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Interview
by SashaS
28-6-2004
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| Nick Talbot: Garvenhurst's flashlight |
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Fairground in the rain
Gravenhurst: the witching-hour sessions
“The ghosts of autumn murders walk me home”: written by Nick Drake? Nick Cave? Old Nick? Nope, a new[ish] Nick, Mr Talbot who creates as Gravenhurst. The man’s second album, ‘Flashlight Seasons’ chronicles tales from the psyche’s darker side with a clarity of sound, catchy tunes and voice to match it. It appears his strength is in his lyrics that simply undermine the sonic prettiness.
Talbot knows to subvert your expectations as you realise that lyrics are not really about beauty but tragedy, loss and the duality we all face; songs are pensive, serene, melancholic but never melodramatic: 'I Turn My Face To The Forest Floor' brings a nicely chilled line, “You're only a stone's throw from all the violence you buried years ago'”.
Anger [instead of angst], love [bypassing fulfilment], pathos and nostalgia (never whimsy) are served with the most elegant-but-disconcerting transcendency; as the press release has it - paranoia and foreboding never sounded this good.
Nick Talbot is Gravenhurst: a Home Counties boy who moved to Bristol in the late ‘90s, lured by work from the likes of Third Eye Foundation and Flying Saucer Attack, “just completely new sounding music which blew my mind.” Former member of Assembly Communications, a My Bloody Valentine-esque troupe, Talbot is also part of experi-tronical Bronnt Industries Kapital alongside Guy Bartell, guitarist with one of his favourite bands, War Against Sleep. [Its debut release found home on Talbot’s label.]
Aren’t people buying records for the image value rather than the quality of music?
“Yeah, there’s that, yeah,” Mr Gravenhurst asseverates while shuffling on an armchair in his record company’s conference room. “My music suits the times we live in: there is strife, tragedy and Armageddon on my record. Hopefully people will get some enjoyment out of my music because we certainly aren’t gonna get it out of this world.”
“I was trying to push the envelope a little bit, contrast something really beautiful with something really horrible. In a kind of slightly exploitative way by using a nice pop song and top it with some dark imagery and lyrics… There is so much stuff being said without saying much… I don‘t know if I have that much to say…”
Of you do; when I listened to your album I had the image of a fairground in the rain: empty, all washed-out, dejected, alone and lonely, a sad sight…
“Interesting and I think it can be viewed in such a light…” Talbot reluctantly agrees. “In some way it is a cheap ploy of something being ostensibly fun and then having it taken away or disrupted by something like bad weather. It is like prophetic fallacy and it works, it works. I think it is shocking to see trashed fairground but I’m really into crumbling fairgrounds.“
Emotional blackspot
‘Flashlight Seasons’ were first released on Silent Age in 2003; the sophomore set of songs are far more complex than the sparse debut long player, ‘Internal Travels’. In part thanks to the increased use of drone-heavy arrangements in sustaining that ‘foreboding’ mood that was justly voted the ‘Album of the Year’ by West Country listings bible, Venue magazine.
“It is melancholy but in a really enjoyable way… That’s the one thing about melancholy…”
What sort of a creative process was it? Were you chiselling away until a sculpture emerged?
“Well, working on my own I did have a few false starts,” comes a frank admission, “and it wasn’t helped by, for a while, with my side band, Assembly Communications, which was much more louder, more like The Smiths, more sonic… My songs weren’t working although there were some great ideas there.”
“I had some of the songs [on ‘Flashlight Seasons] written before my first album but I thought they were better songs and decided to leave them for the second album. ‘Flashlight’ really pleased me but I finished it a year ago… And am looking forward to the next one, already.”
"Victorian electronica"
Silent Age Records is Talbot‘s own label that aside issuing his debut album, ‘Internal Travels’, also released the early works of such West Country luminaries as Mole Harness and War Against Sleep (now inked to Fire Records). Also found time to partner Guy Bartell [War Against Sleep guitarist] in establishing and maintaining the repulsion-invoking, “horror-electronica, something like Victorian electronica”, outfit Bronnt Industries Kapital. [Debut album is finished and due out in not so distant future, he reckons although adding quickly that it is not his project.]
Every write-up on you appears to mention just one influence - Nick Drake, which I find tedious and simplistic; but, just to mention the instrumental on the album, ‘damage II’, that’s like Ry Cooder on mescal?!
“Yeah, thank you… But, the only reference point most people have of folky sounding music is Nick Drake. Personally, I got into Drake via a band called Flying Saucer Attack, a Bristol band, the real pioneers of mixing this kind of folky guitar with psychedelic noise, something like - rural psychedelia. I’ve always been into a noisy psychedelic music…”
Are we talking the 13th Floor Elevator here?
“No, not really, because I don’t know them and I should… I keep hearing about them so much… But honestly my influences are The Smiths, Joy Division, Wire, The Cure, Stereolab… But, also Neil Young and Scott Walker… I think they are the only older musicians still making interesting records. Scott Walker is one person I’d love to work with.”
Talbot tours with drummer Dave Collingwood and multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Paul Nash and says he‘d play more dates if he had a driving license. Right now he is dependant on the kindness of strangers… In a strange land, no doubt.
*
Live date:
28 June - Spizz, London [with The Memory Band, War Against Sleep, Normal, Position]
SashaS
28-6-2004
‘Flashlight Seasons’ is released 28 June 2004 by Warp
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