audience, like, ‘what makes a single?’ I've always found it difficult to be an Alt-rock band in the music scene, especially now.

‘Cos each song is an entity, right? If you're writing it thinking, like, ‘Oh, are we hooking people in in the first 10 seconds?’, you're fucking it up, right? It's like each song is its own entity. It's like a mood. It has some sort of logic to it, and you're trying to kind of figure it out. I like varied records and I think we've made quite a varied record.

I agree.

You know, like Swell Maps or something where it's like, ‘Whoa. What the hell is this? Why is this here?’ But that's it, it rewards repeated listening, and it's something you can dig into. If, these days, it’s just a single or a bunch of things which sound good as sound bites, I don't know if that really has any value. I don't think anyone's going to listen to an album like that in 10/20 years.

I’m with you on that.

We want something that's considered and, it's more about whether we like it or not, right? If we're happy with it, great, if people don't want to wait a minute for the vocal to come in, then….

This is one of the reasons why I design my articles the way that I do. I know people’s attention spans are down and you can’t just scan through them like most articles, but that’s kind of my objective. Obviously, I don’t want to make it illegible, but it’s my little way of trying to get people to read interesting conversations with interesting bands and hope that people read it with more concentration rather than just skimming it. I've had some people say I can't be arsed reading this, and I’m kinda fine with that. I’d say that I can’t be arsed if it’s just a plain piece of paper with standard typeface on it.

Yeah, your visuals are wicked, I love the deconstructed look.

You’ve managed to fit a zine aesthetic into a website, which I really like as well. It reminds me of those ‘90s fan websites that people would make for bands. They don’t really exist anymore, which is a shame, because it was an interesting portal to the band’s world, now it's like, oh, it's their Facebook page. It’s become so homogenised.

Distressed white background 2_edited_edited.jpg

You've just reminded me, actually, of one of the main Hacienda DJ’s DJ, Dave Haslam. In the early 80s, he started a fanzine called Debris, and so he used to print it and photocopy it himself, then take it round to cafes, bars, record shops whoever would take it really - the old school way. And he said he went into, I think it was a bar where he'd he'd previously dropped a few zines off, and when he went into the toilet someone had scrawled on the wall “Debris – pretentious, arty shit”. He said, “I wasn’t upset, I was actually quite happy, because I knew I'd made an impact.”

Haha, brilliant, I like the name of that zine – Debris.

Yeah, yeah. Someone writing on a toilet wall to comment on your work, they’ve taken the time to stand in the toilet and write that!

I guess this leads into that age old debate of who you’re creating your music for – yourself or the fans?

I think we're just purely selfish. I think you've got to be. I think you've got to make the thing you want to hear for yourself.

We’ve been doing it for a while now as well, and I think we’ve got better at it. And maybe that's why this record is good, and the last one didn't go anywhere. I’ve always been playing that style of music – you know, dissonant guitar parts and all. I haven't really changed a great deal. Some of them are a bit more poppy, some a bit more heavy, but I'll probably do that forever. I'd love it to be accessible to a certain degree, but I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to do pop music.

I think the fact that you’re already prepared to be experimental, and play around with - I dunno - sounds, ideas, textures that that almost gives you more of an open book for how your sound evolves, as opposed to immediately being classed in a particular genre.

It’s a nice way of thinking about it, yeah. I think Martin's really good, though. He's bringing in a lot of that shoe gaze and the noise component in. I'm good at composing songs. I might be having to hone him in a little bit. He could do an outro for 10 minutes, and we're like, mate, let’s go old school and have a chorus! {laughs}

You’ve been talking about extending some of the sections live, haven’t you?

I think Martin would like to do that some more. I mean, he's sensational at it. I have very few pedals. I'm not really into that, but I can still hold a rhythm with the bassist. So, you know, we can do it. We’re trying to collaborate, you know, as a group.

I was just going to say, with Martin, we've kind of got our Cornish Kevin Shields. He's the secret weapon {laughs}

I mean, have you thought about doing alternate versions of the songs, extended, reworked or whatever?

Well, yeah, I mean, there’s a new song - which isn't on the record - that we finished the other day, and there's an end bit, like the noise section. And Martin was saying, when we play this live, this can just go on indefinitely {laughs}, so there probably will be more of that.

