Interview conducted November 19, 2007.

There’s reference in press kit to Russ expressing desire for something to get his teeth into something new. That seems a fairly unlikely catalyst to putting a Verlaines album, especially after 10 years without one.

GD: It was part of it, sure. A bunch of songs had arisen over a period of time so I was just chipping away. I’d been pretty busy with work but had still managed to write the odd one or two, here and there, and now there’s an album sitting there and it’s a publishing outcome for me, as far as work’s concerned. But yeah, Russ wanted to get his fingers back into some work, to give himself something to do of an evening. So I send down some CDs with the music and he just karaokes away to the Sibelius files – he’s a good reader.


You had accumulated a bunch of songs, post Hammers and Anvils – just how many were there and what identified them as suitable for this album?

GD: That was pretty much all of them. There were another couple we were thinking of doing – we demoed one of them. Kind of jazzy numbers. I can’t remember why we decided not to go down that route. I think we decided we had enough and for financial reasons we’d concentrate on them. It wasn’t a qualitative thing.

DS: I think we had the magic dozen, didn’t we? Took the path of least resistance. We wanted a bit of a balance between jazzy ones and the more pop, rocky ones.

GD: Part of it was to just see if we could do it, given the distance and the fact that it’s very difficult, nearly impossible, for us to play, really. We could, but it would take a hell of a lot of work to justify getting the horn section and keyboardist and everything to do justice to the songs. Just seeing if we could make a virtue of our limited circumstances.


To what extent did what the other players (core members) bring to the Verlaines dictate the choice of material? Darren, were you involved in nutting out which ones were going to work?

DS: Well, only by dint of trying to play them and seeing if it worked. But no, Graeme brought the songs along and we started to work them up and see how they went. It seemed to be working, so we went into the studio and of course we did it completely differently to the way we’ve done albums in the past, certainly as far as my involvement goes anyway and, probably, historically for the Verlaines. It’s always been a band going into a room and all that sort of stuff. We couldn’t do that, so we took the way you’re not supposed to do it (laughs).

GD: It was pretty much the only way we could do it. We hadn’t properly rehearsed all that parts. As you can probably hear, there’s a lot of lead stuff, which was all conceived in virtual land and not actually played on a guitar until the morning before I put it down.


So when you say virtual land, what were you working with?

GD: A computer programme - Sibelius. It was a giant risk, to be honest, to say ‘OK, we’ve got the rhythm section functioning. It sounds OK. If it sounds OK in Sibelius, it’ll probably sound reasonably good when we play it with real instruments.’ It was just a big leap of faith, really.

DS: Me and Russ didn’t actually work up rhythm stuff together before we actually started recording, pretty much.

GD: Yeah, it was just sort of conceived in virtual land with minimal rehearsal and we hoped it would work.

DS: For me it was a matter of trying to follow the score. I’ve never done that before – mostly looking at a bit of paper and relying on a bit of memory. I’m not a flash sight reader by any stretch. It was a very interesting thing to do.


Had you envisaged Paul Winders being part of this process, and when did it become clear that would not be an option?

GD: Pretty much by the time we started, I think. We still entertained hope that he might be able to a bit of singing on it, at least. But . . . next time.


When did you first get a whiff of this project and was it any kind of surprise to you?

DS: Yeah, well, Graeme brought it up during the year and I know he wasn’t all that enthusiastic about it for a while, just because of everything else that was on his plate.

GD: Yeah, I probably had a bit of a crisis after Hammers and Anvils. I mean, it came out on September 10, 2001 and I had envisaged the whole thing where I would be touring in America with it, but the whole record industry kind of just ground to a halt. It became like a dead-in-the-water project, as far as maintaining an international career was concerned. But, I don’t know . . . when we got asked to do the whole National Anthem thing in 2004 they said ‘Well, we want you to do Death and the Maiden’ and I was like, OK, we’ll do that but we’ll also try to work up a couple of new songs, just so that we don’t appear to be a complete relic. The thing about that process was that the whole band – the horn section, keyboard and core band – only actually spent about an hour in the rehearsal room before going out live to however many thousand people. We worked up the basis of it as a four piece and the Stephen [Small] and the horn section came along to the dress rehearsal. But looking at the tape a couple of years afterwards, I thought that there were lots of mistakes a the odd bung note here and there, but you could actually see that it was possible to organise the material in virtual land and get a reasonable result. And if you’re doing it in a recording studio, obviously you’ve got the opportunity to redo bits you make mistakes on. So I thought, it’s feasible, even though we don’t live in the same city. We can do all the pre-production in virtual land and come together to see if we can make something that will fly.

DS: We also probably thought we didn’t have anything much to lose – except our pride, I suppose.


But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? It’s not like you can just say ‘I’m going to make an album’ and just assume that someone’s going to take it on and promote it. You still had to convince a record company to help you out . . .

GD: Yep, Flying Nun stepped up and were into it.

DS: But yeah, you’re right, that did solve a bit of a problem because if they’d said ‘no’, I suppose . . .

GD: There would have been other options, I’m sure. We’re not a particularly attractive option, in many respects, because we can’t go touring the world, because essentially we’re too middle-aged and with responsibilities that we can’t walk away from. That’s just the truth of the matter. But again, that’s what this project is about, really – a grand experiment to see if we could actually make a half-pie decent record, given the limitations that we have. And if we found out we could make a half-pie decent record, then we’ll just keep on making half-pie decent records (laughs).

DS: And just enjoy the creative process of making new music and going into the studio which, after all, when you get to this end of the game is really the more rewarding thing. Playing live and touring is great fun when you’re young – go and see the world – but for me the attraction of that wanes a bit.

GD: And it’s not possible, with responsibilities. It’d be very difficult as a four-piece unit to find the time to tour America.


The path you’ve followed for this project is quite far removed from that forging process that occurs over a long time playing and rehearsing together, though. What are the pros and cons?

GD: Yeah, I’m preparing a conference paper on exactly that, because there are a lot of pros in doing the thing in virtual land – organisational things in terms of composition of the parts, guitar and keyboard fills, taking the time to think what you actually want them to be rather than just sort of splashes of doodling that can sometimes be the case with fills. There are great things as far as pitching is concerned, with vocals, because you’re constantly having the thing played back to you pitch-perfect. I’ve found that a lot of the vocal melodies are very difficult – false relations and all sorts of nasty things – and I actually did a reasonable job of singing something like Sevastopol. The negatives is that chemistry thing. What I think the thing with that is – and this is mainly anecdotal – that a beat is actually a very large thing. A big pool. It’s about 30-40 milliseconds, probably. And depending on the type of music, sometimes you’re really aiming for the back end – the last 10 milliseconds of the beat. Other times, you’re in the middle or in the front. And you’ll appreciate this, as a drummer – sometimes you’re on top of the beat or behind the beat. That sort of stuff. That’s the thing, if I was going to do this all again, I’d go ‘OK, probably we need to play the songs live to play them better.’ Just to iron out that consistency of who’s on top of the beat and who’s behind the beat. Considering the way we went about it, the record sounds pretty good. If I’m grading it, I’m giving it a pass mark.


Related artists: Graeme Downes, The Verlaines

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