James Hannah

May 15th sees the release of the third album from the Blue­tones, enti­tled ‘Sci­ence & Nature’. It con­tains chart-breaker ‘Keep The Home Fires Burn­ing’, and is set to launch Hounslow’s finest export upon the world once more. Their career thus far has been solid and occa­sion­ally spec­tac­u­lar, in turn pow­ered by a fur­nace of fiery pop tunes, and held back by the anchors of Stone Roses com­par­isons and a so-so sec­ond album response from the Britpress.

“It was our turn,” pon­dered gui­tarist Adam Devlin over the recent luke­warm recep­tion. “We can’t com­plain because we know that fifty per­cent of the cov­er­age of ‘Slight Return’ was due to us being around at the tail-end of Brit­pop. At that stage we could have released some­thing duff and it would have been praised.”

What­ever the case, the Blue­tones have never slumped to the duff, and for all the crit­i­cism, one would not com­pare their sec­ond album to The Stone Roses. So with the addi­tion of a key­boardist as a per­ma­nent band mem­ber, are we to see a whole new side to the band for the third album? Record Mart & Buyer got together with singer Mark Mor­riss and sifted through a few of those styl­is­tic gurus.

The Stone Roses

The Roses started life more or less as an anti­dote to the Smiths. Otis Red­ding was Ian Brown’s touch­stone in an effort to make music that peo­ple could move to. Gui­tarist John Squire brought in the clean sound of The Byrds and cou­pled it with a dirty wah-wah, tap­ping into the cen­tral rhythm of drum­mer Reni. This rhyth­mic sound pro­vides the root to a lot of pop/rock music to this day, and The Blue­tones are fine expo­nents of that essen­tial dynamic.

The Blue­tones’ first release on their own Supe­rior Qual­ity label was a double-sided seven-inch fea­tur­ing ‘Slight Return’ and ‘The Foun­tain­head’. ‘Slight Return’ employed the big sound­ing jan­gle of the 60s, plus a lively organic-sounding rhythm sec­tion, echo­ing the Roses’ efforts on ‘Mersey Par­adise’ and ‘Ele­phant Stone’. The result of this was a hit sin­gle and a tag tied to the band’s toe say­ing that they sounded like the Roses.

A re-release down the line, ‘Slight Return’ is the track that the neu­tral fan can invari­ably cite and, as is the case with so many bands, it pro­vides the bench­mark for all sub­se­quent releases. Per­haps a strength­en­ing ref­er­ence in the pub­lic psy­che was James’s 1989 offer­ing ‘Come Home’, with its par­al­lel cho­rus and Mark Morriss’s vocal sim­i­lar­ity to Tim Booth.

Hav­ing had to dodge such com­par­isons for the last four years, Mark indulges in no specifics. “I just love gui­tars, I think they’re the most effec­tive emo­tional tool. I love the sound of gui­tars played in a cer­tain way. We all loved the Stone Roses. At first every­one was com­par­ing us to them, but we were con­fi­dent that, given enough ref­er­ence points, peo­ple would know where we were really com­ing from. If you know eight tracks by a band, you don’t really know them. But if you know twenty tracks, that’s a more accu­rate depic­tion of where they’re com­ing from.”

So what about the once-burning ques­tion: was the Roses’ ‘Sec­ond Com­ing’ a let down for you?

“No, no. I think there are some moments of absolute genius on it. It prob­a­bly could have been trimmed a bit…” — and into Morriss’s voice creeps the wry con­fi­dence of an artist on the rise over his for­bears — “…A cou­ple of the long tracks off the sec­ond side could have gone. ‘Tears’ I could live with­out, and ‘Good Times’. That would have made a great album…”

Fel­low Contemporaries.

In a genet­i­cally mod­i­fied debate of 1995, the record buy­ing pub­lic was asked if they pre­ferred Oasis or Blur. The Blue­tones them­selves went organic and con­sid­ered Super­grass to out­rank both.