We’re quite a new band, really - we've probably only played six shows!

Yeah, something like that. I think honing the live show, making that better, and working on some of that stuff and so, you know, some of the songs are on the record, we already play them better now than when we recorded them. But that's the nature of like, being a new band and doing the record quickly.

But yeah, there'll be room for experimenting. But we quite like writing new material too, so we’re recording again in January. Ed and me both like country music and we were meant to be doing a separate project - we were going to try and do a country record. But then we were like, ‘Well, we haven't really sorted this out. Maybe we should ask Low Harness if we should do some more recording’. So we're actually writing for that now and there's already a couple of new songs

Yeah, that’s probably more likely to be an EP, but more focused and a higher quality recording. And instead of rushing to do a lot of songs, we'll just do maybe four or five really well.

Would you call yourself perfectionists?

No, no, I feel the tendency is there though. But if we were perfectionists, I don't think this album would have been released. I think the search for perfection in itself is crippling. You know, with typically nothing getting done.

I have many friends like that - phenomenal musicians who have not released a thing.

I wonder how sometimes how your way of doing things is driven by your personality – like if you need to be satisfied with the details, you might need to take time, and there might not be time, that may end up making you feeling stressed. And then you're in a group where personalities and ways of working are different. It makes you think how complex those interpersonal relationships are and do we understand how to always get the best out of each other….

I definitely speak my mind. If I don't like something, I can't help but say it. You gotta say it. Nobody seems to take it personally. I think it helps. I mean, we're adults now. Well, we've been adults for a while. If you have other problems like drinking or whatever, it's very hard to come to any conclusion. That's what happened with my old band and everything goes down the toilet. So no, we don't have a problem communicating…

Everyone's listens here, it’s quite democratic…I think you have to be prepared for the dissolution of ego, where….like when Hannah said to me the other day, “Can you not play that drum beat?” to me, I was like “okay, I thought it was a good idea, but I’m not going to die on the hill for it”

What? Me? I said that?

Err…yeah, I tried this blast beat in the middle of a song {all laugh}

If I’m showing an idea or something I’ve created to someone, I find that how I react depends in the way that suggestions or critiques are presented to me. If it’s not done empathetically or collaboratively, my default will be to resist or reject any suggestions and I’ll need to be brought around. I think I’ve been in too many environments where empathy has been lacking!! I know I’m doing it as well which is really frustrating.

We’ve probably learned the right way to say these things.

Oh yeah, we've had enough dodgy band mates.

Haha, you've learned from them.

Oh god, I've had some difficult experiences, I tell you. But we don't have that problem with this group.

I feel like, if we’re in the room and playing, you know, we all respect each other. If someone says ‘I don't think that's working’, you know, you could argue all day and night about it, but actually, they're probably right.

Respect for other people’s views and abilities is so important, isn’t it?

Yeah and it’s also important to believe in your direction. Martin's just written a song that really he wrote in its entirety. We've added our parts, but he was quite adamant that we had to do it. You know, we worked it out. It took us a session or two to get around it, but we did it.

There have been a couple like that. And I mean, different songs form in different ways. The majority of them on the record have been organic and written together, but Hannah wrote one on the album in entirety and we recreated it. We wrote another song and recreated it. And, yeah, Martin brought his song in. He had programmed electric drums on it, I copied as much as possible and checked he was happy with it. On the respect point, if someone has composed something with a certain idea in mind, who am I to just randomly play some stuff over it? If you listen to the demo and it's good, why not just copy it? I think, again, it’s an ego battle if you think that you need to put your stamp over it. You need to serve the song.

It's different with art because you're making the art on your own. It's your artwork, like the music doesn't make itself, like we're making it as a group, so you're already open to change. If I did a picture and someone didn't like it and had a criticism about it, I'd be like, well, that's how I've done it, that's my painting. So, I would feel the same as you, Giles. I think it art and music are slightly different practices, aren’t they?

Four people have made our songs, each of us are involved, so the four people can look at each other and go, ‘Oh, they didn't like that’ and you’re in it together. Whereas, if you're responsible for it all on your own, you're like, they just hate me! {all laugh} So maybe that makes it easy, I dunno.

