Last Harbour - Interview

  by John Clarkson

published: 16 / 2 / 2008

intro

Manchester-based collective Last Harbour's orchestral third record, 'Dead Fires and the Lonely Spark', is an album of sudden, striking contrasts. Back for second interview with Pennyblackmusic, singer Kevin Craig and guitarist David Armes speak to John Clarkson about its recording

Last Harbour are a Manchester-based collective which was formed by Kevin Craig (vocals, theremin) and David Armes (guitar, loops) in 1999. Their group has blossomed out over the course of the last nine years and a 7” EP, ‘Hidden Songs’ (Liquefaction Empire, 2000); a mini album ‘An Empty Box is My Heart’ (Alice in Wonder, 2001), and two previous full-length CDs, ‘The Host of Wild Creatures’ (Alice in Wonder, 2002) and ‘Hold Fast, Pioneer’ (Tongue Master, 2005), to currently comprise of James Youngjohns (viola, mandolin, pedal steel) ; Sarah Kemp (violin); Gina Murphy (piano, vocals); Mike Doward (bass, double bass, autoharp) and Huw McPherson (drums, percussion). Atmosphere and melancholy have always been central components of Last Harbour’s brooding music. Both once again dominate the sweeping soundscapes and tempestuous dynamics of their latest album, ‘Dead Fires and the Lonely Spark’ (Little Red Rabbit Records, 2008). A record of sudden, haunting contrasts, it is at once both epic and claustrophobic, and discordant and gentle in sound. More orchestrated in tone than their previous recordings. ‘Dead Fires and the Lonely Spark’ finds Last Harbour, as they have done on all their releases, breaking new ground. Recorded on analogue and what they describe as “antique equipment”, it is the first of their albums to be made entirely in a studio, the Woodhouse Studios in Leeds, and also the first to involve a co-producer and engineer, Richard Formby, who has worked previously with Spacemen 3, Herman Dune and Dakota Suite. Craig has described his narrative-driven lyrics, which have a Gothic earthiness and are concerned primarily with social and moral responsibilities, as being on ‘Dead Fires and Lonely Spark’ as a “modern ‘play for today’”. The opening ‘Broken Nail’ tells of a relationship, which despite being long over, lingers uneasily in the mind of its protagonist, and the collapse of which remains fixated around the memory of a snapped fingernail. ‘The Revenger’s Waltz’ is also the tale of about someone who can’t let go, this time a spurned lover, who unable to bear the fact that his love is now with someone else, takes the most appalling vengeance. A couple on ‘The Further Field’ meanwhile find themselves no longer able to properly talk with each other after the miscarriage of their baby. Last Harbour have found it difficult in recent years to bring all their members together. Gina Murphy lives in London. Sarah Kemp is based in Newcastle and Huw McPherson in Derbyshire, and Armes, Craig, Youngjohns and Doward, the Manchester-based members, established as a result a few years ago the Last Harbour Gentlemens’ Quartet, an acoustic side project. The group has recently set up its own label, Little Red Rabbit Records. As Armes and Craig explained, back for a second interview with Pennyblackmusic and for the first time since ‘The Host of Wild Creatures’, they hope that, despite the distance of 300 miles between its members, several of whom have other musical projects, that this will enable Last Harbour to be able to release more than less records together. PB : ‘Dead Fires and the Lonely Spark’ was recorded on "antique equipment" and analogue. Many bands who are on a limited budget record at home these days. Why did you decide to do it the old-fashioned way and to go into a studio to record it ? DA : One of the things that we are keen to do is not repeat ourselves, but it is not so much that. It is to try something new with each album, and a different technique and approach to things. 'Hold Fast Pioneer', the album that we made before this one, was recorded pretty much at home. The drums and the piano were recorded in a wood panelled room which had a really nice sound to it, but the rest of that album was built up at home over a long period of time. Some of the songs on 'Dead Fires' demanded a grander recording than anything we could have done at home with limited gear and by recording on to an eight track as we have done in the past. There are certain sounds that you can't capture very well on that kind of equipment. Some of the louder songs on there and the more orchestrated songs would have been difficult to do there. That was one reason why we recorded it in a professional studio. Another reason was that we wanted to challenge ourselves by recording it on analogue. Although you can do a lot of things with analogue that you can’t do with digital, you can't do endless fixing things. A lot of this record was reliant on getting great performances out of everybody to start with. PB : Were you then immaculately rehearsed before going into the studio ? KC : We were pretty well prepared for it. If you only have a certain number of days recording time you can't just go in there and mess about. DA : 'Hold Fast, Pioneer' was recorded over a long period of time because we wanted to do it at home. We were able to keep adding and changing parts on that over a period of time. One of the things we