Madam - Interview

  by John Clarkson

published: 21 / 1 / 2011

intro

Singer-songwriter and producer Sukie Smith talks about her band Madam's second album, 'Gone Before Morning', which she has recorded by raising money through fan-funded music platform, PledgeMusic, and how many of its songs became intensified for her after they were written with further symbolism

'Gone Before Morning’ is the second album of Madam, the project of London-based singer-songwriter and producer, Sukie Smith. Madam’s debut album, ‘In Case of Emergency’, which was released on Reveal Records in 2008, was primarily a solo release, featuring Smith and fifteen other guest musicians. Madam has since expanded into a full band, and ‘Gone Before Morning’ features most of her regular group, which, as well as Smith on vocals and nylon guitar, also consists of Sarah Gill (cello, keyboards); John Robertson (guitars); Nick Bergin (bass) and Jeff Townsin (drums). As well as this core of musicians, Madam has various floating, more occasional members including Chris Clarke (guitars, bass), Patrick Durkan (bass, who filled in for Bergin who was unable to make the recording session on ‘Gone Before Morning’ )and Swervedriver’s Adam Franklin (guitars). Initial sessions on ‘Gone before Morning’ took place in 2009, when speaker company Bowers and Wilkins commissioned Madam to do four days of recording at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath. An early version of the album was given a very limited edition release then through Bowers and Wilkins, but Smith, feeling that the recording was unfinished, decided to add some parts to it and to remix it at the end of the last year. To pay for the additional studio sessions that she needed to do this, Smith raised £2000 through PledgeMusic, an on-line fan-funded music platform, which has helped other acts, including the Gang of Four, I Like Trains, Emmy the Great and Jack Bruce, all also to make new records. ‘Gone Before Morning’ was released as a download for pledge supporters in January and will come out both in a CD and digital version on Smith's own label, Shilling Boy Records, in early April. As did ‘In Case of Emergency’, ‘Gone Before Morning’ combines Smith’s trademark lack of self-pity with occasional shards of dark humour. It is an album of tense, nocturnal atmospherics, embedded with shimmering guitar lines, gasping strings and spooky, often spidery-sounding effects. Yet, while ‘In Case of Emergency’ was largely introspective in tone, ‘Gone Before Morning’, which is propelled by both Jeff Townsin’s echoing drum work and Sarah Gill’s swirling cello, has a broader, larger sound. The album’s opening track, ‘You Lead I Follow’, begins with Smith wearily having one of those interior dialogues that we all carry in our heads when someone has hurt us. “Why did you leave?” she asks. “I had no choice” is the reply, before Smith then candidly admits, “When I am alone I hear your voice.” Other songs on the eight track album, such as ‘The Ground Will Claim You’, ‘Weekend Love’ and ‘Someone in Love’, all also are suggestive of loss, and only the last number, ‘Ride the Waves’ (“The waves are high/We can ride them”) offers a tentative and conciliatory hope. ‘Gone Before Morning’ is, however, far more than it might initially suggest, an album about simply a series of broken love affairs and brief romances. As Sukie Smith tells Pennyblackmusic in her second interview with us, it is a recording that, after many of its songs were written, which for her has become further intensified with poignant and new symbolism. PB: Why did you decide to call this album ‘Gone Before Morning’? SS: A lot of the songs are about a sense of loss. There was a lot of loss in my life when I wrote that album. It is a lot less sleazy than it sounds in some ways (Laughs). It is also about being transient and feeling that you are unaccountable in some ways for the night before. PB: Love comes across as an absolutely devastating, horrible thing on this record. Was that the intention? SS: It was, but those songs are more than just love songs. There is a lot about death on ‘Gone Before Morning’.‘You Lead, I Follow’ is in particular about the death of my father, who died suddenly while I was working on this album. The songs on the album aren’t all necessarily about him, but I was drawn to putting those songs in the album because of the feelings that came with his death. Most of them were written beforehand, but they suddenly had a resonance to them which was not apparent to me before he died. ‘Ride the Waves’, the last song on the album, was written about the fact that I found that I had a twin who died in childbirth. There is a sense of loss on that too. PB: And you found this out only latterly? SS: I found this out way latterly, about five years ago. That was a real shock to me. While it is about death, it is also about being triumphant and living a life for somebody else as well, as I felt I should when I found this out. That was why I put it last in the record. In some ways it feels like a triumph over sorrow. The whole album is an exploration of the fleetingness of things. I hadn’t properly thought about it having any kind of theme when I made it, but I can see now that