“I’m a big fan of Super­grass,” says Mark. “They have a chem­istry about them and they’re really lucky. They can play any­thing and make it sound funky. They could play the ‘Mil­len­nium Prayer’ and we’d all rush out and buy it. I think we have the same chem­istry as that, you know? In a band it’s either the chem­istry of every­one pulling together or the noise of every­one pulling apart that can make great music.”

In a way Super­grass and the Blue­tones have a good deal in com­mon. Their first albums were struck through with unshake­able pop, and were fol­lowed up with a much darker sound for their second.

“Yeah, I think their sec­ond album’s fan­tas­tic. We sup­ported Super­grass early on, and it was a really good place to be. Very fer­tile. Two of the best bands around on the same bill, and the tick­ets were seven quid!”

The Brit­pop idea is almost uni­ver­sally looked back on as con­temptible. No bands wanted to be lumped under that lit­tle umbrella: a lot of trum­pet blow­ing about gui­tar music of a merely healthy qual­ity. The dan­ger is not being able to see the new lit­tle Eng­land that pushed through, with the bands inter­wo­ven through fair means or foul. Blur vs Oasis was entirely man­u­fac­tured, whereas the Blur/Elastica/Suede dynamic had the com­mon ele­ment of Jus­tine Frischmann, cre­at­ing an inter­est­ing stir. The Blue­tones and Dodgy lived more or less together, hon­ing their har­monies in the same garage in Hounslow.

“There was one gig espe­cially. Super­grass, then us in the mid­dle, and Ash, and by the end of that year we’d all had num­ber one albums. It was a big turn­ing point. Well, not at the time really, you just keep your head down and get on with it, but on reflec­tion it was an impor­tant time.”

The Bea­t­les

After a lull in the Elec­tronic Eight­ies, the career of The Bea­t­les is now about as pros­per­ous as it ever has been. How­ever bad or good you con­sider the money-spinning reunions or the Brit­pop rip-offs, there really is no get­ting away from it: The Bea­t­les’ career is exam­ple enough to even the most con­fi­dent (nay, arro­gant) of guitar-based bands in the early 21st cen­tury. They are cur­rently more potent than any other band, and their art is defin­i­tive in the small field of pop­u­lar music. The Blue­tones bow down, deep down, to them.

“We all love the Bea­t­les,” says Mark. “I would have to say my favourites of their albums are ‘Revolver’, ‘The White Album’ and ‘Rub­ber Soul’. Those three have been the most influ­en­tial to me.

“‘The White Album’ is like a per­fect anti­dote to ‘Sergeant Pep­per’. I’m not of the school that thinks a reduced, sin­gle ‘White Album’ would make it a bet­ter record. It just shows a really dif­fer­ent side of the band that peo­ple didn’t realise existed before. They’re work­ing at a dif­fer­ent way of putting the tracks down, a dif­fer­ent way of edit­ing it together. They’re going against all the other stuff; it’s not intri­cate and well thought-out. It’s Jack­son Pol­lock as com­pared to Leonardo da Vinci.

“‘Revolver’ I think was an inno­v­a­tive jump. It proved that pop tunes could be last­ing works of art at the same time as being palat­able. It has that really strong gui­tar with a lovely crisp and clean sound, and then there’s a new aggres­sive deliv­ery from John Lennon.”

Like the Boo Radleys before them and Dodgy along side, the Blue­tones con­sider this acces­si­ble pop sound to be all-important. “The Bea­t­les made the tem­plate for pop music, and pop is very impor­tant to us. When I was at school I was buy­ing the pure pop stuff, like Duran Duran and Frankie Goes To Hol­ly­wood. It’s like, a painter has to have the pic­ture frame to stop work­ing by. The frame we use is pop. It’s a dis­ci­pline to work to, a chal­lenge when you’re writ­ing inter­est­ing new songs.”

Buf­falo Springfield

The pop­u­lar idea of US/Canadian hybrid Buf­falo Spring­field is as a super­group in reverse. They con­sisted of Neil Young, Stephen Stills (later sand­wiched by Crosby and Nash), Richey Furay, Bruce Palmer and Dewey Mar­tin. They toured with The Byrds before sign­ing to Atlantic and releas­ing their first album. This con­tained the ever present ‘For What It’s Worth’ sin­gle, which remains their best-known moment, although the band is more gen­er­ally cred­ited for hav­ing paved the way for coun­try rock.

