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Interview
by SashaS
19-7-2004
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| Half Cousin: Orkney, another planet! |
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A tinder-man’s mansarde
Half Cousin: Combat pop callin’
In the world where fantasists, idealists and eccentrics equate fools, we find ourselves looking for someone who is refusing the downspiralling soul of humanity producing culture that is like a ghost town, in a sense - the characters have left long ago. The target of our interest is Half Cousin, a one-man band whose debut LP ‘The Function Room’ is simply an uncut diamond. Its genre? NME called it ‘witch rock’ but a Wickerman-, voodoo-folk is a more appropriate tag in the world where brand-less means unmarketable.
Let me make the introduction: Half Cousin is a brainchild of Kevin Cormack, the Orkney native, and it is that rocky beauty, the wind-swept and desolate landscape [as well as spending six months in the cinematic ‘Land of The Ring’ - New Zealand, alongside studying in Dundee and Glasgow], that inform these songs brimming with passionate ingenuity, rustic inundation and emotionally relishing… as sweet as porn is to a teenager.
All 13 tracks take on a different internal trip of the creator with varied textures and diverse vocal delivery and every songs has a subplot, a very personal reason to be included. Combined with unorthodox-but-natural instrumentation [driftwood percussion, metal-sheet ‘drums’, dysfunctioning accordion, bargain-keyboards from Woolies, plumbing pipes and so on], this album is simply as strange and intriguing as the 1963 black’n’white b-movie, ‘Shock Corridor’: you go in sane but no presaging how affected you’ll re-emerge.
"I love hearing the bands who use instruments you wouldn’t expect," Kevin Cormack commences elucidation on his artistic credo, "and it is hunger for variety, desire for more colour, call of the challenge…"
Confronting the backdrop of greyness and sex-appeal masquerading as ‘pop’ music?
"It seems that the business is getting more and more conservative," the Half Cousin man speaks quietly and studiously as if weighing each thought before its lingual form, "more and more formulaic, and whatever you can do to counter it, risk something in the process… I subscribe to Billy Childish’s Stockist Movement… It is a fabricated art movement, bogus creation with a manifesto, called Stockism. The main point is being free to feel, expending your vocabulary, success being getting out of bed and writing a song…"
"Free to feel is very important to me…"
Gourmet 'junkist'
‘The Function Room’ presents Half Cousin’s distinctive brand of "short melodic songs made from junk" of myriad styles - there is a talking-song, a music hall cut, a country song - all sounding so individualistic you wonder how much environment and distance from the biz-bullshit can liberate and hearten artistic expression.
An incredible spatial sense emits from the disc, sensation of clean-air and natural ruggedness… it feels like music for dreamers who haven’t forgotten how to do it after all the years of TV-reconditioning of mindsets. The oddballs have been held in underground by the mainstream’s inability to deal with anything but bland, mediocre and monotonous copycatting. Repetitious repulsion…
"The eccentrics are the ones who brave the new musically, the mavericks like [Captain] Beefheart, Tom Waits… The influence should be a thrown gauntlet - ‘This is me but who are you?’… Influence you take and copy subconsciously but you have to inject it with your own personality otherwise it is somebody else’s work and you are no more than a jigsaw puzzle of other people’s lives…"
"I’d never mimic anybody because… Like Björk, she is unique and that makes her influential but hard-to-copy… That’s my ambition to be as individual as she is, take in things but be myself…"
Autonomy of sonic collages
Based in London for the past 3-plus years, after landing a record deal [with Grönland – home of Neu!], the Half Cousin has grown into a collective. With fellow Orcadian Jimmy Hogarth, they recruited two members of the late great Joe Strummer’s band the Mescaleros for live dates.
"Jimmy knew the Mescaleros guys and we became friends. When I needed a band they were the first people I thought of. Unfortunately I’ve never met Joe Strummer but Jimmy did and he played few gigs, on bass, with them and I saw one at the 100 Club. They were awesome!"
All the album’s originality ends with The Beatles’ cover?
"The reason is that I’ve always like The Beatles and my earliest memories are my dad’s old records… There is a personal significance again and my version is kind of like a funeral march to give it a… [eerie] feeling. My ‘Girl’ has a darker feel, quite the opposite to their jaunty 1960s vibe…"
"I like to think of my album as a musical collage: metal box comes from a warehouse I used to work in for a year or so, the accordion belonged to my uncle who I dedicate the album to as he passed away just a few months ago, so there is personal angle to the album… Then, there are found objects, things that people threw away, that have had a different life but end up on the album. Strange things to produce sounds to capture the sense of place: coat hangers, biscuit tins, cages…"
Cormack then talked about Darwinism in music [we agree on it being in ‘de-evolutionary’ phase for the past few years] before concluding, "the ‘Superhero’ world of black-and-white reality of good’n’evil that obscures the complexity that life actually is."
‘The Function Room’ sounds like no other record released this year probably will. And, it’s been a good year of returning-to-organic, kinky, individualistic: Devendre Banhart, Gravenhurst, !!!, P.E.T., Half Cousin… But, these still only hover around the level of…
"Cult simply means there are not enough people to make a minority," Robert Altman defined it once.
Half Cousin is worth far more than just a ‘minority’ status.
SashaS
19-7-2004
Half Cousin’s debut album ‘The Function Room’ is released 12 July 2004 by Grönland
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