it does. ‘Weekend Love’, for example, is about something that has got a length of time to it, and ‘Someone in Love’ is about plotting how to leave and extract yourself from a situation and also has become about extracting yourself from grief as well. I thought that ‘Ride the Waves’ was a really important song to be a part of that collection and also that it is important that it went where it does on the record because we are all triumphant over death for a period of time. I felt like I had to celebrate that. We have been playing it live for about a year now and it feels like a weird lullaby of something forgiving. There is nothing harsh in that song. PB: A lot of the album also seems to have this other running theme of being swallowed up and engulfed whether it is by the ground on ‘The Ground Will Claim You’ or drowned in ‘Marine Boy’ and nearly being drowned and surviving in ‘Ride the Waves’. Was that something you were conscious of? SS: No, I wasn’t when I wrote it, but it’s true. ‘Gone Before Morning’ seems like an emergence from something. ‘In Case of Emergency’ was an album very much set in my head. There was all this stuff about paranoia and what I was thinking, but ‘Gone Before Morning’ feels more physical. There are lines on it like “Stay in one place too long” and a lot of it is about always being on the move, leaving and there is also a fear there of somehow being consumed if you don’t. PB: All of the songs in the album were written by you except for ‘The Snake’ and ‘If You’re Looking For a Way Out’. SS: They are both covers. ‘The Snake’ was a big Northern Soul song. People like Tom Jones have covered it, but it was made famous by Al Wilson. There was a club in Tufnall Park which I used to go to after drinking in Camden on Sunday afternoons which played Northern Soul and that was where I first heard it. It is a real cautionary tale. A lot of times women can get into a real blaming thing about men when things go wrong and there is too much of that. I don’t know if it is about being older and having my eyes opened a bit and understanding the danger of getting involved with somebody else, but I think everyone must understand that they are entering into something quite mercurial and strange when you interact with somebody else. I like that song because it takes the attitude of, well, you know what he was. I just thought when I first heard that, “Yes, exactly”. If you are going out with someone who has disaster painted all over them (Laughs), then disaster is probably going to happen. If something is as straightforwardly toxic as it looks, then you can enjoy it for that, but should know for yourself that it is destructive. You either forgive yourself afterwards or try and be laid back about it (Laughs). PB: What about ‘If You’re Looking For a Way Out’. Who did that? SS: It was Odyssey, the 70’s disco act. Apparently Tindersticks have done a version as well which is really slow and miserable, but I didn’t have any idea of that until after I had recorded it. I can remember it from my childhood and loving that song then and just thinking that it was so sad. There is this sophistication of understanding of humanness in that song . PB: Were all the songs on the album recorded at Real World? SS: Yes, all of them were apart from ‘Cover the Ground’ and ‘Someone to Love’.They were recorded as a session live in the studio there. Bowers and Wilkins had commissioned twelve albums for their website and were offering them to their subscribers for a fee. What they were championing was genre less music and what they wanted to do was show technology that didn’t crunch sound with MP3s. Apparently Peter Gabriel curates the whole thing. There are a team of people that work with him at Bowers and Wilkins and they find artists. I don’t know how they came across us really. I didn’t know if we were going to be able to do it at first. I thought that it might complicate things with Reveal Records, our label of the time, but they were cool about it. PB: It was recorded in four days in comparison to ‘In Case of Emergency’ which had taken nearly a year. Why did you decide that you wanted to develop these tracks further? Did it just feel rushed and incomplete? SS: People said that it had some worth and I thought that was a good enough starting point to maybe go and completely redo it.I had enough feedback from people saying how much it worked at a lot of levels that I thought that it didn’t do some of the songs justice to just be some sort of band only album which it essentially was. I don’t hear music like that and it was also part of the deal that all the files came back to me. They were completely mine in terms of ownership, so I got back in touch with the engineer from Real World and approached him about redoing some of them. PB: What did you do new to it? SS: The only tracks that I didn’t touch were ’The Snake’ and ‘If You’re Looking For a Way Out’. I think those songs was in some ways me exploring my ability as a producer and it was easier to do with songs that I hadn’t written myself. I had a tiny bit more distance with them and that meant that I was happiest with them. Some of the developments are much bigger than others. For ‘You Lead, I Follow’ I added backing vocals