You're a bit more exposed maybe…

Have you found yourself getting out of your comfort zone in your creative life?

Yeah. I'm not good at noise music. I'm very good at angular, dissonant rock, but I can't do improvised noise, so I'm having to jam along. That's very much out of my comfort zone, but I'm open to it. I'm not doing anything complicated. I'm just trying to fit into where it's going.

I'm just trying to play catch up and get better on the drums, really, to a level where I feel like I’m serving the band better, and I've had to really accelerate that.

Wow, so you didn't play the drums before?

Not really. I've only really started since I moved to Cornwall. I could kind of play before, but I was horrible, I had no technique. I’ve had a couple of lessons now, and so I'm just trying to really get up to speed. It's really fun and I love it. There's some way to go, I think, but it’s like what we were saying before, you know, it's better to be doing it than, say, if I was a perfectionist, I would be thinking there's no way I'm good enough to do this. But the only way to get better is by just doing it.

I think a lot of people, myself included, really hone in on bits that I think I’ve fucked up, or think I could have done differently…and most of the time, nobody else even notices those bits…you’re like in your own little echo chamber with your own voice

Yes, no one's mentioned anything about those bits that we weren’t so sure about….yet! {laughs}

It's funny, isn't it when you look at it from the other side of the glass. I mean, I know Thurston Moore said something like every time he was releasing a Sonic Youth album, he'd have this moment where he was like “am I going to commit this terrible, out of tune singing to the ages”. And that kind of blew me away, because growing up listening to Sonic Youth records as a teenager, they were perfect. To me. Every second of it is perfect. And from the point of view of the person making it, you're like “fucking hell, are we going to get away with this? This bit's pretty ropey, that bit needs patching up…”

Giles

Maybe it’s just me, but I love the imperfections. Listening to a band playing live and they fuck something up - they have to stop and restart, or play a duff chord - I just think it sort of shows that they are humans doing their best and part of that is fucking up. Definitely makes the whole thing more relatable.

It's like these videos of The Ramones playing in their very early days where one of them falls over, Joey drops his mic, does the splits, unplugs something by mistake, they argue. And it's beautiful, you know? Because when they got it right, it's great, you know? It's like the mistakes make it honest somehow.

Giles

really agree with that.

I'm sure there's going to be some AI plug-in soon called ‘mistake eraser’, and you just turn it and it makes it all sound like “insert name of generic artist”.

Hannah

We were going to put synths in this band as well. And when we did the first residency, we did put synths in it and it’s almost like a smoother…. it's almost like, oh, look, let's fill up this bit, smooth it over. We decided not to put them in this record so it’s a guitar-based record. I mean, there's nothing wrong with guitar bands and there’s nothing wrong with synths. But it was more to expose flaws, I suppose, rather than hide them.

We might add them later, you never know.

Hannah

I do like some synth, but, yeah, we just didn't go for it this time.

Giles

So, the other thing I wanted to talk about is the artwork for Salvo, and how it was working with Peter Kennard.

Hannah

He's amazing. He's been going for a long time in newspapers and anti-war demonstrations, and he taught at the Royal College in London till recently. As far as I'm concerned, he's in the top echelon of British artists. And I got to know him because he used to come in a café that I worked in. His studio is behind the café. We became friends, and he's just a very generous, lovely person. I went to see his exhibition, and he was there, and he said ‘Bad Breeding have just got in touch with me. Do you know them?’ I was like, ‘yeah, for sure’. So, Bad Breeding got the artwork for their latest album (Contempt) from Peter (it’s a previously unreproduced 1986 piece of the Sellafield Nuclear Power Reactor in England). And he invited me to have a look in his archive, which was amazing. I mean, I usually try and do the art myself, but on this occasion, I was very, very happy and very lucky to have him around for this. His work is very political and I did go for something that was a little less, you know, overtly political. I don't know….I didn't want to disrespect him, but it was also an album cover. I found a sort of middle ground, really.

Giles

I think having good artwork really adds to the aesthetic, it makes it a complete package. When I was a kid, I used to – still do actually – just sit listening to the record and pore over the artwork, photos, script and all that with a toothcomb. It was magical.

Hannah

Oh yeah, for sure.

It’s hard to imagine the record without that cover now….