wanted to do with ‘Dead Fires and the Lonely Spark’ was set ourselves a time limit. Part of that was of course to do with the budget we were on for it anyway, but we also wanted to nail everything down to one period of time. We had ten days recording. While that allowed enough time for new ideas to emerge in the studio, setting yourself a target and a challenge like that can be a good thing sometimes. It really focused everyone's minds. We chose all the songs we were going to do beforehand. There were actually eleven songs that were recorded. There were two songs that were left off it because they didn't really fit on the album. KC : Richard Formby knew all the analogue gear at his studio inside out. It was really helpful to have someone else there who knew what he was doing there and who could suggest things. We hadn't really worked before with another producer. We had always kept it amongst ourselves and it was great having someone like that around. It really allowed us to concentrate on what we wanted from the music. PB : ‘Dead Fires and the Lonely Spark’ has approximately twenty different instruments on it. How did you write the songs for this album ? Did you start with one basic instrument and build the songs up from there or did it work in another way ? DA : The process really wasn't that different to what we had done before. It was just what we wanted to do with the songs after that. The songs are written by all of us. They don't turn out as fully formed songs until we have all been involved with them. That's one thing which is really important about the band. It is quite democratic and a collective in the sense that people write their own parts. Most songs start with the guitar or the piano, but beyond that, as we get further into a song, we are always thinking about what sound works within that song. Every instrument and sound is there for a purpose. We were very conscious about not just putting stuff on for the sake of it. We put a lot on this record, but it would have been very easy to put a lot more on it still. PB : It is a record of great turbulence. The music drops from loud to quiet and epic to intimate and vice versa fairly quickly. Was that something you were aiming for with this record or was it something which evolved naturally as you were writing the songs ? KC : It was a bit of both really. As people were adding their parts, a lot of things appeared out of nowhere. The timing of when a violin suddenly comes in or when the tempo ups can really add something special. Although we were quite certain that we wanted to add a lot of dynamics to the songs, I think as a result of the way we were working and writing those songs they just tended to happen anyway. DA : The process that we were going through from writing to eventually recording all fed on itself. You might start off with a piece that doesn’t have lyrics to it, and then when it has lyrics that demands a certain other change in the instrumentation. That affects the whole way that you are writing a song right the way up until you record until it. At a certain point you lose track of where something started. I see that as a really exciting thing. You can’t really remember how something started or the whole reason for it as it has gone through this whole process of writing. In the end a lot of the instrumentation has to affect the lyrics and vice versa as well. The lyrics have to reflect what is going on in the music as well. The two have to work really well with each other. PB : Kevin, most of the characters in the songs are in a fairly emotionally fraught state. How many of those songs were inspired by personal experience and how many of them came from a vivid imagination ? KC : There are four or five songs on there that have an element of personal experience, but none of them are like pages of my diary. That would be really terrible (Laughs). I was trying just to write a straight narrative that would go with the sounds. PB : Could you ever see yourself writing something that wasn’t a narrative ? Most Last Harbour songs over the years have told some sort of story. KC : I think I would find it difficult to write something in another way because that is the way I have always thought about songs. I don’t think that I could write something that didn’t have a narrative in some form or which at least referred to a narrative. I have tried to remove things a bit so there isn’t just a beginning, a middle and an end. My songs are very narrative-driven though. PB : You have described the album as being a “modern Play for Today” . What did you mean by that ? KC : Part of it is due to its narrative nature. There are so many different little stories in there that it ended up being like those very British type of radio plays that you hear that throw you straight into a world. I really like the idea of being thrust straight into a story that you don’t actually hear the very beginning and that you don’t actually hear the very end. I like the idea of turning on the radio and you have missed the first three minutes or something, or turning it off just before you get to the end. I always find that much better than getting to the very end. There is an element of that on the songs on ‘Dead Fires’. There is also an emphasis on the small moments in people’s lives actually being the pivotal