Mark hops to an expla­na­tion. “They were so cre­ative for a brief period between 1966–69. They were the first band con­tain­ing three main song­writ­ers in Stills, Young and Foray. They made about two and a half albums of the most won­der­ful, beau­ti­ful, pos­i­tive eclec­tic music. They’ve got to be absolutely my favourite band ever, and the biggest influence.”

There were tur­bu­lent times for Buf­falo Spring­field; Bruce Palmer was deported and Neil Young and Stephen Stills were con­stantly at each other’s throats, result­ing in Young’s tem­po­rary res­ig­na­tion from the band. Does that reflect the aver­age day in the Blue­tones, who are by all accounts a band of three song-writing guitarists?

“We’ve got five gui­tarists actu­ally. We can all play. But no, there’s no ego prob­lem. The only time there might be a prob­lem is if some­one stops bring­ing mate­r­ial to the band. We’ve got very much an equal split with song writ­ing and money. The last thing you want to have prob­lems about is money. It’s the first thing you sort out: you make sure every­one gets the same. It’s a Marx­ist Utopia in the Bluetones.”

Talk­ing Heads

Nobody really pays atten­tion to the 80s when dis­cussing gui­tar bands. It’s all 60s and Love and The Byrds and The Stones. A less vaunted influ­ence on the Blue­tones there­fore is Talk­ing Heads. True enough, the par­al­lels are there. Their rhythm-based exper­i­ments built them into a suc­cess in the lat­ter half of the 70s, and their col­lab­o­ra­tion with pro­ducer Brian Eno helped bring out a filmic ele­ment to their work and side-projects. Eno him­self is a widescreen mae­stro, and enjoyed a fer­tile time with Derek Jar­man towards the end of the British filmmaker’s life.

“When my brother was six­teen at school,” says Mark, “he and this mate of his really got into Talk­ing Heads. So he brought the influ­ence home, and we would sit in the bed­room lis­ten­ing to all these Talk­ing Heads records. I was mes­merised with this per­sona that David Verne built up around him­self. He was like a char­ac­ter in a Talk­ing Heads movie.” Verne him­self got into movie direc­tion with 1986’s ‘True Sto­ries’, for which Talk­ing Heads recorded some songs.

“I think it’s Verne’s sort of humour and fool­ish­ness that I try to incor­po­rate in our own stuff. I mean you’ve got to be light with what you do. It’s like Cap­tain Beef­heart as well, there’s a humour in there that I think is really important.”

The Smiths

Thank­fully enough, the last decade has seen sig­nif­i­cant British bands cel­e­brate the legacy of both the Smiths and the Stone Roses, rather than divid­ing the bands into rival camps. Whereas the lat­ter con­cen­trated on devel­op­ing the right vibe, the for­mer wielded a heady brew of melody and lyri­cal wit. Mixed together in the 1990s, those two ide­olo­gies cre­ated a high stan­dard for bands to follow.

As a result The Smiths, like so many other much-loved bands, owe a per­cent­age point to pos­ter­ity. “It’s the leg­end,” says Mark. “The leg­end of The Smiths is what makes them so great now. But if music is good enough, it doesn’t date. It is a work of seri­ous art, remain­ing as rel­e­vant today as it was when it was writ­ten. That’s what has hap­pened to The Smiths.”

“The whole rea­son Adam picked up a gui­tar in the first place was because of Johnny Marr. It was the same with me, I was very dri­ven by Johnny Marr, and Mor­ris­sey too when I thrust myself up into the lime­light as the frontman.”

REM

One critic in The Guardian described The Blue­tones’ songs as being about ‘aloof alien­ation’, and this struck Mark as a well-observed expres­sion. There are no sur­prises then when he is asked about over­seas music.

