Trembling Blue Stars - Interview Part 4

  by Anthony Strutt

published: 7 / 1 / 2007

intro

In the fourth and last part of his extensive interview with Bobby Wratten and Beth Arzy from Trembling Blue Stars, Anthony Strutt talks to them about the reissue of their entire back catalogue and why they have decided to abandon live work

PB : Other than the new album everything that you have recorded has been recently remastered and reissued . BW : Yeah. BA : In the last two years. PB : Were you involved with that ? BW : Yeah. We were. It came about in a weird way. I am quite good friends with Caesar from the Wake (Factory/Sarah Records band, whose early line up included Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream-Ed), and LTM put out their stuff . I told Caesar that it was great that he had got his stuff out there again, and that I wished that my early stuff with the Field Mice was, which it wasn’t at the time. PB : Sarah stuff sells for a lot of money on EBay now. BW : Really, I should have kept some then. I just felt if your back catalogue isn’t out there then you kind of get forgotten about, and Caesar mentioned it to James Nice who runs LTM and James said “Send me some stuff then” because he didn’t know the band at all as he comes from a different musical background, and Beth did a good sales talk on him. I said to him “I’m not saying this will sell really well” and Beth said to him “You won’t regret this” and then they sold really well (Laughs). Then James said “What else have got you got ? What about your next group, Northern Picture Library ?” It was kind of weird because that was my least favourite out of all my stuff. But James said we should do everything, the Field Mice, Northern Picture Library and then Trembling Blue Stars. The idea was to do them as a once for all. If you want them here they are. PB : When you release the new Trembling Blue Stars album will you tour it ? BW : Probably not . The last thing I said about playing live was that I was never going to do it again. PB : Is that because you’re shy ? BW : No, the more you do it the easier it gets. But every time we do it is like starting over again. I have never got nervous before going on stage or anything like that. What I don’t like about playing live is that everything is out of your control. You make a record, and you can direct everything. Then you get on stage and your guitar is out of tune or feedbacking or on stage it sounds great, but out front it sounds terrible. When it goes well, it’s great but last year (2005-Ed) we did some dates on the East Coast. We played in New Jersey and did two dates in New York and it was like “Why are we doing this ?” BA : We went to New York because we were going to tour with some friends of mine called the Ocean Blue. PB : A great band. BA : It was going to be really good and then the agent dropped the tour, so we salvaged what we could and did the dates. I did say the other day if I give up touring I will miss the free international travel, but that was a year ago. The band as a live unit finished again. PB : Anything else that you would like to add before we finish ? Buy the new album ! Don’t download it. BW : Just listen to it as an album, as it was recorded to be listened to, all eleven tracks, in the correct order from beginning to end. PB : Thank you. The photographs that accompany this article originally appeared on the website www.bigorangecrayon.com

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