moments that actually determine the outcome of things. Stuff like ‘Broken Nail’ is specifically about that PB : The album also seems to be about people being dwarfed by things beyond their control. Do you see most of the main characters of these nine songs as victims or prisoners of their own emotions ? KC : Yeah, partly their own emotions and partly the emotions of others. A lot of the characters on ‘Dead Fires’ are lost in something which don’t quite understand and which they’re not entirely sure of. PB : You have also formed the Last Harbour Gentlemen’s Quartet. How regularly does the Quartet play in comparison to Last Harbour ? DA : Not that often at the moment. We did play quite a bit a couple of years ago. It came about because of the band’s circumstances really. There are only the four of us who live in Manchester. Lets’ make no bones about it (Laughs). We are also four men. We are four gentlemen after a fashion. We wanted to be more active and to do things more regularly. We play acoustically as a quartet which is quite different to the full band with drums and electric instruments. We have had to work out different settings for the songs. Some of the songs were written acoustically to start with and work out really well when we play them like that. It is a thing to keep us busy and to keep us out of trouble really (Laughs). That is the idea behind it. PB : The album has been released on Little Red Rabbit Records, which has put out a couple of low-key Last Harbour singles in recent years. It is also going to be putting out albums later in the year by Anna Kashfi and Crazy Man Michael, which are James Youngjohns and Michael Doward’s other projects. Is that your own label ? DA : Yeah, that’s right. It’s a label that we have set up a collective for all our music. PB : Why have you decided to do that rather than release it through other labels as you have done in the past ? DA : It was so that we could have more control over what we are doing and when we do it. We’ve always got something good out of every label that we have worked with, and I would only say good things about everyone we have worked with. Things had got to a point though in which we wanted to release things more regularly and quickly than other labels were able to. There is always a delay with any record coming out. Every band under the sun will grumble and moan about that because when you have made a record and you are proud of it you want it to be heard by people. If there is then a year long gap between you recording that record and it being released, then that can get really frustrating. I guess this is something that people are addressing more and bands like Radiohead in particular. You can actually finish a record and make it available to people much more quickly. If you are just going to make it download, then that is one thing, but we wanted to go the old school route. We have got a lot of material that we want to get out and a lot of songs recorded. There are a lot of other songs that we want to release. It has been a problem in the past waiting for other people to have the time in their schedule to be able to do that. We feel that we are a bit more in control as a result. KC : If you do it yourself, then not only do you end up being in control, but all responsibility for it on you. There is a lot of work involved, but everything that we have done is down to us. I am really proud of that. PB : You are also going to be releasing a single, ‘My Knowen Foe’ .What is on that CD ? Is that the two tracks that you mentioned which didn’t fit on the album ? DA : No, it’s not actually. It is three different songs. ‘My Knowen Foe’ is the main song. That’s a brand new song which we wrote only about a month before we recorded it and which came together really well. There is also an older song called ‘The Wanting Seed’, which was also on ‘The Host of Wild Creatures’ as well, but we wanted to record it with this current line-up of the band because we felt that it had improved a lot in the time we have been playing it recently. There is also a song on it called ‘Sinner’ which we have been finishing a lot of recent gigs with. It is one of those great, long, slow-burning songs that we do. PB : You are also going to be touring. What other plans do you have for the immediate future ? DA : Like you say we’re touring in March and April. Hopefully we will do a lot more touring before the end of the year, and maybe one or two festivals over the summer which we are sorting out at the moment. Like I said we have quite a lot of recorded materials, songs that are ready to go and songs that didn’t fit on the album that would make a decent EP. I would hope that we will have another single also coming out towards the end of the year. We have also got between half and two thirds of the next album already written. I guess in the next six months or so we’ll be thinking about what we want to do for that. There’s been a fair gap between the previous album and this album coming out so we’d like to do the next album sooner than that. PB : Are you looking at 2009 to release that then ? DA : Yes, possibly. It depends how quickly we can get ourselves sorted out and how quickly we can get all seven of us in one room together. PB : Thank you.

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