“REM are a big influ­ence. I’m not what you’d call a mas­sive fan of ‘Up’, although I thought ‘New Adven­tures in Hi-Fi’ was a mas­ter­stroke. It was like a band that had found its muse again. They have been hugely suc­cess­ful in retain­ing their integrity through a lot of pop­u­lar­ity, and I’d like to emu­late that. I’d like us to retain integrity in the way they have. That’s one of the rea­sons we will never, ever, have any of our mate­r­ial on adverts or any­thing like that.”

Are there any other US influ­ences you think the band has?

“Well, They Might Be Giants. They’re great. I was watch­ing a video of their great­est hits a while back, and ‘Ana Ng’ came on and it sounded just like one of the songs off our new album. I spoke to my brother about it and he said, ‘Yeah, I know what you mean…’ I wish we were more like them. We’ve had meet­ings about what we can do to sound more like them.”

Really?

“No.”

Oh.

“But they’re not fuck­ing Bare­naked Ladies, are they?”

The Com­edy B-side

There aren’t many bands who can jus­tify the CD1-of-a-2CD-set swin­dle when it comes to sell­ing sin­gles. But the Blue­tones have always been about good cus­tomer ser­vice. Supe­rior Qual­ity, to quote their label imprint. All the sin­gles are in thick cases with nice book­lets, and all the b-sides are new tracks.

“It’s got to look good,” explains Mark. “You put them in thick cases and they look nice. You give them all new tracks on the b-sides and peo­ple move them up from their Ordi­nary CD shelf to their Good CD shelf. And you can’t start putting live tracks on the b-sides. Why would any­one want to do that? And I don’t think we’ve ever done any­thing that would ben­e­fit from a remix. I don’t like the idea of hand­ing over cre­ative con­trol to some­one else. You’ve still got to pay them even if you don’t like it, so you might as well put it out. No, that stuff’s not our bag.”

The first offer­ing from the ‘Sci­ence & Nature’ LP was ‘Keep the Home Fires Burn­ing’, released in Feb­ru­ary. For a glimpse at the Blue­tones’ ‘bag’ check out the track ‘Armaged­don (Outta Here)’. It fea­tures Vic Reeves cohort Matt Lucas and the Blue­tones in a sketch out­lin­ing life in uni­ver­sity Halls of Res­i­dence, and gen­tly mock­ing the band for their Biggest Hit, ‘Slight Return’ (“Oh, I just thought it was called ‘You Don’t Have to Have the Solu­tion You’ve Got to Under­stand the Prob­lem’”). If you are read­ing this in a Uni­ver­sity Halls of Res­i­dence, it will sound exactly like the guys in the room next door (though not your­self, of course).

So any­way, how did it come about?

“Well, Matt’s a mate of mine. We’ve got this sort of mutual admi­ra­tion. I ini­tially had this idea for an instru­men­tal, and I wanted to sam­ple some bits of this dia­logue he’d done for the Para­mount Com­edy Chan­nel. So I phoned him up and asked him where I had to get per­mis­sion for this and he said I could either go to Para­mount, or we could record it again. Then he said that he’d quite like to write some­thing new for it, and I liked that idea even bet­ter. I gave him the track and some ideas, goal­posts to aim at really, and he wrote it and then per­formed it for us in the stu­dio. We went around the place with a DAT tape record­ing all the sound effects and we recorded it Goon Show style, really. It was great, a real nice break from the drudgery of record­ing an album.”

Film

Films play a large role in the life of Mark Mor­riss. He claims to have nine hun­dred on video, so surely they have some kind of influ­ence on the way he presents him­self creatively?

“Well, I think Woody Allen films are inspi­ra­tional to me for the way I express myself in songs. He will make the odd flip­pant remark that throws a curve ball to make you think dif­fer­ently. He gives you a skewed per­spec­tive on things and it reveals truths, and it’s nice to go away with these truths. It’s very com­fort­ing to think that per­haps you’re not alone in think­ing in such a way.

“Through­out his whole career he has always approached his films as a young, fresh per­son. He’s never been old and dod­dery, and his films all have the same sort of Woody Allen pace. I love that, and I iden­tify with that kind of pace and emo­tional tone.”