and little secret things in the keyboard sounds. With ‘The Ground Will Claim You’ I just added a little bit of acoustic guitar to give it a bit more solidity. I could hear this rhythm in my head which I really wanted for that track. Something like ‘Weekend Love’ was, however, a complete remix. I got Adam Franklin from Swervedriver to do a whole load of guitar for that. He auditioned the guitar lines and I was like, “That one is not sleazy enough and that one is disgusting, so that’s going on” (Laughs). It was the same with ‘Marine Boy’. That also got a complete reworking. PB: You said that you didn’t do recordings of ‘Cover the Ground’ and ‘Someone in Love’ at Real World. SS: We ran out of time to do ‘Cover the Ground’ there. We thought that that is just a simple little song that it would be easy enough to do elsewhere, but of course it is not really and that took just as long as everything else (Laughs). We did record ‘Someone in Love’ there, but had done a previous version of it and the one that we did at Real World didn’t have the same energy as the one that we had recorded before, so we went for that one instead. PB: The instrumentation on ‘Gone Before Morning’ is pretty deceptive because the instruments you use on it are fairly minimal, but at the same it has a large and quite cavernous sound. Was that something that you did deliberately? SS: A lot of ‘In Case of Emergency’ was recorded on an eight track in someone’s bedroom when their child was sleeping, so there was a kind of intimacy to it. It was going to happen that way anyway because the songs demanded it, but it is really interesting what location does to a sound. Real World was just astonishing. I have never heard songs sound that beautiful ever. The guitar would be cranked up and then you would you go into a different room and it would just sound like liquid. All my vocals were done at four ‘o’ clock in the morning, all in one go, so that was no different there to ‘In Case of Emergency’, but in terms of sound, yes, I did want a bigger sound. PB: Why did you decide to go through Pledge Music to release this album? SS: Reveal, who put out ‘In Case of Emergency’, folded. I was very depressed when that came to an end and I found it very unnerving. At the same time while I am really grateful to Reveal for everything they did for us, I have found it found oddly freeing at the time and that it is quite good doing it yourself. Pledge are great because they give you really good feedback and a structure and make you work really hard. They let you know that you have only got two months to raise this money, so you go bonkers doing stuff and encouraging people to hear your music. It is is actually against my nature to do that, which is bizarre because at the same time I would love everyone to hear everything that I have done. It turns it into something else where it won’t exist if you don’t approach people, but you also start to see the worth of yourself. It was a very positive experience using them. Now I have to deliver all the pledges and all the incentives that people have asked for like hand drawn illustrations and lyrics and there is a lovely feeling that accompanies that you’re definitely there. I often feel quite invisible because I live in my head most of the time and this is definite kind of proof that I am there (Laughs). PB: You have also recorded a song,‘Wild Dogs Run’, with the Italian post-rock band Hollowblue, which has been attracting a lot of interest. Will you be doing any more with them or is that strictly a one off? SS: I met them at a festival in Italy when we were both on the same bill and they came to me a few months later and said, “Can you co-write this song?” It was just after my dad had died and I couldn’t. They kept gently reminding me. They said, “We’ve got a space on our album for this track and we wrote it for you” and I was like, “I can’t”. That song was very important as eventually I gave in. It was the thing that forced me to start writing again. I went to Italy and recorded it and then went back there to make the video. This promo company picked it up and it is now winning massive amounts of awards. It has a life of its own now. There is apparently a version in 3D which I have not yet seen and which has just won an award in Hollywood. I am definitely going to do some more writing with Gianluca Maria Sorace, their songwriter. We’ll maybe do a whole album (Laughs). PB: So will that be your third album? Do you know yet? SS: No, it won’t. I have got about eight songs ready to go and some of which we have been playing live. I really want to make another Madam album next. There is this guy, John Mercedo, who has joined the band and who does amazing soundscapes on laptops and I also want to make soundtrack stuff with him and John Robertson, our guitarist, before it becomes a band thing. Those are my next two priorities. I am approaching other labels now. It was an incredible effort making money through Pledge Music, but I will do that again if I can’t find a label. PB: Thank you. The photographs of Sukie Smith that accompany this article were taken by Rebecca Miller, while the band photograph was taken by James Alexander.

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