Sec­ond Blue­tones album ‘Return to the Last Chance Saloon’ is steeped in Spaghetti West­ern imagery, with Scott Morriss’s art­work all John Ford land­scapes and cacti and sombrero-hidden Mexicans.

“There was cer­tainly a West­ern thing going on there,” explains Mark. “I was really into West­erns, and there was this gen­eral curios­ity going on about Latino cul­ture and the Tex-Mex thing. We immersed our­selves in the cul­ture and the food and the music, lis­ten­ing to all these Ennio Mor­ri­cone sound­tracks and Tito & Taran­tula, and drink­ing lots of tequila.”

So it was a con­scious thing?

“Well, I was just into it, and I think if you’re in a band then these things bleed through and every­body starts to get a bit involved with it.”

The ‘4-Day Week­end’ sin­gle is lifted from ‘Last Chance Saloon’, but dis­penses with the West­ern imagery in favour of stills from a manga video that was made for the song by a Japan­ese ani­ma­tion com­pany. How did that come about?

“Oh, I was so flat­tered when that came back. We are quite pop­u­lar in the Far East any­way, and this com­pany had approached us with an inter­est to do a video for one of the songs, so we sent ‘4-Day Week­end’ to them and they just gave it their own inter­pre­ta­tion. It cost us vir­tu­ally noth­ing, because the com­pany fig­ured that they would do this video and it would get picked up by MTV which would be good pub­lic­ity for them and for us. But in the end MTV wouldn’t play it. The offi­cial expla­na­tion was that it didn’t fit in with their line, but it was just some chicken-shit bloke sit­ting behind a desk who made a chicken-shit deci­sion. You know a lot of peo­ple suf­fer from one man’s deci­sion like that.”

THE NEW ALBUM

‘Sci­ence & Nature’ will be unleashed on the pub­lic on 15th May on (“our lit­tle Ander­son Shel­ter”) the Supe­rior Qual­ity Record­ings imprint of Mer­cury Records. The first album was really acces­si­ble, and the sec­ond was much darker. What are we to expect from the third?

“I have great ambi­tion for this record,” says Mark. “I think it could really do well. We’ve gone out of our way really to make this one the most acces­si­ble yet, after the heavy sound of the last one.”

So that makes your last album the prover­bial Dark Sec­ond Act, a sort of ‘Empire Strikes Back’ of the Blue­tones’ career?

“Ha, yeah! That’s exactly right. I’ll def­i­nitely have to use that. It was because we were all tour­ing and play­ing live all the time. Our sec­ond album is born out of tour­ing. It’s much beefier with the heavy live sound com­ing through. That’s what we had meta­mor­phosed into. When you’re in a band it’s like a con­stant meta­mor­pho­sis. Albums are like Polaroids of the band at a par­tic­u­lar time. I mean, we fin­ished this album in Octo­ber, and we’re a dif­fer­ent band now.”

Rather more thought has been put into the impact of dif­fer­ent instru­ments with the new album. Adam Devlin gave an insight into the new sound recently: “[Key­boardist Richard Payne] is a multi-instrumentalist, but he’s not a muso. There’s a lot of nat­ural instru­ments, like a banjo and a man­dolin in there.”

From the tracks that have sneaked out for a pre­view, a new less-is-more vibe seems to have struck the band through after the expan­sive sound of ‘Last Chance Saloon’. ‘Tiger Lily’ lends a Simon & Gar­funkel edge, and dis­plays a much more pared down sound, with the sug­ges­tion that Richard Payne’s key­boards have been planted right at the cen­tre of the Blue­tones’ sound. ‘Zor­rro’ was aired on Radio 1’s Evening Ses­sion at the end of last year, and has become some­thing of a live favourite.

There is still plenty of the com­plex song-structure, and a new space carved for the har­monies to gain extra sub­tlety and impact. With the demise of Dodgy and the Boo Radleys, the Blue­tones have a new ter­ri­tory to explore in their own care­fully fool­ish way.